#274: ON THE HAIKU: MATSUO BASHO, R.H. BLYTH, KOBAYASHI ISSA AND RICHARD WRIGHT.  My discovery, made recently reading Judi Dench’s book on Shakespeare, that the “golden lads” and “chimney sweeps” in his elegy “Fear no more” (from Pericles) were Warwickshire slang for dandelions, in bloom and in seeding, was a lovely reminder that the great poems can be inexhaustible wells, to be read for new discoveries as well as repeated pleasure.  Of all the great Japanese haiku undoubtedly the most famous is Basho’s verse about the frog: in romaji, “furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto”.  This has been translated innumerable times; there’s one page of a poetry website that gives thirty-two different versions.  One of R.H. Blyth’s three versions reads:  “The old pond: / A frog jumps in— / The sound of water.”  He later revised this, to convey the continuity of meaning in the last two lines: “The old pond; / The sound / Of a frog jumping into the water.”  In his earlier book Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, he devoted eight pages of explication and background to this verse.  Apparently Basho’s old pond had hidden depths.

      We are nowhere near done.  Andrew Fitzsimmons, in his recent book: Basho: The Complete Haiku, gave a couple of revealing pages to this poem as well.  Basho’s poem originated in a competition, Kawazu Awaze, for composing haiku about frogs.  In his choice of opening with the evocation of the old pond, Basho was likely veering away from a then-overdone habit of using certain phrases to critique the Japanese poetic past.  The frog itself, kawazu, is a species native to Japan, which does not make the croaking noises we hear around our New England ponds, but trills, in a high, pleasant pitch, so that it has in Japanese poetry always been associated with this particular sound.  Basho’s frog, instead, is pointedly silent, and the only sound in the poem is of the plash of water.  All this verbiage may seem a bit labored, but these are the details that will register with the intent Japanese reader—inflections of long-established tropes and traditions.  Fitzsimmons translates the verse as: “The olden pond now / A songfrog springs into / the sound of water.”  The first line is padded a bit, as Fitzsimmons likes to observe the five-seven-five syllabic division; I’m not mad for “olden.”  He gets the songfrog detail in; but the line break suggests that the frog leaps into sound rather than water.  The earliest of Blyth’s versions tosses the traditional syllable breaks and goes for onomataopoeia, echoing the effect in the word oto in the original:  

The old pond.

        A frog jumps in—

                Plop!

     The haiku is at some level profoundly different from most poetry—an ecology of perception, much influenced by Buddhism, not discursive but infinitely more reverberant than mere observation.  At best a haiku offers us, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “a stop to see the hepatica,” but with a seeing much more than denotative or simply pleasureful.  The American Zen teacher Robert Aitken, in an essay devoted to Basho’s frog, quotes Yamada Kôun Rôshi: “When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen—pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind—then anything may serve as a medium for revelation.”  Zen abounds in stories of monks awakened to enlightenment by the smallest, most commonplace, unpoetical experiences: the sound of a stone stiking a bamboo stalk, or, famously, Bankei’s coughing up a blob of phlegm.  The original of these is the Buddha’s own experience of enlightenment, when, after an arduous night of mediation he came to full awakening at the sight of the morning star.  Aitken suggests that “Plop!” is the full moment of Basho’s enlightenment, that step past the level of quietism: the leap, in Zen metaphor, from the top of the hundred-foot pole.

       And yet….  Good poetry almost never does only one thing at a time, and for all the Buddhist thought that may underlie the haiku form as a whole, there are plenty of haiku, even by the masters, that seem no more than wonderful moments of noticing, of being struck by something,

moved by something, with no metaphysics needing to apply.  With the whole system of seasonal words in place—specific plants and animals suggesting particular seasons and weathers—the haiku was able to echo the Japanese expeerience with a quality much like the way the great temples and gardens melt into the surrounding landscape and come to seem almost a single experience.  In the great period of haiku, the later seventeenth through the end of the ninetennth century, we may see the world, but we also see, very specifically, Japan: the peasants, the children, the geese and cranes and flowers, the hototogisu (usually called the Japanese nightingale), the pine trees.  In one of Blyth’s volumes there’s a whole chapter on scarecrows, (I wondered how many young people now will never have seen a scarecrow).  No ideas but in landscape, in geese flying low over a field, a crying child, the moon in the winter night.

