Approaches between Asia and Latin America: A Critical Renga

Abstract

The conceit of a "critical renga" was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson's 1969 quadrilingual experiment in poetic composition Renga, itself loosely modeled on the Japanese poetic genre of that name. This form of "linked verse" became a major literary genre in Japan in the fourteenth century. Starting from an opening hokku of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables (this is the origin of the haiku), a group of poets would take turns composing the next link in their chain, each alternating between fourteen and seventeen syllables, with each contributor responding only to the immediately preceding set of verses. 1 A quite complex set of rules developed over time, guiding both the particulars of any set of verses and the relationship between them in the composition as a whole (which could run to one hundred or even one thousand sets of verses). The goal was to try out a form of critical writing that would be a bit more social, more interactive, and more improvisatory than is typically the case with academic writing. At the same time, we wanted to foreground the constructed character of the connections that constitute a field. As a practical matter, we decided that instead of a single chain (which would have taken too long to complete), we would have two separate strands that would meet. Each contributor saw all the previous contributions in the chain and was encouraged to dialogue with any or all of them. We then decided to take advantage of this double-stranded structure by