On Haiku
Page 1
On Haiku
Also by Hiroaki Sato
poems
That First Time: Renga on Love and Other Poems
history and criticism
One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English
Snow in a Silver Bowl: A Quest for the World of Yūgen
biography
Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima by Inose Naoki (adapted and expanded)
compilation
Erotic Haiku
translations, poetry
Spring & Asura: Poems of Kenji Miyazawa
Mutsuo Takahashi: Poems of a Penisist
Lilac Garden: Poems of Minoru Yoshioka
See You Soon: Poems of Taeko Tomioka
Chieko and Other Poems of Takamura Kōtarō
From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (with Burton Watson)
A Bunch of Keys: Selected Poems by Mutsuo Takahashi
A Future of Ice: Poems and Stories of a Japanese Buddhist by Miyazawa Kenji
Osiris, the God of Stone by Gōzō Yoshimasu
Sleeping Sinning, Falling by Mutsuo Takahashi
A Brief History of Imbecility: Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kōtarō
Right Under the Big Sky, I Don’t Wear a Hat: The Haiku and Prose of Hōsai Ozaki
String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi
Bashō’s Narrow Road: Spring & Autumn Passages
Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saikō
Rabbit of the Nether World by Reiko Koyanagi
Not a Metaphor: Poems of Kazue Shinkawa
The Girl Who Turned into Tea: Poems of Minako Nagashima
The Village Beyond: Poems of Nobuko Kimura
Santoka: Grass and Tree Cairn
Runners in the Margins: Poems by Akira Tatehata
Toward Meaning: Poems of Kikuo Takano
The Modern Fable by Nishiwaki Junzaburō
Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology
The Iceland by Sakutarō Hagiwara
So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms: Haiku from the Year of the Earthquake and Tsunami by Mayuzumi Madoka (with Nancy Sato)
Cat Town by Sakutarō Hagiwara
My Purgatory by Inuhiko Yomota
translations, prose
The Sword and the Mind by Yagyū Munenori and Takuan Hōsō
Legends of the Samurai (anthology of old accounts with commentary)
Silk and Insight by Mishima Yukio
My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Yukio Mishima
The Silver Spoon: Memoirs of a Boyhood in Japan by Kansuke Naka
Copyright © 2018 by Hiroaki Sato
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
“Useless! Useless!,” “What is Buddhism?,” “Prayerbeads,” “Haiku, schmaiku,” and “The fly, just as” from Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac, edited and with an introduction by Regina Weinreich, copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas, Literary Representative. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
One-line excerpts from “Pastel Sentences (Selections)”, “American Sentences 1995–1997” from Death & Fame: Last Poems 1993–1997, by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1999 by the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1426) in 2018
Design by Eileen Baumgartner
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sato, Hiroaki, 1942– author.
Title: On haiku / Hiroaki Sato.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2018. | “A New Directions Paperbook Original.” | A collection of essays including many haiku translated from the Japanese.
Identifiers: lccn 2018021511 (print) | lccn 2018026919 (ebook) | isbn 9780811227421 (ebook) | isbn 9780811227414 (alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Haiku—History and criticism. | Japanese poetry—History and criticism. | Haiku, American—History and criticism. | American poetry—Japanese influences.
Classification: lcc pl729 (ebook) | lcc pl729 .s1887 2018 (print) | ddc 809.1/41—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021511
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
ndbooks.com
Contents
Preface
Note and Acknowledgments
Haiku Talk: From Bashō to J. D. Salinger
What Is Haiku?: Serious and Playful Aspects
Haiku and Zen: Association and Dissociation
Hearn, Bickerton, Hubbell: Translation and Definition
White Quacks and Whale Meat: Bashō’s Kasen, “The Sea Darkens”
Renga and Assassination: The Cultured Warlord Akechi Mitsuhide
Issa and Hokusai
From Wooden Clogs to the Swimsuit: Women in Haikai and Haiku
The Haiku Reformer Shiki: How Important Is His Haiku?
The “Gun-Smoke” Haiku Poet Hasegawa Sosei
From the 2.26 Incident to the Atomic Bombs: Haiku During the Asia-Pacific War
“Haiku Poet Called a Hooker”: Suzuki Shizuko
“Gendai Haiku:” What Is It?
Mitsuhashi Takajo: Some Further Explication
Mishima Yukio and Hatano Sōha
Outré Haiku of Katō Ikuya
In the Cancer Ward: Tada Chimako
Receiving a Falconer’s Haibun
Through the Looking Glass
Glossary of Terms
Glossary of Names
About the Author
Landmarks
Cover
Preface
When you are in a foreign country, you are sometimes taken to be an authority of some aspects of your native culture. Thus it was that, just a few years after I arrived in New York City from Japan in 1968, I was asked by two ladies, Carmel Wilson and Eleanor Wolff, to “teach” haiku to them once a week, and I had the temerity to say yes. As I learned soon enough, they knew more about haiku than they had hinted at the outset, having studied with Harold J. Isaacson, the author of Peonies Kana: Haiku by the Upasaka Shiki, at the New School of Social Research.
