by Hiroaki Sato
. . . a one-line poem—at least in Western languages—is willy-nilly at the same time a no-line poem. This is a fact around which there is, I think, no route of escape. Lines of poetry are in this respect like sexes in the world of biology: you need to have at least two to make the whole question of sex a meaningful one. Two would seem to be the lowest common denominator if we are going to speak of lines of verse at all; there are couplets and there are parallel lines, but to speak of a “one-line poem” is to speak of something that cannot exist.
LaFleur conveniently ignored the existence of the monostich in Western poetic tradition. I say “conveniently,” because when I told him of the existence of poems “consisting of just one metrical line,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, quoting “That Celebrated Monostick” from 1708: “The Bashful Water saw her God, and Blusht,” he responded by saying he had made his observation so as “not to confuse the students.”
LaFleur’s “lowest common denominator,” in any case, holds sway. Ozaki Hōsai, for example, wrote a piece with just eleven syllables:
月夜の葦が折れとる
Tsukiyo no ashi ga oretoru.
In translating it for his pioneering Modern Japanese Haiku, Ueda cast it as follows:
Moonlit night:
a reed
is broken.
Why not just “A moonlit night’s reed is broken”?
And so, today, the awareness that haiku is regarded as a three-line poem in the West seems to generate a sense of unease among the Japanese when translated in one line. It would be remiss of me not to point out that as early as 1892, the haiku reformer Masaoka Shiki, in his college paper, translated haiku into three lines of English—based, most likely, on the instinctive sense that the 5- and 7-syllable units each constituted a prosodic line. So he produced:
The old mere!
A frog jumping in
The sound of water
At the time, translations into English and other European languages of Japanese verses were in an incipient stage, and the acceptability of such bare-bones “lines” was far from certain. But the matter is now on firmer ground. For example, Ōoka Makoto, whose associations with American and European poets are probably among the most extensive of his contemporaries has written that it would be “ludicrous” to break up Bashō’s haiku into lines when printing them in the Japanese original, though it might be necessary to do so when translating them into foreign languages.
Similarly, Natsuishi Ban’ya requested that I break up his one-line haiku into lines in my English translations. When I asked him why he wanted me to do so, he gave me a few reasons, the most significant being: “In English and French poetry, lineation is a far more important rhetorical device than in Japanese poetry.”
On the face of it, Natsuishi may be right, but to me it still feels unsatisfactory. Still, I’m afraid that I must accommodate the likelihood that Natsuishi—a professor of French who sees a good deal of haiku translated into French and other languages, as well as haiku written in French and other languages, almost always in a lineated form—doesn’t feel that the monolinear formation of the Japanese original, if reproduced as is, will appeal to foreign readers.
So now I pose this question: Are one-line haiku possible in English? The answer must be yes: I know a number of English-language haiku poets who write one-liners, as well as non-haiku poets who write haiku in one line. Here are four examples from the Australian haiku poet Janice M. Bostok’s 1998 collection, A Splash of Sunlight:
envelope my thumb slips open the seal of his tongue
quiet church caw of a crow rings out from a vacant lot
only wishing to rescue it moth’s down sticks to my fingers
muzzle of the drinking cow glides across still water
And here are four from the Californian haiku poet Chris Gordon, who publishes the magazine ant ant ant ant ant:
a purple evening in the window she folds her underwear
ducks break the surface in the dark blurry crescent moons
clapping my hands i kill a mosquito find it was a moth
the smell of garbage cans she asks me to keep her ring anyway
Among American poets who mostly write non-haiku poems, John Ashbery, Michael O’Brien, and Allen Ginsberg have written one-line haiku. In 1978, Ashbery accepted a large selection of 150 haiku of Ozaki Hōsai in my one-line translation for the Partisan Review, and included his own one-line haiku in his 1984 selection, A Wave (which I had the temerity to translate into Japanese in its entirety).
