Stumbling Moon - a renga sequence
1. Anne Carson (hokku)
2. Christopher Drake
3. Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen
4. Lawrence Marceau
5. Lewis Cook
6. Janine Beichman
7. Rein Raud
8. Sonja Arntzen
|
(Anne Carson) |
| Tents of the visiting troupe billow in slow music by the shrine |
(Chris Drake) |
| Piercingly cold the sound of a flute through the whirling leaves |
(Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen) |
| They imagine such a scene At a concert in the park |
(Lawrence Marceau) |
| Open the gates, Kwannon-sama, grant us a glimpse of a paradise beyond |
(Lewis Cook) |
| Child-cat with golden paws calls me for a walk |
(Janine Beichman) |
| Oranges are ripe In the gardens of Midas-- We eat with our eyes. |
(Rein Raud) |
| Turning, he shuffles down the path, a hermit on his way home. |
(Sonja Arntzen) |
| (in progress) |
Other participants so far: Chris Drake, Lawrence Marceau, Janine Beichman, Lewis Cook.
Original mail to pmjs list is recorded below.
Editor's note: This is your renga
sequence, so please suggest how it should best be laid out. I
have followed what I understood to be Chris Drake's suggestion
about indentation and italics. Esperanza is the referee here,
so I leave it to her to judge whether suggested continuations
are acceptable or not. I have recorded mail in chronological sequence,
correcting the dates in Chris' mail (he seems to be one day ahead
of the rest of us).
Email correspondance. (Beginning in medias res)
from Chris Drake (99/10/7)
Esperanza,
I like your translations of Saikaku's haikai verses! Very nice. I also like your spatial sense. Just to fill in, in verse 26, "....How madly they pull at the love sash," the woman of the "they" is a heavenly sky woman (Amatsuotome, of 'Shinkokinshuu' 1653/-1 etc. fame) descending down onto her lover. This is because the heavenly woman appears in verse 25 and continues, linked forward, in verse 26. The cloth sash being stretched seems to be Nunobiki Falls itself, the heavenly woman's robe, which the couple is now looping around (the back of) both their necks as their tight "love sash." I believe it's the man who's most commonly horizontal in shunga versions of kubihiki as well, though *very* unfortunately I don't have time to check to be sure at the moment.
Thanks for sharing the wonderful hokku. I think making a 'rempai(?)' sequence in English would be great. Are you going to do the wakiku for us? Please don't hesitate. Before we go any further, though, I'd like to ask you about one thing. In my personal experience, alternating verses of four and three lines in English often seems to approximate the effect of compressed Japanese 'lines' or units better than alternating three and two English lines. Three and two are really tough to work with, and demand great discipline, though of course I'm not opposing that form at all. I just want to mention this to get your opinion or the opinions of others who might want to participate. Then again, changing lineation might not be so good, since the hokku is already in three lines. Anyway, do you want to try for a kasen or a hyakuin? And how many verses will be on the first "face"? Six? Eight? Since the hokku's so nice, maybe we could just make it the face of the moon and leave it at that.
Cheers,
Chris
Chris, glad you liked them! It was sort of fun, seeing them again after all these years, which reminds me, re your note on the heavenly sky woman Amatsuotome "descending down onto her lover" via the metaphor of Nunobiki Falls, that my student Cathy Ryu observed in her dissertation last year that Enchi Fumiko's Komachi hensou has an amazing image of a gushing waterfall, one of the epiphanic moments in the novel, figuring as the power of a woman's jouissance, or something like that anyway. I always thought there was something haikai-teki in Enchi's style, you know, a sort of exaggerated or sensational, but also off-beat quality. Not that I think she read this particular Saikaku link. . . So, thanks for clueing me in on the kubihiki in shunga, will watch out for it next time I'm in the locked part of the library.
Re the `stumbling moon' rempai, why don't we just see how far it will go, sort of just leave the thing on the board indefinitely and see if someone will pick it up when the mood takes one. Your suggestion about English verse being more manageable in fours and threes, I hadn't realized that, and would like to experiment on it sometime. This time, however, can we just go with threes and twos, and see what happens. Are the renga rules okay? You know, the 100 verses deployed on each page on each leaf as:
Leaf I: 8, 14
Leaf 2: 14, 14
Leaf 3: 14, 14
Leaf 4: 14, 8
There should be only one "flower" on each leaf, one "moon" on each page, and ditto with "snow." When Autumn or Spring appears, it should continue in a series for 3 verses minimum and 5 maximum; Love 2-5; Travel, Laments, Buddhism, Shinto 1-3. There should be an interval of 7 verses between the same seasons and 5 between the other themes. Well, those are the general rules. In Basho-school haikai, the other topics/motifs or linking contrasts are the four social classes, city and country, profane and sacred; monogatari or poem allusions, etc. In this case we should probably feel free to include the western canon as well. Oh, I forgot, Winter and Summer also go for 1-3 verses. Well, that's enough for rules or tips. I think we should have both `serious' and `comic/ironic' passages, what do you think? Since some people might feel more comfortable with one or the other.