Several years after our weekly sessions started, the Haiku Society of America asked me to give a talk on haiku as a “translator of modern Japanese poetry.” My talk was more negative than positive about haiku, as it was a somewhat unflattering assessment of the genre: the form is too short to make it as a poem on its own, its origins suggest it requires a larger context, and so forth. As an English major in Kyoto during the 1960s, I had not had a high regard for the ephemeral thing. Nonetheless, I was elected president of the society two years later and served from 1979 to 1981. Since then I have translated many haiku, both into English and Japanese, and have had a number of occasions to give a talk or write an essay about the verse form—its history; its religious, philoso
phical, and social backgrounds; its understandings outside Japan, mainly in the United States. And so the contents of this book.
I translate haiku in one line because most Japanese haiku writers, both standard and nonstandard, treat it as a one-line form and adjust its prosody accordingly. There is also a non-haiku genre called “one-line poem,” ichigyō-shi, that came into being in the 1920s, written most notably by Kitagawa Fuyuhiko and Anzai Fuyue. At the same time, there are some who lineate their haiku, as you will see in “‘Gendai Haiku’: What Is It?”; with them, I am impelled to reproduce those “lines” in translation. But I am by no means the first to translate haiku in one line; some had done the same before I started doing so, to no discernible ill effect. In recent decades, a fair number of non-Japanese poets have written monolinear haiku, as there have been poets who have written one-line poems. In the mid-1970s, for example, the American poet Bill Zavatsky devoted one of the five issues of Roy Rogers to one-line poems.
I must make it clear that this is not to suggest those who translate haiku into three lines, as most do, are wrong. The prosody may be least transferable into a different language, besides the fact that in English a “one-liner” suggests a witty or humorous quip. It has long been a tradition to present haiku in non-Japanese languages as tercets, albeit in various numbers of syllables, from 5-7-5, or a total of 17, to poems of just a few syllables.
—Hiroaki Sato, Spring 2018
Note and Acknowledgments
All Japanese names in this book are given the Japanese way, surname first. This may create confusion for some readers: most famous haiku writers are usually known by their given or personal name, which is in truth their haiku, or haikai, name. Bashō, for instance, is one of the many haikai names of Matsuo Munefusa. The months before the nineteenth century are called by their standard lunar calendar names: First Month for January, Fourth Month for April, etc.
Grateful acknowledgments are made to the following publications and presses for first publishing some of these pieces: Introducing Modern Japan: Lecture Series, the publication of the Japan Information and Culture Center, Embassy of Japan, in Washington, D.C. (“Haiku Talk: From Bashō to J. D. Salinger,” originally a speech given on May 25, 1994); St. Andrews Press (“Renga and Assassination: The Cultured Warlord Akechi Mitsuhide” in That First Time: Renga on Love and Other Poems); Lynx (“White Quacks and Whale Meat: Bashō’s Kasen, ‘The Sea Darkens’”); Black Widow Press (excerpt of “Issa and Hokusai” in Barbaric, Vast & Wild: A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present); Modern Haiku (revision of “White Quacks,” fuller version of “Issa and Hokusai,” “The ‘Gun-Smoke’ Haiku Poet Hasegawa Sosei,” “From the 2.26 Incident to the Atomic Bombs: Haiku During the Asia-Pacific War,” and “‘Gendai Haiku’: What Is It?”); The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus online newsletter (“From the 2.26 Incident to the Atomic Bombs: Haiku During the Asia-Pacific War,” revised and expanded, with full illustrations); Roadrunner Haiku Journal (“Mishima Yukio and Hatano Sōha,” “Outré Haiku of Katō Ikuya,” and “In the Cancer Ward: Tada Chimako”); and Frogpond, the magazine of the Haiku Society of America (excerpt of “Mitsuhashi Takajo: Some Further Explication”).
Thanks also to M. E. Sharpe, the publisher of Japanese Women Poets, where “From Wooden Clogs to the Swimsuit: Women in Haikai and Haiku” first appeared; Penguin Books for several haiku from Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac; HarperFlamingo for two “sentences” from Death & Fame: Poems 1993–1997 by Allen Ginsberg; Charles Trumbull, who prompted me to write “The Haiku Reformer Shiki: How Important Is His Haiku?”; Forrest Gander, who invited me to give a talk at Brown University, “Hearn, Bickerton, Hubbell: Translation and Definition,” in March 1999; and the Haiku Society of America, for listening to my talks in the 1990s, “What Is Haiku?” and “Haiku and Zen,” and in 2016, “‘Haiku Poet Called a Hooker’: Suzuki Shizuko.”
I would like to thank Jeffrey Yang for patiently, meticulously editing these essays. And among the many people who have helped me over the years, I’d like to thank my wife, Nancy, for being my primary reader of all things I’ve written and translated.