I’ll cite three of the haiku O’Brien sent me on a postcard:
sunset flashing in ranks from an office building’s monument windows
a cat’s footprints, first drops on the windshield, wiper opening its fan
out of the tunnel grey spider-sun over wintry Jersey marshes
O’Brien’s are all written in seventeen syllables. More are included in his 1994 collection, The Floor and the Breath.
It was O’Brien who told me that Ginsberg’s posthumous collection, Death & Fame: Last Poems, 1993–1997, contains one-line poems. So of course I bought the book. It indeed did—fifty-three one-line poems in “Pastel Sentences (Selections)” with the end note, “for Francesco Clemente,” etc., and a group of nineteen one-line poems in “American Sentences 1995–1997,” each dated. In the afterword, Bob Rosenthal, Ginsberg’s longtime personal secretary, says that these “sentences” are written in “Allen’s form of American Haiku (seventeen syllables with the common haiku associational enjambment of senses but carried through on a single strophe each).” Let us cite one from each group. From “Pastel Sentences”:
Body spread open, black legs held down, she eats his ice cream—
white sex-tongue.
From “American Sentences”:
To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky.
March 23, 1997
When I showed these to Cor van den Heuvel, he flatly said, “These are not haiku,” reminding me of the same curt dismissals he made at the Haiku Society of America meetings at the Japan Society in New York during the 1980s. He would come directly to the meetings from his job at Newsweek, impeccably dressed, so his judgment carried weight. However, his dismissals had nothing to do with line formations.
* * *
* See “Bashō” in Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017).
† For his involvement translating the work of Proletarian writers, Bickerton was arrested and tortured by the Japanese police in 1934. He described the torture in his article, “Third Degree in Japan,” first published in The Manchester Guardian then reprinted in the September 1934 issue of The Living Age in Boston. See also my Japan Times column, “Undergoing the Third Degree in Prewar Japan,” February 26, 2016.
White Quacks and Whale Meat: Bashō’s Kasen, “The Sea Darkens”
In Eighth Month 1684, Matsuo Bashō left Edo, today’s Tokyo, to visit his hometown and a number of other places in the provinces to the west, and returned in Fourth Month of the following year. Travel in those days was more purposeful than it is today. Bashō’s trips certainly were—when he set out for extended travels, he did so with the aim of expanding and securing his influence as a haikai master.
The 1684–85 tour, the first major one for Bashō, produced two landmarks in the history of haikai: Diary of a Skull Exposed in the Field (Nozarashi kikō), the first of his kikō-bun, narratives of travels sprinkled with haikai poems, and Winter Day (Fuyu no hi), the first of the “seven anthologies of the Bashō school.”
The thirty-six-link renga, or kasen, known as “The Sea Darkens” (Umi kurete) is the result of one of the sessions Bashō had with local poets during the tour. It appears that he sometimes stayed with Hayashi Tōyō in Atsuta, south of Nagoya, during Tenth to Twelfth Month 1684. One
evening of the last month of the year, the two men did some boating with two others, Hozumi Tōtō and Kōzan. “The Sea Darkens” was composed on that occasion. The sequence was soon eclipsed by those included in Winter Day and is generally not placed among the best kasen in which Bashō took part. Still, aside from the famous hokku by Bashō that opens the sequence, the renga has a light, imaginative, charming touch that makes it undeserving of neglect.
As noted elsewhere, the classical or court renga sequence consisted of one hundred units, alternating 7 and 5 syllables, but by the end of the sixteenth century the shortened length of thirty-six units had become popular. Kasen, “poetic saints,” was the name given to the sequence of this length named after “thirty-six kasen,” the number of Japanese poets Fujiwara no Kintō selected as the best. The rules for the shorter version were simplified, though may still appear complex enough to the modern reader.
* * *
While I was in Atsuta, in Owari Province, some people put out in a boat to look at the sea of Twelfth Month:
1.
