#274: ON THE HAIKU.  My discovery, made recently while reading Judi Dench’s book on Shakespeare, that the “golden lads” and “chimney sweeps” in the elegy “Fear no more” (in 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.  Undoubtedly the most famous of all the great Japanese haiku is Basho’s verse about the frog: in romaji, “furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto”.  This has been translated innumerable times; I give one of R.H. Blyth’s three versions:  “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, citing in the process 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 later, in the second volume of his four-volume work Haiku, said of this explication “I have changed my mind about it,” while announcing a final version of the translation—cited above--to be found in Volume Four.  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 an intent reader of the Japanese.  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:  

The old pond.

        A frog jumps in—

                Plop!

       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 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 twentieth-century writers, translators and teachers whose work found 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 became a student of D.T. Suzuki, and influenced Robert Aitken, the American Zen teacher he’d met in the internment camps.  He wrote on senryu (the satiric and humorous form of Japanese verse) and on Zen, books still of great value.  But he was one of the foremost enthusiasts of the haiku, and his six volumes on the subject are still invaluable troves of translation and commentary.  They could only have been written by someone deeply and humanely grounded in English-language literature, poetry especially, as shows in the range of reference mentioned above in his comments on Basho.  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.”  He could get pretty far out there, 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.

        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 may 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 exception to this idea 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, and published posthumously.  Wright doesn’t have the advantage of the traditional devices—the seasonal words and such—that allowed the Japanese writers a kind of informational shorthand; but his sensibility—the angle of his attention—seems finely in keeping with the form and its masters.  They are very strict in their syllable count—five-seven-five—but because they were 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. In her introduction, Julia Wright (Wright’s daughter) makes clear the link of this strictness to his surviving those final months of ill health and the 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 watchful and varied, individual 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.

--Basho: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Basho, translated, annotated and with an introduction

       by Andrew Fitzsimmons.  University of California Press, 2022.

--R.H. Blyth: History of Haiku, two volumes, and Haiku, four volumes.  Originally published by

       Hokuseido Press, reprinted now by Angelico and Greenwood Presses, respectively.

--Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, translators and editors: From the Country of Eight Islands:

       An Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Columbia University Press, 1986.

--Sōseki Natsume’s Collected Haiku, translated by Erik R. Lofgren.  Tuttle, 2024.

--Richard Wright: Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon.  Arcade, 2012.