Keteks

[CalaCrisp88]

I know this is kind of an old thread, but I hope you don't mind me opening it up again. Here's a ketek I made after thinking about Hoid's story about beauty in WoR:

Beauty, fleeting by, divinely catches all men's eyes, men all caught divinely by fleeting beauty

[Ookla the Absent]

That's really good!

[FeatherWriter]

I forgot about this thread until it got bumped... ha. So a friend of mine requested something with Shallan, Kaladin, and Adolin for Christmas, and me being me, I decided to write a ketek for the three of them. I feel like my keteks are a little bit ridiculously long, in that their "five parts" tend to be... like full sentences. It's 53 words, but whatever. Long keteks are just more fun.

 

Two Soldiers, Two Radiants, Two Lighteyes

Families found broken in pieces

Plainly shattering this light within

 

Loved one became liar

Spearman turned slave

Proud prince defeated

 

Raise Light up!

We bind fate as fate binds us up

 

Light raises defeated prince’s pride

Slave turns spearman

Liar becomes one loved

 

Within light, this Shattered Plains’ pieces

In brokenness, found family

[Curiosity]

I forgot about this thread until it got bumped... ha. So a friend of mine requested something with Shallan, Kaladin, and Adolin for Christmas, and me being me, I decided to write a ketek for the three of them. I feel like my keteks are a little bit ridiculously long, in that their "five parts" tend to be... like full sentences. It's 53 words, but whatever. Long keteks are just more fun.

 

Two Soldiers, Two Radiants, Two Lighteyes

Families found broken in pieces

Plainly shattering this light within

 

Loved one became liar

Spearman turned slave

Proud prince defeated

 

Raise Light up!

We bind fate as fate binds us up

 

Light raises defeated prince’s pride

Slave turns spearman

Liar becomes one loved

 

Within light, this Shattered Plains’ pieces

In brokenness, found family

 

Feather. How are you so good at this? Classical ketek it is not, but... it is beautiful. (I'm head-canoning that it's about Dalinar instead of Adolin. Dalinar forever! Or until Brandon kills him in Oathbringer. )

[FeatherWriter]

Ahhh, see and this was even one I wasn't too thrilled about. I felt like the "plainly shattered" was too obvious as a flip for "Shattered Plains" and it gets a little nonsensey in the middle where I'm trying to make grammatical flips that end up not necessarily terribly meaningful. 

 

But, for me, keteks are like grammar puzzles. And as a linguistics grammar person, I adore twisting grammar about and making it do what I want. There's some reversals that seem obvious to me. "Spearman became slave" and "Slave becomes spearman" are easy enough reversals that work well (with an added twist on verb tense to differentiate them just a smidge.)

 

Other times, though, I think up a phrase I kind of want to use, and have to fiddle with it in order to make its reversal work. "If I add a verb here, can I use that as a noun in the flip?" "I have to take that article out, it won't reverse correctly at all, but does the phrase still work without it?" (A word to the keteking wise: articles are the worst and you should avoid them whenever possible. Those little "a" "an" and "the" will murder you when you try to turn them about.)

 

So yeah, it's all about fiddling with the phrases and seeing if there's ways to make things work. When you figure out something really fun and clever, it all just starts to fit. Finishing keteks is the best feeling, honestly.

[Delightful]

Well it's not perfect but it sure is beautiful.

[DrakeMarshall]

Fun fact: did you know there was actually a literary form very similar to the ketek in the ancient world? The idea was that it sort of repeated itself after a certain point, and the thing in the very middle was always the most important and emphatic statement. One contemporary example of this is some of the psalms found in the bible.

Also. What are the odds that someone here in school writes and submits a ketek for a poetry assignment?

Anyway. Lets try for writing some ketek.

 

Not sure what to write, so lets warm up with a ketek about writing ketek.

Not knowing what to write, I make a ketek, holy vorin poetry, a ketek I make, writing what I do not know.

 

Hm... Perhaps one for the passage of night and day.

Light surrounds, the night recedes, the sun sets, recedes to night, surrounds light.

 

And here is a "ketek" that is likely extraordinarily sacrilegious to vorinism :

Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination, death is my life, the strength becomes my weakness, the journey has ended.

Edited August 10, 2016 by Drake Marshall

[Lindel]

On 8/9/2016 at 11:41 PM, Drake Marshall said:

 

Fun fact: did you know there was actually a literary form very similar to the ketek in the ancient world? The idea was that it sort of repeated itself after a certain point, and the thing in the very middle was always the most important and emphatic statement. One contemporary example of this is some of the psalms found in the bible.

