It is both inevitable and desirable that Field Notes should stimulate discussion, some of it "off-topic".
To foster such conversation, I've opened a separate (but related) subject area. If you wish to open a discussion prompted by but not directly relating to the main subject-- challenge-- this is the place to do it.
PY
I have copied a conversation between Paul Miller and Alan Summers below. It was prompted by Paul's
post in FN 7: Challenge. It is an open conversation. As always, you are welcome to participate.
PY
*****
ALAN SUMMERS
Hi Paul,
I just wanted to say that this "verse" really moved me when I first read it. In Britain the remembrance of the First World War (where Japan were allies with Britain) there was were many cold mathematical calculations by British Generals to burn a few thousand British soldiers for the sake of a few feet of earth won.
Quote:
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
-- Sugimura Seirinshi (trans. Richard Gilbert and Ito Yuki)
I have pondered and pondered this haiku, approaching it from a number of angles, and I think it fails. It is a bunch of twenty-five cent words when five cent words would have done. One challenge in this poem is to stand up to the new orthodoxy and point out its lack of pants.
--Paul Miller
The Second World War was a different set of mathematics e.g. the Nazi experiments with killing large numbers of Jewish, homosexual, Gypsy, and mentally ill people from those first dark bikes to showers and ovens. Whatever Sugimura Seirinshi meant, I don't know, but it strikes a strong chord with me, whenever I read this haiku.
Weblinks:
Modern Haiku
MH Essay—"From Haiku to the Short Poem" by Philip Rowland
http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/RowlandFromHaikuToShortPoem.html (http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/RowlandFromHaikuToShortPoem.html)
New Rising Haiku:
戦死者が青き数学より出たり 杉村聖林子
sennsisha ga aoki suugaku yori detari Sumimura Seirinshi
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
Simply Haiku:
http://www.simplyhaiku.com/SHv5n4/features/Ito.html (http://www.simplyhaiku.com/SHv5n4/features/Ito.html)
Nazi Euthanasia
Each expert placed a + mark in red pencil or - mark in blue pencil under the term "treatment" on a special form. A red plus mark meant a decision to kill the child. A blue minus sign meant meant a decision against killing. Three plus symbols resulted in a euthanasia warrant being issued and the transfer of the child to a 'Children's Specialty Department' for death by injection or gradual starvation.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/euthanasia.htm (http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/euthanasia.htm)
I am sure the blue pencil was utilised for various record keeping and mathematics on more than one side of the war, for example:
Stalin's Deadly Blue Pencil
The editor is the unseen hand with the power to change meaning and message, even the course of history. Back when copy-proofs were still manually cut, pasted, and photographed before printing, a blue pencil was the instrument of choice for editors because blue was not visible when photographed. The editorial intervention was invisible by design.
At a meeting with Winston Churchill a few months later, the British prime minister watched as Stalin "took his blue pencil and made a large tick" indicating his approval of the "percentages agreement" for the division of Europe into Western and Soviet spheres of influence after the war.
http://punditfromanotherplanet.com/2013/10/07/stalins-blue-pencil/ (http://punditfromanotherplanet.com/2013/10/07/stalins-blue-pencil/)
Of course I'm seeing this subjectively, and emotionally. As a child I watched many war films including several dealing with the Nazi Concentration Camps.
Only a couple of years ago, I discovered that a relative, although not blood related as I'm adopted, died in a concentration camp. Not being Jewish I never felt I'd come to know a relative died there, it touches us all, as does 911 despite not being American.
I just wanted to say how much, however much I misread that haiku, it has touched me to the quick.
Alan Summers
p.s.
I just want to [end with a] quote from Michelle Tennison's post as it moved me so much:
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
-- Sugimura Seirinshi (trans. Richard Gilbert and Ito Yuki)
This last haiku is in itself an effective argument for experimentation in art. Didn't the French Surrealism of the 1920s grow, at least in part, out of the existential insanity of WWI, which many of its originators had experienced first hand? They were witness to the extremes of the "mathematics" of our rational minds, that has everything neatly identified, categorized, and tied up, i.e. our linear, left-brain culture run amok, that can lead to such violence upon ourselves and our world. The harsh light of war can help us to recognize that we are perhaps never more dangerous than when we know everything there is to know.