海くれて鴨の聲ほのかに白し
umi kurete kamo no koe honokani shiroshi
The sea darkens and the voices of ducks faintly white
Bashō
Category: winter. Kigo: ducks, which migrate to Japan from the north in the fall and winter.
This is among the most famous hokku by Bashō because of its irregular syllabic formation of 5-5-7 (rather than 5-7-5) and the synesthetic depiction. If the syllabic units are recast into a regular order, as is perfectly possible, the hokku will say, “The sea darkens yet is faintly white: ducks’ voices,” thereby losing the synesthetic effect. A contemporary note included in Kagaki Shikō’s Travel Casket Diary says the boating was done in the evening darkness. Another account, Hayashi Tōyō’s haikai collection The Tale of a Wrinkled Box (Shiwabako monogatari), gives a glimpse of the seascape along Ise Bay that Bashō saw: “The Ise Sea is boundless as it boils up the waves, with a single sail immersed in Heaven; on the shore are the snipe busily preening, plovers fly in the inlet, and ducks swarm in the reedy marshes.”
The salutation, one requirement of a hokku, is implied in the complimentary phrase, honokani shiroshi, “faintly white”: ducks quacking are associated with people chatting at a gathering, with the suggestion that both ducks quacking and people chatting are praiseworthy, or so it is interpreted. Part of the haikai, “humor,” of this hokku may derive from its phrasing, which is reminiscent of Chinese verse. It has been argued that this piece illustrates why a hokku, or a haiku, should not be broken up into two or three lines. The poet-cum-haikai-commentator Andō Tsuguo, by way of condemning those unable to tell the difference between haiku and one-line poems, suggested that the “ambiguation” as to where this hokku may “break,” after the first five or the second, is what makes this piece attractive.
The duck in classical Japanese poetry is also called ukine no tori, “bird that sleeps afloat,” and in the early days its quacking (quarking, quorking) was thought to provoke yearnings for one’s home, as in the following tanka by Prince Yuhara from the first extant anthology of Japanese poetry, the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yōshū):
吉野なる夏實の川の川淀に鴨ぞ鳴くなる山かげにして
Yoshino naru Natsumi no kawa no kawayodo ni kamo so nakunaru yamakage ni shite
In Yoshino, in a river pool of the Herb-Picking River, ducks call,they say, in the shadow of a hill
Because of the distinct way Bashō referred to the ducks, conjectures have been made as to which species of duck he was talking about: magamo (mallard), kogamo (common teal), karugamo (spotbill), suzugamo (scaup duck), kurogamo (black scoter), kinkurohajiro (tufted duck), or hidorigamo (wigeon). Similar conjecture led to a big debate as regards to which species of cicada Bashō was describing when he wrote:
閑さや岩にし入蝉の聲
Shizukasa ya iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe
Quietness: seeping into the rocks, the cicada’s voice
Was the cicada the small and delicate niiniizemi (Platypleura kaempferi), or the large and loud aburazemi (Graptopsaltria nigrofuscata), or another kind? My translation also raises the question of whether there was just one cicada or many, but that’s another story.
2.
串に鯨をあぶる盃
kushi ni kujira o aburu sakazuki
whale broiled on skewers and this cup
Tōyō
Category: winter. Kigo: whale, which represents winter because most whales migrate along the Japanese coasts during the winter. Bashō’s contemporary, the novelist and haikai poet Ihara Saikaku, gives an account in his Japan’s Eternal Treasury (Nippon eitai-gura) of Tengu Gen’nai, who amassed a fortune by devising a vast net for capturing whales, as well as the means of extracting whale oil even from the bones discarded by other whalers.