It's called a chiastic structure. It's actually quite prevalent in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as other ancient literary works, such as the Odyssey.  

[DrakeMarshall]

A lot of modern Odyssey translations tend to remove a lot of the poetic form, but yes I imagine it would be prevalent there as well.

Chiastic. That's the word. Yes. I wonder if Sanderson got the ketek idea from chiastic structure.

[Lindel]

Seems likely, since I'm pretty sure he drew some inspiration for Vorinism from ancient Hebrew practices. 

Edited August 12, 2016 by Lindel
Clarification

[Doc12]

This is me trying to encapsulate the scene at the Honor Chasm as Kaladin turns into a vengeful spirit determined to live and protect once more.

 

Storms brewing, despair crushing him,

broken man, saving bridges

Darkness kills Light, spirit vengeful

Man watching death.

Poison crushes Honor

 

Honor offering leaves of death offering honor

 

Honor crushes Poison.

Death watching man, vengeful spirit

Light killing darkness.

Bridges saving man broken,

Him crushing despair, brewing storms

 

The middle portion is meant to be a pun on how "Honor" which refers to Syl as an honorspren, offering Kaladin the Blackbane, which is a twisted sort of 'honor' as in 'Honor chasm'.

So yeah XD

[Darkness Ascendant]

Once at night/found/Love/found/night at once (what was that??)

[Daniel Chambers]

Hey, so I just stumbled upon this because I just finished the Way of Kings and started WoR recently. I fell in love with keteks and made about five of them so far. Not sure if all of them fit the five-section thing, as my intent was more in creating a ketek that perfectly was symmetrical, regardless of spacing, punctuation, and grammar. Here are my submissions, if you can call them that: 

Want to live? To cease not, do inversely: do not cease to live to want.

 

Yellow in day, light paves sun, the silence, and breath whispers joy, whispers breath and silences the sun, paves daylight in yellow.

 

Sight brings opportunity, which begs thought: how is it found? It is how thought begs, “Which opportunity brings sight?”

Crying, in sunlight, drowns the clouds. They that tear form water, falling, and falling, water forms tears that they, the clouds, drown sunlight in crying.

Redeem thyself, doing so in service to others. Guiding others to service, in so doing, thyself redeems.

These are my five. The first is only into 3 parts, as I can make out, but the second, third, fourth, and fifth can be broken into five. As a side note, I get ridiculously enraptured with obscure forms of poetry when I first find out about them. When I went through my super haiku phase, I wrote a story entirely of haiku. I may attempt the same with keteks- if I do, I'll post them here. And yes, I know I'm resurrecting a dormant thread, but hey- poetry never dies. Let's hope I reinvigorated it back into working order. :D

 

 

[DrakeMarshall]

@Daniel Chambers these are very good keteks

I particularly liked these two:

Sight brings opportunity, which begs thought: how is it found? It is how thought begs, “Which opportunity brings sight?”

Redeem thyself, doing so in service to others. Guiding others to service, in so doing, thyself redeems.

 

[Daniel Chambers]

Thanks! I came up with them when I was supposed to be reading Shakespeare. Hamlet can wait- a new form of literary art has arrived in my horizons. 

[Daniel Chambers]

I got more! Mine tend not to always be split into five parts, but I feel they're keteks still.

Ears open upon fall sounds. Happy sounds fall upon open ears.

I'm no sure if these next two are 'legal' either, because they use homonyms, but I think that allows for a larger opportunity for craft and craftiness, so I consider them legitimate.

Night breathes, consuming quick yellow streaks in their air. Breaking dawn breaks air there in streaks, yellow, quickly consuming breathless night.

Their song fills heaven, spiraling endlessly on. Haste to sing! Two is but one for these, and joy dawns again. Mirth again dawns joy and these for one, but is too singing to hasten on endlessly, spiraling heaven-filled songs there.

These are too fun to write- great brain games, fun to read, and neat to ponder on how exactly to get them to work.

Edited November 30, 2016 by Daniel Chambers

[Daniel Chambers]

Back with another. Two variants of the same. A little backstory on this one: I needed a senior quote and couldn't think up a good one, so I decided to make it a ketek:

Life: Schooling highly outranks pitiful time regarding rest and relaxation, for stopping for relaxation and resting regards time pitifully, outranking high school life. 

However, I didn't know until after I'd written this that the word limit was 15 words. Perfect for a short ketek: 7-1-7:

 

Life: Schooling highly outranks time for freedom. Graduating: Freedom for time outranks high school life. 

Not my best, but I was proud of my being able to technically make two keteks in under 15 minutes, as well as being able to fit one of them into my senior quote! Keteks are best poetic art form.