This kind of radical experimentation, although demanding for the reader, is healthy and has infused contemporary haiku with new vitality. It often forces us to engage more intuitive channels in order to relate. There is value, and life, and courage in tripping up the habitual mind (and habitual form) just enough to bypass ego and reason, if only temporarily, so that new realities can be allowed to penetrate awareness. The intelligence of the heart can recognize truth even when the mind cannot (and can help us transcend the sometime arrogance of reason).
To sum up, "We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are." (Anais Nin). I live for that moment when observation, external and internal, is allowed to newly inform my being-in-the-world. What about the moments when we do see the world a little bit more as it is, and it raises our consciousness, lifts us up and informs our choices and perceptions? What happens when we take the risks necessary to see something new that might actually change us? This is a personal challenge, and it is one of haiku's greatest gifts.
*****
PAUL MILLER
Alan, thanks for commenting. I get a meaning from the poem, and can understand how someone with a history with war could find it emotive, but it is essentially a rewrite of:
war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad
where "calculations" stands for the decisions of bureaucrats and generals.
I understand what the poet is trying to say (or I should say I get something from it) and his view is valid.
However, when I say it fails I am detaching the meaning of the haiku from its execution. I believe the writer fell in love with the phrase "blue mathematics" and wasn't prepared to get rid of it. I think we are supposed to think it cool and clever and overlook its use. It is an awkward attempt at symbolism.
*****
ALAN SUMMERS
True, that blue mathematics has a zing, but then a lot of haiku poets do use blue other than for its natural image in nature.
It's possible many of us are influenced by the blue period of painting
perhaps:
http://pablo-picasso.paintings.name/blue-period/ (http://pablo-picasso.paintings.name/blue-period/)
But it's intriguing how, pre-computer, the blue pencil has been an instrument for what a computer user might now use strike-out or blue text etc... in a word.doc or spreadsheet etc...
True, we shouldn't be emotional when it comes to haiku, and war is business pure and simple. Perhaps that's why Mrs Bush dealt with so many anti-Gulf War poets and their careers.
I must admit I don't know:
war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad
Do you have a weblink for that?
I must admit that a large number of haiku leave me disinterested on any level, but I am interested in these short verses that somehow carry more than they should. When they act as a cipher beyond just a few conveniently placed words.
I must admit 'blue mathematics' is striking, but for me that would fail after a few readings.
I tend to multiple read a haiku when I first come across it, and multiple readings over the weeks and months.
A haiku has to go way beyond a gimmick to hook me. But then what might
leave me indifferent, or sufficiently enticed into multiple-reads, might work for someone else.
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad
For the Japanese the New Romantic notion of only originality is something
that is quite alien I would think. Yet do non-Japanese poets go for
total originality?
Bill Manhire's poem:
http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/manhire/originality.asp
(http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/manhire/originality.asp)
I was lucky enough to see him at a Bath Spa University Summer event for BA
and MA students. He was one of the best speakers and despite almost all
BA students studying novels, he was far more interesting, and amusing for them.
But it's just my personal viewpoint, perhaps seeing blue pencil in action for something I cannot recall now might have influenced me.
*****
PAUL MILLER
I may not have been as clear as I should have been. I think having an emotional reaction to a poem is the first and most important reading you should have, so for you the haiku succeeds. But for me the abstraction distances me from a real event. The advantage realism has is that the reader is forced into a real situation that they must grapple with. "blue mathematics" is just too cute and clever for me to deal with. It also makes the poem intellectual rather than emotional--for me.
Now not all haiku need to be realistic. I find Metz's blowhole haiku to be wonderful because there are so many great links between the parts that reverberate back and forth (sea = space; blood = stars; etc). I don't get those same parallels in the war dead haiku. The "blue mathematics" feels out of place, tacked on.
The reading:
war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad
is mine. That's what I think he is trying to say. I just think he is doing it in a poor way.
Dear Agent Provocateur,
Whomever you are. We kiss the golden apples that fall from your ass.