On Haiku
Haiku Talk: From Bashō to J. D. Salinger
Some years ago, during another one of those “crises” in US-Japanese relations, there was an article in The New York Times—I think it was—about an officer at the Embassy of Japan in Washington who used haiku in a bulletin as a way to redirect Washingtonians’ attention from such pecuniary matters as trade with Japan to something more elevated: poetry. Here I have no such highfalutin hope. My only hope, indeed, is that you might have an amusing moment or two in the course of my unfocused, meandering discourse.
Haiku has completely become a part of American life. Last week, for example, I was on a program called “Where Haiku and Music Meet,” in which Kashiwagi Toshio explained how he set Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi) to piano music and Inaba Chieko played his compositions. Afterward, I asked a friend of mine, Arlene Teck, to give me her assessment of the presentation. She did so through a haiku:
musician’s face:
expressing the emotions
of the music
Arlene is the vice president of a company that specializes in devising brand names for pharmaceutical and other products, and I have known her for quite some time. What I still do not know is whether or not she takes haiku seriously. I say this because there are people who do. Paul O. Williams is one of them.
Two years ago, Mr. Williams, who I hear is also known as a writer of science fiction, gave a speech entitled “The Question of Words in Haiku,” and opened his remarks with these observations:
Haiku is often a poetry written around the edges of the consciousness of the poet. And haiku helps poets extend the borders of their attention to notice what is going on at the edge of the eye. . . . If effective, it does not represent official consciousness, demanded or conventional consciousness, occupational consciousness.
Mr. Williams went on to speak of “the comparative absence in haiku of witty verbal acts.” This talk of “consciousness” in relation to haiku is clearly influenced by Daisetz Suzuki, the greatest twentieth-century proselytizer of Zen in this country, and R. H. Blyth, the greatest twentieth-century proselytizer of haiku in the English-speaking world. Of the two, Suzuki said in Zen and Japanese Culture, “a haiku does not express ideas but . . . puts forward images reflecting intuitions. These images are not figurative representations made use of by the poetic mind, but they directly point to original intuitions, indeed, they are intuitions themselves.” Blyth, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Suzuki in Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, spoke of the “directness, simplicity, and unintellectuality” of haiku, asserting that “haiku is a form of Zen”—although it would not be fair to fail to note that he followed this with the declaration in Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture: “If there is ever imagined to be any conflict between Zen and the poetry of haiku, the Zen goes overboard.”
Notwithstanding the assertions of two such greats to the contrary, the suggestion that the act of composing haiku is an almost unconscious one and that witticism is nearly absent in this literary genre would have startled Bashō, the first poet most people think of when the word “haiku” is mentioned. This I say not because of the trite observation that virtually no literary endeavor can be unconscious save automatic writing. Rather, haiku during Bashō’s days was occasional verse par excellence, or what Mallarmé called vers de circonstance.
The term “occasional verse” is not used often these days, but the poem Maya Angelou composed for and recited at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration is an occasional poem; so is “Greetings, Friends,” which Roger Angell annually composes for the end-of-the-year issue of The New Yorker. The latter, as you know, attempts to incorporate as many personal names in the news as is manageable in “airy cols of rhyme.” The poem last year, for example, had two li
nes, “Harris Wofford, Kirkpatrick Sale, / Harrison Ford, and Pauline Kael.”
Renga and Hokku
How, in what way, was haiku occasional verse? The answer: In Bashō’s days the haiku had not yet become completely independent of a larger poetic form. Not independent? A larger poetic form? you may ask.
Yes. The haiku was originally called hokku, “opening verse,” and it referred to the piece that started the sequential poetic form renga, “linked verse.” The term haiku did not gain currency until about 1900, but Mr. Williams wasn’t wrong in calling Bashō’s piece haiku. Modern Japanese scholars also refer to hokku before then the same way, retroactively.
Now, the sequential poetic form renga alternates 5-7-5- and 7-7-syllable verses up to fifty times, or a total of one hundred verse units. Normally composed by two or more persons, at times even by a dozen, renga, in fact, is a literary game and, being a game, has a number of rules—highly complex ones at that. Of these rules, the basic one for the opening verse was traditionally tōki, “this season,” and tōza, “this session”—the requirement to incorporate a reference to the season when the game took place and to describe something directly observed at the session itself.
Take Bashō’s piece that Williams cites as a perfect embodiment of his—Williams’s—concept of haiku. In his citation, it goes:
Beneath the tree,
In soup, in fish salad—
Cherry blossoms!*
The original reads:
木のもとに汁も鱠も櫻かな
Ki no moto ni shiru mo namasu mo sakura kana
Despite the somewhat unfamiliar “fish salad,” you might feel that this, at least in the original, must be an innocuously pretty line of verse, especially if you learn that it describes a scene of a hanami, “cherry-blossom viewing,” where an assortment of tidbits, along with an ample supply of sake, is taken out picnic-style under cherry trees in full bloom. No matter how innocuous it may seem, though, this hokku could not have been “written around the edges of the consciousness of the poet.” Bashō made a living as a sōshō, “master,” of rule-bound renga poetry, and had to take many things into account—especially when composing a hokku.