Something never done before.

I've found an original way to solve my abridgment problem.

Originally I was simply paraphrasing. I took the texts from the Mark Musa and Birk, Sanders translations and put them in my own words. It's been a very long time since I've written any poetry (about five years) and I wasn't sure how to begin so I just used some flowery prose, and while I'm happy with my prose interpretation so far it's not short. In fact in some canto's it's actually longer than the poem. The problem or rather the greatest temptation has been to just take the narrative and run with it and Dante's Hell is so rich with imagery and for some reason it's so easy for me to conjure up the macabre while it's been intense and unsettling it's also not been an exercise in restraint.

I went out yesterday looking for more research materials. I bought a copy of The Aeneid by Virgil, and a couple of books on poetics including the famous treatise by Aristotle because I've always meant to read it. While I was at a friend's bookstore I was talking about my project and the thought occurred to me, what about Haiku?

Nobody has ever done The Comedy as Haiku and it would certainly solve my narrative problems. I spent some time last night and today thinking about it then I re-wrote Canto 3 as five successive poems in the Shinru form. It works!

Not only did it considerably abridge the work but it still carried some of the effect. I have also been finding the challenge of syllable and word choice to be really engaging, so tonight I re-wrote Canto 4 as well. I'm not certain if I'll be posting any of my Shinru here. Not yet anyway. I think I'll have to re-work them still. I like Jack Kerouac's approach to haiku, while it's creation is spontaenious it's perfection is not.

The biggest possible downside to this is that it detatches me from the narrative. When I wrote the prose paraphrase I was really emotionally involved, I felt like I could put myself in the shoes of Dante the Pilgrim while the economy of language in Japanese poetry forces the narrative into a more objective shape... This might not be a bad thing though... we'll see how things bear themselves out.