       Fitzsimmons reminds us of several bits of the history of the form.  Its earlier name, hokku, designated the opening verse of a renga, the linked verse that was a favorite indoor sport among Japanese literati.  The opening verse was five-seven-five; the next verse was seven-seven, completing the classic Japanese poetic form, the tanka; and so on from there, in round robin.  It was only into the twentieth century that the use of the word haiku became common, indicating a poem not necessarily the beginning of a longer sequence.  Our habit in English of printing them as three separate lines disguises the fact that in Japanese they have always been printed as a single line.  There was indeed, even in Basho’s day, some freedom in the syllabic count and distribution; it increased in modern times and with more contemporary masters, Shiki and Santoka Taneda.  In his anthology of Japanese poetry, From the Country of Eight Islands, Burton Watson printed the haiku in translation as a single line; a recent and superb translation of Soseki Natsume’s haiku by Erik Lofgren prints them as two lines, but with varied syllabic breaks; not couplets and (thank God) not rhymed.  Of the old attempts to transform Japanese poetry into rhymed and metrical English-language poems, it takes a Franciscan gentleness to say no more of them than that they have not aged well.

       R.H. Blyth was one of a distinctive gaggle of English and American twentieth-century writers, translators and teachers whose work found for Asian literature its first wide audience in the West.  Blyth was born in 1898.  His early life was rough: he was imprisoned in England as a conscientious objector during World War One, was left by the English wife with whom he had moved to Korea, had a son shot as a traitor by the South Korean army, and was interned by the Japanese as an enemy alien during World War Two.  After that, though, as he continued his teaching career in Japan, he was a liaison to the Japanese Imperial Household, helped draft the statement in which the emperor declared himself human rather than divine, and became tutor to the later emperor, Akihito.  He was a student of D.T. Suzuki, and influenced Robert Aitken, the American Zen teacher he’d met in the internment camps.  He wrote books on senryu (the satiric and humorous form of Japanese verse), on Zen and on the haiku, all still very much worth reading.  

       With his six volumes on the haiku—translations interspersed with commentary—Blyth hit upon the ideal form for presenting the subject.  The translations are superb—as good as any done before or since—and his explications give the reader not only a bit of breathing space between the special effort of attention the haiku form requires, but specifics of the Japanese landscape they likely will not have seen, and lovely inductions into the way the images connect and contrast—those minute inflections that are the source of the poem’s profundity.  They could only have been written by someone deeply and humanely grounded in English-language literature, poetry especially: in eight pages of commentary on Basho, for instance, he cites D.T. Suzuki, Kikaku, Buson, Issa, Wordsworth, Shiki, A.A. Milne, Emerson, W.H. Davies, Charles Lamb, John Clare, Keats, Meister Eckhart, the Book of Genesis, Montaigne and Arthur Waley.  He wrote with great understanding not only of the literary accomplishment of the poetic form, but the spiritual accomplishment it expressed.  “To make the moon and the plum blossoms a pleasure, an ornament of life, is not so difficult. But to make these things the chief delight of the passing days, to live for them, to see them now, remember them, in retrospect, with longing, to wait eagerly for their yearly return—this is given to few.”  Blyth’s attempts in his commentary to bring “these things” to the reader’s attention are part of what makes his books so individual, still so marvelous—they’re what he brought to the party. He could get pretty far out there at times, and perhaps the definitive statement about him was from J.D. Salinger, who adored him:  “Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he’s a highhanded old poem himself, but he’s also sublime.”  In 1951, this highhanded old poem wrote: “I must ‘testify’ in conclusion that haiku, together with the music of Bach and Chinese paintings, have given me the greatest, purest, and most constant pleasure of my life.”  Rereading his books these past months while on a Japan binge, I’ve never doubted that statement for a moment.

