Tweeting offers some interesting constraints for conveying a narrative and writing poetry. Poet for the project, Mike Rose-Steel (@MikeRSTyping) explains:
My poetry projects gravitate towards the formally constrained (especially numeric limitations) and the ekphrastic. This project automatically provides this framework; the verbal compression and temporal segmentation required by Twitter’s short, drip-feed delivery will force me to consider several qualities that can be muted by a single poem on a page, or an interactive installation.
The challenge here is threefold: i) to adapt to the tweeting format, so that each tweet can be equally understood on its own and as part of the greater whole, which will be available only after the event, over six months after transmission began; ii) to explore the possibilities of conveying in modern style and vocabulary a medieval narrative – remaining true to the source text while also revealing something about our reception of it today; iii) to produce poetry within these constraints that is interesting on its own terms, not merely a pastiche or a novel means of communicating. This is simultaneously a question about the boundaries between translation and creation, and where this project situates itself.
As we collaborate on the rules, means, tone and timetable of production (always an interesting process) I hope that the project is a genuine response to the possibilities and challenges that communications technology offers to literature and scholarship. The reception of poetry, my particular concern, is becoming increasingly complex and temporal – one of the motivations behind my use of performance, installation and film in other projects. Here, the breaking down of an original text into ‘tweetable’ quantities, and their reconstitution into poetic responses is a new – and not straightforward – engagement with a venerable source; we hope that the combination of innovative, serious and playful impulses in this project will generate enthusiasm for the original as much as its re-incarnation, and perhaps a little charm and controversy along the way.
We have attempted to settle on a form that retains some of the character of the original Old French text, while also being suitable for use in modern English. The original’s octosyllabic lines and full rhyming couplets are typical of the style of the day, and part of the ludic tone, but also serve it well in its didactic instances – the ‘little pile-driver of a form’ to use Seamus Heaney’s expression and the anticipation of each rhyme serve to command the audience’s attention and involvement. However, full rhyming couplets, especially in a very long poem, can become heavy and dull in English, particularly as contemporary poetry has generally moved away from this form. This is emphasized in combination with the short lines (compared to the more common iambic pentameter) to sound, perhaps, inherently comic. On the other hand, strict octosyllabic lines without a rhyme scheme, much easier in English, tends to feel quiet, contemplative, careful, which seemed ill-fit for the mobile and romantic dream narrative.
After a certain amount of experimentation, we have retained the octosyllabic form (with a little looseness to fit the tendency of English to mumble in places) and combined mostly half-rhyme with some full rhymes and occasional blank couplets. This should allow us to retain some of the features and feeling of the original, without becoming cloying or boring. It also has the happy benefit that an octosyllabic quatrain tends to work out at about 130 characters, perfect for tweeting.
The next question was about how to divide up the text. The option of simply re-rendering the poem line-by-line was put to one side; excellent translations, such as Frances Horgan’s (published by World’s Classics), already exist, and this approach leave relatively little space for poetic invention. A more interesting tack was to match each tweet (or tweet-combo, in places) with a thematic unit in the text. To this end we followed the narrative sections that Prof Stephen Nichols had identified, ensuring that we covered all the most essential events and themes of Lorris’s Rose. Given a little freedom and consultation about particular images or ideas to leave in or leave out, this division should be covered by 150 quatrains – still a very sizable endeavor, but considerably less than a quarter of Guillaume de Lorris’s mighty composition, let alone the entire poem with Jean de Meun’s much longer extension.
Finally, we wrestled with different possibilities of tone and reference, aspects of the degree to which this would be a faithful re-telling of the Rose, and to what degree a free-standing poem. We decided that the initial impetus behind the poem – attracting new readers to the digital Rose project – meant that we should stick fairly closely to the text; the poem has not been re-imagined at a distance, as a record of reader experience, or re-sited into an overtly modern period; references to Scipio and Gawain, for example, have not been usurped by Susan Sontag or Michael Bay. However, given the importance of citation and allusion in the practice of Medieval literature, we have (perhaps inevitably) permitted a certain amount of less overt citation into the text, drawing on our own literary forebears, and not only sources available to the original authors.
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