Yosa Buson has a hokku:
既に得し鯨は迯げて月ひとつ
Sudeni eshi kujira wa nigete tsuki hitotsu
The whale already taken got away: the moon alone
Ah, whaling! Yes, every bit of the whale was used in Japan, unlike the whale captured by Captain Ahab and his crew who took only its blubber, discarding the rest. But by the time Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick in the mid-nineteenth century and predicted, optimistically, even after citing several contrary indicators, that “we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in this individuality,” whaling in “impenetrable Japans” had declined fast. Fewer and fewer of the sperm whale and the humpback whale, the two species the Japanese hunted, migrated along the archipelago’s coast—most likely because of the pelagic whaling practiced by the Pequod and other Western whalers. The semi-isolationist policy of the Tokugawa shogunate banned the building of oceangoing ships, among other things.
At any rate, in return for the complimentary description of the expanse of a wintry sea coast by Bashō, the guest of honor, Tōyō, the host, deprecates himself by drawing attention to something much humbler: roasted, skewered whale meat and sake on a boat. The first cup of sake here is probably offered to Bashō. In later years Tōyō became a distinguished calligrapher. So far, this has been a formal poetic exchange, as required.
3.
二百年吾此このやまに斧取て
nihyakunen ware kono yama ni ono torite
“For two hundred years I’ve plied my hatchet on these hills”
Tōtō
Category: miscellaneous. The scene is switched from seascape to mountainscape. This switch is possible because the wild boar, inoshishi, was also called “mountain whale,” yamakujira. There is a suggestion of something fantastic, supernatural: a woodcutter-turned-Taoist-saint, who has attained an extraordinary longevity.
4.
樫のたねまく秋はきにけり
kashi no tane maku aki wa ki ni keri
now it’s autumn when oak seeds are sown
Kōzan
Category: autumn. The idea of sowing oak seeds, an incongruous act, is an extension of the preceding description of a fantastic being.
5.
入月に鶍の鳥のわたる空
iru tsuki ni isuka no tori no wataru sora
as the moon sets crossbill birds fly across the sky
Tōyō
Category: autumn. Kigo: crossbill. This position requires the mention of the moon.
Though thinking of the moon at the mention of autumn is automatic in Japanese poetry, Tōyō may also have thought of the fact that crossbills like to eat pine seeds—the thought prompted by “oak seeds.”
Crossbills migrate to Japan mainly from the end of winter to summer. Though some are also resident birds, it’s somewhat puzzling why they are assigned to autumn as a kigo. During the breeding season, they are relatively quiet. At other times, they often fly in small flocks, calling back and f
orth.
6.
駕篭なき国を露負れ行
kago naki kuni o tsuyu oware yuku
in palanquin-less country carried through dew
Bashō
Category: autumn. Kigo: dew. In the original, who’s being carried on someone’s back is left unstated. This type of ambiguity is a trick the Japanese language can pull off with ease. The picture is one of someone being carried piggyback in a remote rural area where there are not even palanquins. The image presented, along with the fact that dew is often associated with tears, gives a strong hint of an untold story that is bizarre or sad.
7.
降雨は老たる母のなみだかと
furu ame wa oitaru haha no namida ka to
“Is this rain falling my old mother’s tears?”
Kōzan
Category: miscellaneous. Coupled with the preceding link, this evokes the well-known legend of obasute, the abandonment of an old woman on a mountain to die. One of the earliest narrations of the theme appears in Tales from Yamato (Yamato monogatari), a collection of poetic tales compiled in the middle of the tenth century:
Once, there lived a man in a place called Sarashina in the Province of Shinano. His parents had died when he was young, and from childhood he had lived with his aunt, whom he treated like his mother. But his wife was a depressing sort of person and always hated her mother-in-law, so to speak, for the way she was aged and bent. She constantly told her husband all sorts of mean-spirited and disgusting things about her. As a result, unlike his past, he began to neglect his aunt.
When the aunt became very old and bent double, the man’s wife found her even more noxious and wished her dead. So she seized every chance to say something bad about her and pester her husband, saying, “Take her and throw her out somewhere deep in the mountain.” Tired of being pestered, the man finally decided to do what he was told.