       And of the great haiku poets, none has a more easily discerned or more disarming personality than Kobayashi Issa, the third in the canonical progression of haiku masters. Issa’s poems have an orphan’s vulnerability, a special childlike treble that is the polar opposite of any kind of aristocratic hauteur.  This modesty of stance and subject—his kinship with any being that is fragile or endangered--makes him tremendously endearing, and he is rightly adored and revered in Japan.  The scholar David G. Lanoue has taken Issa up as passionately as Coleman Barks has taken up Rumi, or Daniel Ladinsky has taken up Hafiz, and in three perceptive studies has brought out the most defining and appealing aspects of his character and his work: Issa and Being Human (2017), about his poems on children, farmers, prostitutes, the old, everyone on the low end of the social totem pole; Issa and the Meaning of Animals (2014) on Issa’s characteristic cast, not of lions or tigers or the majestic predators but of geese and fleas and sparrows and kittens, of mosquitoes and frogs; and Pure Land Haiku: The Art of Priest Issa (2016) focusing on Issa’s connection with the Jodo Shinshu sect, with its simplicity and self-deflecting reliance on the nembutsu, poking a hole in our notion that the haiku was purely a Zen possession. Issa lived through a life of loss and tragedy—he lost his mother at three, was plagued by a stepmother straight out of a Grimm’s tale, lost all four of his children and his wife: the most famous of his haiku, about “the dewdrop world” is about the death of his year-old daughter to smallpox.  But that life delivered him to the wry and moving sympathy that marks all his work, his worry for the bereft, and to a humanity and voice utterly aside from what Keats called “turbans and crowns and blank regality.”

       Blyth said at the end of his studies that one thing he never foresaw was the adoption of the haiku form in languages other than Japanese.  Reading most attempts at haiku in English will remind you of what someone once said of the Irish pennywhistle: that it was an instrument anyone could play, but very few could play well.  One rather distinctive exception to this is the collection of 817 haiku, chosen by Richard Wright from the four thousand he’d written in the last year and a half of his life, published posthumously now by Arcade Press: Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon.  They are very strict in their syllable count: five-seven-five; but because they are composed in English this way, not a translation of an existing work, and never imposing a traditional English metric, that I feel I’ve begun to understand the rhythm and importance of this structure as I have not before.  And in her introduction, Julia Wright (Wright’s daughter) has made clear the connection of this strictness to surviving those final months of ill health and grief at his mother’s death.  She calls the haiku “Wright’s poetry of loss and retrieval…..they lie somewhere in that transitional twilight area between the loss for words and the few charmed syllables that can heal the loss.”  The poems are vivid and varied, watchful, and never mere examples of a traditional, practiced form—though maybe this one does give a slight bow to Master Basho:

Above corn tassels

    Half-lost in the evening haze,

            A single frog’s croak.

        With four of his travel journals and a generous choice of his haiku, Sam Hamill’s Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings (Shambhala, 1998) holds place as the best one-volume selection of Bashō; the translation is superb. David Young’s Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times (Knopf, 2013) is also quite good.  Andrew Fitzsimmon’s book (The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō, University of California Press, 2022) is invaluable and has helpful annotation, for all that I have quibbles with some of the translations.  David Landis Barnhill has done Bashō’s Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō (State University of New York Press, 2004) as well as Bashō’s Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Bashō (State University of New York Press, 2005) the most extensive selection of Basho’s prose that I’ve seen.  A Zen Wave: Bashō’s Haiku and Zen, by Robert Aitken (Counterpoint, 2003) is an excellent presentation of the relation of the haiku form to Zen.  The title essay in Sam Hamill’s book Bashō’s Ghost is a lovely and evocative piece, an introduction to and beautiful image of  “the way of haiku.”  The website mentioned is https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm.

       Sam Hamill’s book The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku (Shambhala, 1997) is a wonderful translation of Issa’s most famous prose work and some 160 additional haiku; Lucien Stryk’s The Dumpling Field (Swallow Press, 1991) is also excellent.  In addition to his books David G. Lanoue (published by HaikuGuy and available via Amazon) has a website (https://haikuguy.com/issa/) that, at current count, has translated 13,000 of Issa’s haiku.  Most of the prose works seem to have escaped translation—someone should get on this.  

      R.H. Blyth: History of Haiku, two volumes, and Haiku, four volumes, originally published by Hokuseido Press, are reprinted now by Angelico and Greenwood Press, respectively.  There are several good general anthologies of haiku, including The Essential Haiku, by Robert Hass (Ecco, 1995), versions of Bashō, Buson and Issa; and Haiku, edited by Peter Washington, in the very attractive Everyman's Library’s Pocket Poets Series (2003).  To sample the span of Japanese verse, an excellent collection is Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stamford, 1991), translated with an introduction by Steven D. Carter.  Here, in addition to gracefully rendered versions of the individual poems, are the famous work “One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets” as well as full sequences of renga, the linked poems, and linked haiku, all with transliteration and helpful notes.  The other titles mentioned are From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, edited by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 1986, and Sōseki Natsume’s Collected Haiku, translated by Erik R. Lofgren.  Tuttle, 2024.