Manituana Haiku - Wu Ming interview the poet Rossano Astremo

About a rewriting of Manituana in the form of a poem, a haiku for each chapter

On his blog the writer and poet Rossano Astremo writes:

One of the good suggestions of 2008 will be the completion of a work begun a few months ago, a kind of verse rewriting of Manituana by Wu Ming. To dedicate a haiku to each chapter of the book. To contain the epic nature of a choral story in the short breath of a poetic composition. I offer a taster of it here, pointing out that in the choosing the haiku and not respecting the syllabic scansion that characterises it, I am making Jack Kerouac’s words my own: ‘A "Western Haiku" need not concern itself with the seventeen syllables since Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the fluid syllabic Japanese. I propose that the "Western Haiku" simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language.’

By way of illustration, Astremo has published the first 13 haikus, which concern the prologue and the first part of the novel. To take one example, these lines correspond to chapter 34:

In the trajectory of opaque rainbows…
Dreams invade the mind…
Drops of water on Joseph’s lips.

Intrigued by this project, we decided to interview our colleague. Below, our email exchange. As always, for the printable version, click ‘Print’ at the foot of each page.

WM. Very unusual: the authors of a ‘main’ work interviewing the author of a ‘derived’ work. It’s a bit as if – obviously without the proportions and the countless differences – J.R.R. Tolkien were to interview the makers of ‘The Battle for Middle-Earth II’. Because this approach is unusual, we will open with a banal question: when did you get the idea of writing a haiku for each chapter of Manituana?

RA. The idea came to me immediately after finishing the reading of the novel. In the notebook on which I started ‘jotting down’ the haikus there’s a date, 3 May, which indicates the start of my personal rewriting of Manituana. Why the poetry? I think the linguistic work you performed in writing the novel was really detailed and complex. I would go so far as to say that compared to the other two collective novels, Q and 54 the ‘language question’ is something you have talked about for a long time. Within this linguistic contrivance which has given form and substance to the events that see protagonists that the protagonists of the Six Iroquois Nations what I have found truly interesting is the capacity for representation of what some reviewers have called ‘the geography of the interiority of human behaviour’. Since it is a novel with a strong epic connotation, with a large choral framework, once I finished it I found myself thinking about those narrative zones in which single characters found themselves immersed in their solitude, in hand-to-hand combat with the dancing ghosts that the traps of life help to create. Of all of them, I could mention Philip Lecroix and Joseph Brant, of course, but never have the women, from Molly to Esther, been so deeply analysed as in this book. In these frames the language of Manituana becomes less denotative and more connotative, tersely lyrical and suspended. Hence the idea, playful, perhaps, of releading the book and taking to extremes that latent component, but strongly present in my eyes. I said it was playful, but at the same time, through this choice I am also performing a critical, interpretative act. Giving prominence to some elements of the text over others. Think of this body of haikus as my personal review of the text. So why hakus? First of all to give myself a closed form that would limit me. Otherwise, almost certainly, I would have scattered myself. As happened anyway, but for other reasons. Then, along with not respecting the typical syllabic scansion of the Japanese haiku, there’s a phrase by Jack Kerouac that I’ve thought about a lot: ‘Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.’ Nice, isn’t it?

WM. Lovely. Staying with the issue of poetics, it has been shown that the human brain ‘responds well’ to triadic and terary structures. The most effective mottos and slogans are made up of three elements: veni – vidi - vici, produce – consume - die, believe – obey - fight; Ein Volk - ein Reich - ein Führer, etc. The most memorable arrangements of people are tercets and triumvirates: Father – Son - Holy Ghost, Caesar – Pompey – Crassus, The Good – the Bad – the Ugly, Emerson – Lake – Palmer, Huey – Dewey - Louie etc. When we use reason, we resort to syllogyisms (major premisse – minor premisse – conclusion) or schemes such as thesis – antithesis – synthesis. In poetry, the tercet is the metrical basis of immortal compositions, the Divine Comedy most of all. And we could go on. The haiku is also composed of three lines. As a poet, what function do you attribute, generally speaking, to each of the three?

RA. Yes, it’s true, we could go on to infinity with this massive presence of the number three in our imagination, declined according to the greatest variety of functions. The art world is full of number threes: The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions; The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Godfather Part III; the trilogies of Aeschylus; the triptych by Giacomo Puccini, made up of three single acts, Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. And The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is part of Sergio Leone’s dollar trilogy. And how could you forget Krzysztof Kieślowski’s colours trilogy? To stop messing around and return to the question, as I said before the choice of the haiku was dictated by a desire to have very precise ‘spatial restrictions’. Given this, as you can tell from the texts published in my blog, in every composition every line seems to be self-sufficient, to contain within itself a very precise image that doesn’t spill into the line that follows. And I think the idea is to give the first line the task of introducing the chapter, the second to develop it and the third to conclude it. For example the haiku for chapter 25 of the first part, the one concerning Mary’s death, says: ‘Songs, dances, drunkards’ tales/Joy flirts with sordid pain/A child’s corpse, blood-soaked Mary.’ It’s one of the most heart-rending chapters of the book, and yet it opens with a mood of festivity, a noisy party. So how to contain and explain in three lines such richness and complexity of content? The second ilne, ‘Joy flirts with sordid pain’ seemed to me to synthesise the sudden change, the approach of the drama. I must also say that my wy of writing poetry is usually completely different from this. For me it’s an experiment and as such I’m aware that in many respects it may be fallacious.

WM. You say the poem you are writing maintains a certain autonomy from the novel whose chapters it follows? If someone read the haikus before reading the novel itself, what idea could they make of the novel?

RA. I take the opportunity to say I’d like to finish this poem in haikus by 20 March, 2008, exactly a year after the publication of Manituana. Having a deadline will help me complete it. I don’t deny having had second thoughts about it, especially when I have reached a linguistically crazy zone where the Mohocks appear in London. How to render those chapters? Copy their slang or try to maintain a kind of homogeneity throughout the whole work? In the end I opted for the latter and they’re well away now. Given this, I think every derived work is worse than the original. Absolutely. As far as I’m concerned, every film taken from a novel is shoddy and unsatisfactory. So, anyone who reads the poem in haikus after reading Manituana will find the operation pointless. At least in most cases. If, on the other hand, someone read the haikus before the novel, I think they might be able to form some ideas from the imagination that the poetry sets in motion. I don’t think they’d be able to reconstruct the events, but I think they might be able to become attached to the solitary, thoughtful image of Lacroix and Esther’s bloodless beauty, for example. In the sense that most of the time the characters appear in the compositions, but they carry not actions but sensations. This is an aspect that really stirs my curiosity. Working out whether a by-product of this kind might lead, who knows, a reader of poetry and not novels to approach Manituana. We will have to wait and see.

Born in 1979, Rossano Astremo is from Grottaglie (Taranto). He is a freelance journalist. He writes for "Il Nuovo Quotidiano di Puglia". He is editor of the literary journal of writing and criticism ‘Vertigine’. He is working with Lecce University on the project ‘The reader of books in the Puglia region’.
He has published: Corpo poetico irrisolto [Unresolved Poetic Body], edito dalla Besa, 2003; Jack Kerouac. Il violentatore della prosa [Jack Kerouac: The Violator of Prose] (Icaro Editore, 2006); L'incanto delle macerie [The Crying of Ruins] (Icaro Editore, 2007).
His critical and creative texts are published in various magazines, webzines and anthologies.
His novel La carne muore [The Flesh Dies] can be downloaded here.

05.01.08 · on interviste