I read about half this post before realizing that this concept is intuitively familiar to me from the process of translating poems/songs: very often a poem or song will have certain specific bits that are going to be extra important to get exactly right (e.g. the title, or something conceptually loadbearing, or a particularly clever or emotionally impactful line) or unusually hard for some reason (e.g. it’s trying to get across a very specific or finicky or culturally specific concept, or using clever wordplay, or it’s self-referential like “a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, a major lift”), and when considering a new translation it usually makes sense to start brainstorming from those bits, because every line you write will affect what can go near it, so it makes sense to start with the lines where I’ll be lucky if I can think of one good thing that scans, and then from there try to fill in the other lines (which hopefully have more degrees of freedom) with things that not only scan but also rhyme with the hard parts. (Also because sometimes you won’t think of anything for the hard parts, and then it might not make sense to invest a bunch of time in working on the rest of the thing.)
I read about half this post before realizing that this concept is intuitively familiar to me from the process of translating poems/songs: very often a poem or song will have certain specific bits that are going to be extra important to get exactly right (e.g. the title, or something conceptually loadbearing, or a particularly clever or emotionally impactful line) or unusually hard for some reason (e.g. it’s trying to get across a very specific or finicky or culturally specific concept, or using clever wordplay, or it’s self-referential like “a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, a major lift”), and when considering a new translation it usually makes sense to start brainstorming from those bits, because every line you write will affect what can go near it, so it makes sense to start with the lines where I’ll be lucky if I can think of one good thing that scans, and then from there try to fill in the other lines (which hopefully have more degrees of freedom) with things that not only scan but also rhyme with the hard parts. (Also because sometimes you won’t think of anything for the hard parts, and then it might not make sense to invest a bunch of time in working on the rest of the thing.)