Haiku and Haiku by Martin Lucas

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Haiku and Haiku
by Martin Lucas

QUOTE
©　www.poetrysociety.org.nz

What Is Haiku?

Haiku is not haiku. Our ‘haiku' are not haiku. Haiku - here identified by italics - is a very short form of Japanese verse. It would not be quite true to say that it can be written only by a Japanese, but it can be written only in Japanese, and it would require the same level of fluency in Japanese culture, history and literary tradition as in language. If you want to get to know haiku, you need to get to know Japan; the country, the people, the language. That's a huge project, a lifetime's project, but there's no point in minimising the scale of it and pretending that you can somehow get to know haiku without it.

So What, Then, Is Our ‘Haiku'?

It is a very short form of verse in English inspired by what we have seen of Japanese haiku. In 99 cases out of 100, this means inspired by translations of Japanese haiku. (Only a handful of English-language writers have any fluency in Japanese.)

We need to be clear that a translation is not the poem, it is only a version of the poem. It can be a very close approximation, or a very distant approximation, but even in cases where the meaning is conveyed almost precisely, the fact of the language difference means that the poetic experience is bound to differ. Sometimes a very closely approximate translation sounds like a very poor effort in English; and sometimes a very distant approximation can achieve striking success as a ‘haiku' in English. Either way, we are still dealing with approximations.

All the concepts with which we handle haiku are approximations. We might define haiku, roughly but reasonably, as: ‘A short poem in three lines of 5,7 and 5 syllables respectively, usually including a season-word and a cutting-word.' If we understand this as a rough-and-ready definition, there is no problem. But it is only possible to be more precise by offering numerous qualifying footnotes, and this is because every single aspect of this ‘definition' involves an approximation:

•‘Lines' is a concept applicable to English and other related Western languages. We might naively imagine the poetry of all languages to be structured in lines, but it isn't so: the concept of ‘lines' has limited validity in describing the structure of a haiku.
•‘Syllables', in English, are a variable measure of the spoken language. The sound-symbols in which Japanese haiku are written are a fixed measure of the written language, only loosely corresponding to our notion of ‘syllables'.
•And ‘cutting-word' is a slightly desperate attempt to find some English equivalent for the kireji, a ‘meaningless' word that is used as punctuation, either within or at the end of the haiku. It is entirely reasonable to think of the ‘cut' in haiku as corresponding to a dash, semi-colon or exclamation mark, for instance, but this only gives a vague idea of the significance of the kireji. If we read translations in which these punctuation marks replace ya or kana, we miss something integral to the original.

Changing a language also means changing concepts. For example, it is naive to assume that haru, natsu, aki and fuyu are spring, summer, autumn and winter. As William J.Higginson points out1, the haiku seasons begin about a month earlier than in the usual northern hemisphere Western interpretation of the calendar (in February, May, August and November respectively). That's not so much a meteorological difference as a cultural and linguistic difference, a difference in the concept of ‘season'. More attention is paid to the signs of the season, the incipient conditions, than to the temperature graph. But because of meteorological differences, the connotations differ, too.

Consider the season-word, kareno. You can translate this, in a sense, as ‘withered field(s)', but without the phenomenon you can't meaningfully translate the concept into, for example, British English as it describes a desiccated condition that residents of the British Isles rarely see - where fields in winter become muddy, soggy and boggy.

Such conflicts of connotation bedevil all translation projects from beginning to end, and it's not saying anything new to point it out. But it is remarkable how much discussion of haiku-in-English proceeds from a position that overlooks both the fact and the consequences of the fact that our knowledge of Japanese haiku is based very largely on poetry in translation. I'm not saying that haiku can't be translated, I'm saying that translation is an imperfect art.

And this isn't a counsel of despair, it's a counsel of humility and respect for limitations. Our own haiku have added a new and valuable creative possibility to the range of poetry in English. But let's not be too quick to claim that our own approach is in some way authorised by Japanese practice, unless we can back up the claim with an evident ability in and familiarity with Japanese. This is not something to worry about, it is something to be aware of - our statements about haiku had better be tentative rather than categorical.

Un-useful Advice

Something left out of this article so far is any word of advice on How To Write Haiku. This advice is absent because I don't think it's possible to approach the question directly in any useful way.

To begin writing haiku, and to make progress to any significant extent, requires two gifts:

•The ability to be alert to the subtleties of sensory or psychological experience (i.e., to notice things)
•A sensitivity to the subtleties of language (i.e., to be able to express things).

However, it isn't necessary to know that you possess these gifts before beginning to write: the gifts are very often revealed - and developed - in the writing. In the process, you may enter something which we might call ‘haiku mind'. This isn't any special or exceptional state, and there are no magic words of access; there are as many haiku minds as there are readers and writers of haiku.

But what ‘haiku mind' points to is a certain way of seeing the world, and relating to it, which is an unfolding process of discovery. Once you've started on this path, it can take many twists and turns, but there is no real reason to turn back: if you're seeing the world through your haiku mind, why would you ever choose to unsee it?

In this light, there is no real value in giving technical advice. It's possible to provide technical comment on a particular work-in-progress, but technical advice in general is restrictive and haiku need to emerge without restrictions. Haiku has a centre of gravity - your own immediate experience - but it has no boundaries. Go with your haiku mind, wherever it goes.

snip

Haiku don't always spring from an attitude of contemplative serenity. One of the delights of dramatic verse - and one reason Shakespeare is so famous for his insults and invective - is that it allows us to abandon our neutrality, enter a character, and be uninhibitedly one-sided. Here, Matt Morden's expression, although more properly termed a senyru, has the same uninhibited one-sidedness. From this position, the advocates of high-mindedness and balance are bastards.

Editor's note: Martin Lucas has edited Presence haiku journal since 1996, and co-edited two previous anthologies of haiku. He holds a PhD in haiku from the University of Wales, and was president of the British Haiku Society from 2003-2006.


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