Numerical answer
The four sentences below, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the correct order.
1. This is why translated poetry so often reads as competent but strangely flattened: the translator has correctly rendered denotation while quietly abandoning the music that made the original worth reading in the first place.
2. Every language carries constraints — rhyme schemes, syllable counts, consonant clusters — that a translator cannot reproduce in a target language without either distorting meaning or abandoning form altogether.
3. Prose translation tolerates this trade-off reasonably well, since prose's primary duty is to convey sense rather than sound.
4. Poetry, by contrast, often treats sound and sense as inseparable, so that sacrificing one to preserve the other is not a minor compromise but the loss of something essential.
1. This is why translated poetry so often reads as competent but strangely flattened: the translator has correctly rendered denotation while quietly abandoning the music that made the original worth reading in the first place.
2. Every language carries constraints — rhyme schemes, syllable counts, consonant clusters — that a translator cannot reproduce in a target language without either distorting meaning or abandoning form altogether.
3. Prose translation tolerates this trade-off reasonably well, since prose's primary duty is to convey sense rather than sound.
4. Poetry, by contrast, often treats sound and sense as inseparable, so that sacrificing one to preserve the other is not a minor compromise but the loss of something essential.
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Answer: 2314
Sentence 2 opens with the general constraint facing any translator: form versus meaning. Sentence 3 narrows this to prose, noting prose tolerates the trade-off well. Sentence 4 contrasts this with poetry ('by contrast'), where sound and sense are inseparable. Sentence 1 then draws the concluding consequence ('This is why') — translated poetry reads as flattened. Order: 2-3-4-1.
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