Opening lines of famous novels in the form of hay(na)ku V
A
screaming comes
across the sky.
This is how Thomas Pynchon chose to start his epic novel, Gravity's Rainbow. After I typed it out as a hay(na)ku, I didn't know what to think. It looked unbalanced and out of proportion. First, there's the lonely "A," and after that, two long lines jutting out kind of without any real purpose. What if I turned it around, starting with three words in the first line and finishing it off with "sky" at the end? No, that would leave us "across the" in the middle and that doesn't add up to anything, really. On second look, the regular scheme started to make sense, though. The empty space after the "A" makes you ask: what is it, actually, that comes screaming across the sky? Anyway, it's got a nice iambic rhythm and sound to it, with well-chosen vowels and consonants doing the job. Not a bad opener, no.
screaming comes
across the sky.
This is how Thomas Pynchon chose to start his epic novel, Gravity's Rainbow. After I typed it out as a hay(na)ku, I didn't know what to think. It looked unbalanced and out of proportion. First, there's the lonely "A," and after that, two long lines jutting out kind of without any real purpose. What if I turned it around, starting with three words in the first line and finishing it off with "sky" at the end? No, that would leave us "across the" in the middle and that doesn't add up to anything, really. On second look, the regular scheme started to make sense, though. The empty space after the "A" makes you ask: what is it, actually, that comes screaming across the sky? Anyway, it's got a nice iambic rhythm and sound to it, with well-chosen vowels and consonants doing the job. Not a bad opener, no.
posted by Karri Kokko at 00:54
3 Comments:
In
the beginning
was the word
A.
No argument there, Mark. This is all to show, I think, that the hay(na)ku is a work of genius. There are no limits to it. As it happens, even the translators of our Finnish bible knew it (check my newest post.)
What comes screaming is the letter "A" that Hester Prynne is condemned to wear on her chest in Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_.
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