[Spoolofwhool]

"Circles within circles, I fall forever, escaping the madness, the escape forever falling, I circle within circles." 

I made this up in a couple minutes. Not that good really and I had to turn a noun into a verb to make it work. Oh well.

[Daniel Chambers]

Nice!  @Spoolofwhool I don't think that keteks are necessarily bad if the grammatical structure of wordage is changed to make it work. If you have to finagle, you're most of the time doing something right, the way I see it. Also, this reminded me of something that I heard last week: several people were rehearsing something for a theater thing at school, and they said the phrase "just as he said" like "justice he said," which got me to thinking: would certain fusions or fissions of words, keeping the meter and sound mostly the same, be considered legitimate in a ketek? I personally think they could be, and if people would be a bit stingy about it, then it could exist as a lower level ketek, but I believe that ideas like this and other wordsmithing should be encouraged- the more fluid you can make a palindromic sentence or phrase, the better your skill and craft, I believe.Maybe just my take- any thoughts?

[Ataraxian Wist]

I haven't divided these into thoughts yet, only just thought of them today, but here they are.

On Shards:

"Men, killing for gain, use gain for killing men."

(Note that the word "gain" can be replaced with "blades," "Shards," or "spren" without changing the meaning of the poem, but gain can also be used to imply the titles that come with capturing Shards.)

On war:

"Endlessly warring, Kings of land rid land of Kings, warring endlessly."

"Spearmen, killing, by cavalry, help cavalry by killing spearmen."

(This one uses both meanings of the word "by" to mean both alongside and the more common meaning that I'm having trouble defining).

Edited April 5, 2017 by Sazedezas

[Ataraxian Wist]

On 12/14/2016 at 5:46 PM, Daniel Chambers said:

 it could exist as a lower level ketek, but I believe that ideas like this and other wordsmithing should be encouraged- the more fluid you can make a palindromic sentence or phrase, the better your skill and craft, I believe.Maybe just my take- any thoughts?

I definitely think the important part is making the ideas palindromic, considering how glyphs work, so I would consider something like that a lower level ketek The exact wording is also important, of course, as shown by Sanderson's example keteks, by which standard this would still be a lower level ketek.

Cool idea though.

Edited April 20, 2017 by Sazedezas
Typo.

[Staphylococcus]

On Vin -

A girl warrior, defeating darkness, destroying the Final Empire finally destroyed, darkness defeated, by a warrior girl.

On Kelsier -

Survivor hoping, to slay the God; dying suddenly, came sudden death; the God slain; the hope survived.

(The middle parts are hard!)

[Radiant_Jaeger]

Dedicated to Lift and Kaladin

Leaves upon wind, loving together, dancing, together love, wind upon leaves. 

 

Above as below, a wind racing, the dancer, the race, winding below as above.

[Kynedath]

On 09/06/2012 at 3:02 PM, FeatherWriter (Alyx) said:

However, with French, there would also be really cool opportunities for meaning swaps, because depending on where you place an adjective, it changes meaning. For example, the phrases "pauvre homme" and "homme pauvre". Both literally translate to "poor man" but the first describes someone who is pitiable, like "Oh, my poor baby!", while the second describes someone who has little money, like "We've been poor ever since you lost your job."

I may have to look into writing some French keteks for you all...

My french immersion class is on our poetry unit so I thought I would try this out. I took your "homme pauvre/pauvre homme" idea, I hope you don't mind. I also found a couple other cool homophones that I used, such as "comprend" meaning either comprise or understand, and "voler" meaning either flying or stealing. I wanted to share both the original and translated versions here.

 

Original

Dieu seulement sait je volent, prenant des memories.

Pitié éternellement l'homme pauvre, le trahison comprends mon conscience.

Toujours perdant mes valeurs, mes valeurs perdant toujours.

Mon conscience comprend le trahison, le pauvre homme, éternellement pitié.

Les mémoires prends vol, je sais seulement dieu.

 

Translated.

God only knows I steal, taking memories

Pity eternally the poor man, treason understands my conscience.

Always losing my values, my values always losing.

My conscience includes treason, the poor man, eternally pitied.

The memories take flight, I only know god.

 

This is my very first attempt at a ketek, so any input is valued. I think that this around a K3, but I could be wrong. I moved articles around so it's no higher then that. The project said I needed at least ten lines, so that is why all of the parts can be divided in two.

[FeatherWriter]

I... I think I'm in love. What a gorgeous ketek! I'm just sitting here in awe that something so lovely and beautiful exists in this world. 

*sighs dreamily*