I've already written the waki to Anne Carson's verse, and I'll forward that to this site, but I think we should have a different sequence than the Fellows', so you should write the waki for this one, let's call it "The Stumbling Moon Sequence." I'm very interested to see how you would respond to her hokku. Then I'll do the daisan, okay? And the others can follow when they wish. So, you go ahead, Chris. I'll check in to see how it's going next week. Ciao! --Esperanza
It turns out I'm supposed to do the second verse, so here goes.
1. Big autumn moon stumbles
up the sky - with a place or without
a place of rest she burns herself away. (Anne Carson)
2. Tents of the visiting troupe
billow in slow music by the shrine
Here's number three, Chris; Lewis or Larry, which of you will follow? Will others follow them, I wonder. Okay, I'll play the referee. Shall we place non-verse communication under another subject heading, just "Renga," and leave the verse text clean? We now have 3 Autumn verses; the next person can either continue it or move to another seasonal theme, or transition to another season through a Miscellaneous verse. --Esperanza
3. Piercingly cold
the sound of a flute
through the whirling leaves
(Esperanza R-C)
To Esperanza and the rest:
It's hard to change seasons with the verse Esperanza has provided. Please excuse the "nioi-zuke". Fortunately I've made the next person's job easier!
Here's what we have so far (are there Nihongo versions, too?)
L. Marceau
Lovely poems, but I have two questions for Larry: what is nioi-zuke, and could you also provide romaji, since my software (and probably others' too) can't read kanji. Though if you post on the Pmjs netsite, I could...
From Christ Drake
(99/11/13)
Dear Esperanza,
Thanks for another nice verse! What do you think about the uchikoshi in Larry's #4? 'Concert' seems to go back to music in #2. In Danrin and Edoza that kind of uchikoshi is sometimes all right. What do you think? I guess you're the master and shuhitsu in one, so do you have an opinion? I ask you privately, because I don't want to dampen Larry's enthusiasm.
Yours,
Chris
From Chris Drake (99/11/13)
Sorry for sending two messages to Esperanza to the whole list. Ah, nyuushi season madness! I probably should have addressed both to the whole list as well. In case some people aren't familiar with uchikoshi, it's a shorthand term for looking back over two previous verses instead of linking only to the immediately previous verse. In classical renga, continuing an image or situation for three verses was avoided as a form of stagnation. In view of this, I'm wondering whether verse 4 is a partial return to verse 2. I'm not personally against that and enjoy it if that's what's happening. (Thanks, Larry!) In the Edo period the Danrin and Edoza haikai "schools" allowed long links (on or around the same subject or situation for up to about five verses, though there is no explicit rule about this, only actual practice). So I'm wondering whether or not we need to observe strict forward movement in this sequence. Is it all right if we sometimes refer back two or three verses? I myself hope that it is. I'd like to get this clear as the sequence progresses. [...]
Best,
Chris Drake
To Chris, Janine, and other PMJS-ers,
Chris and another correspondent mentioned the "uchikoshi" or "kannon-biraki" allusion to verse two in my verse. That's my fault--I was so concerned about trying to get away from the falling leaves and the season, that I forgot where the flute had come from originally.
However, I was actually "imagining" something quite different from the "billowing tents" when I alluded to the concert in the park. I also feel comfortable in the "Inaka Shoumon" school of the Ise-ha and Mino-ha, in which the rules were relaxed quite a bit in the Kyouhou eras and later.
As for "nioi-zuke" (it's not the takuan I left in the refrigerator too long), Haruo Shirane has written at length about different forms of "tsukeai" linkages between verses in HJAS a few years ago, and more recently in his excellent book on Basho, Traces of Dreams. Tsukeai of the "nioi" type are implicit, rather than explicitly linked to a specific term/image found in the previous verse. A "fragrance" of the previous verse "wafts" to the link.
The romanization for my two lines of Japanese verse are, for what they are worth:
Futari kaku omohi (The couple consider in this manner) Oto wo kikitsutsu (While listening to the sounds)
I'm learning a lot already--please keep up the commentary!
L. Marceau
5. Open the gates,
Kwannon-sama, grant us a glimpse
of a paradise beyond
(Lewis Cook)
From Janine Beichman (99/11/14)
I'm thinking of adding this but want to know from those who know the rules, progression, etc. where we are now and what kind of link is needed--not sure this would work--for one thing, I've never seen a cat in any renga I know---not even an unreal one, as this one could be read--emissary of Kannon?
Child-cat with golden paws
calls me for a walk
The sequence is getting very interesting! Since we don't have a shuhitsu to brush it all down for us and the only copy is the one added to by the person who makes a new link, I have a small proposal. How about not forwarding the sequence text in the standard italics with left-margin spikes? In Netscape Communicator 4.6 you can forward a message in ordinary print and also add to it yourself by clicking Message, then Forward As, and then Inline. Do other people have something similar with their software? If so, then we could keep the copy in the same print as it goes around.
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