As a note, on the translation of 青き "aoki" into English. It is quite impossible. "Blue" here might actually be "green" or "natural" or "nature" or "as nature" -- we may continue to tease it. Go back far enough in haiku/Japanese poetic history, and there was no "green" only "blue" for nature. Recall even the recent "aoi yama" (green mountains -- literally, blue mountains) from Santoka. You might ask why we purposefully chose "blue" here.
We remain impersonally yours, for the blue are counted dead. You are not wrong to chose otherwise. As well you are not. Pathetically so. It's good we are not at war. Is an ocean blue? Or the sky? There is actually more in Japanese than meets the eye; no accounting for taste.
"This last haiku is in itself an effective argument for experimentation in art." (M.T.) We concur.
Thanks Agent Provocateur (and Richard Gilbert)
It's been great to dialogue with Paul Miller, and that our last two emails are posted here. I have to say I am still deeply moved by the blue mathematics haiku. True, we have an intense public season of mourning and examination regarding the First World War, and how calculating British Generals and politicians were in disposing of British troops. I'd say it was the equivalent of Corporate Manslaughter at the very least.
Here's the last email I sent to Paul:
Hi Paul,
Dealing a hand of emotive cards in such a short verse as haiku with all
its demands is not an easy task.
I think Richard Gilbert's Poems of Consciousness made me broaden my
appreciation of haiku styles, although it was fairly broad before, but
being a Virgo, my perfection is being forced open. His book really pushed
me, and also I've got to see more Japanese haiku in translation.
I'm often sensitive to too much architrave, it really has to earn its
right to embellish. As a former Painter and Decorator I've painted or
restored a few architraves in my time. Architrave:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architrave
I have seen a lot of haiku adopt the color blue, from the famous blue
apple series:
deep underground--
the blue apple reflecting
billions of suns
Scott Metz
Ginyu 42 (2009)
blue apple
it gives birth
to a mirror
Scott Metz
Ginyu 42 (2009)
cloudless
a day balanced
on the blue apple
Scott Metz
Ginyu 42 (2009)
http://roadrunnerhaikublog.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/how-do-you-like-them-apples/
And other ways of using blue, or subverting the accepted order of
syntax/semantics etc...
http://www.shampoopoetry.com/shampoothirtyeight/metz.htm
The influence is probably all Belgian, even from the Japanese. :-)
I can't say academically why the blue mathematics connects to me, or why
the blue sharks of Kaneko, or the blood group (although I'm B Rhesus
Positive, and very much a loner and outsider at times) and perjury haiku
of Fumio means so much to me.
ni-ju oku kônen no gishyô omae no B-gata
twenty billion light-years of perjury: your blood type is "B"
Hoshinaga Fumio
It might hinge on injustice born out of reading DC and Marvel comics as a
child, alongside Dickens and Shakespeare. The sense of right and wrong in
mythical places, Victorian Britain, and Italy perhaps. I'm wired both
wrong(ly) and differently.
kindest regards,
Alan
http://area17.blogspot.com
p.s.
Also inheriting depression from my blood mother who I met just a few years
ago (explaining so much) might explain my connection to the hue of blue.
Quote from: Richard Gilbert on August 07, 2014, 05:35:56 AM
Dear Agent Provocateur,
Whoever you are. We kiss the golden apples that fall from your ass.
As a note, on the translation of 青き "aoki" into English. It is quite impossible. "Blue" here might actually be "green" or "natural" or "nature" or "as nature" -- we may continue to tease it. Go back far enough in haiku/Japanese poetic history, and there was no "green" only "blue" for nature. Recall even the recent "aoi yama" (green mountains -- literally, blue mountains) from Santoka. You might ask why we purposefully chose "blue" here.
We remain impersonally yours, for the blue are counted dead. You are not wrong to chose otherwise. As well you are not. Pathetically so. It's good we are not at war. Is an ocean blue? Or the sky? There is actually more in Japanese than meets the eye; no accounting for taste.
"This last haiku is in itself an effective argument for experimentation in art." (M.T.) We concur.
Dear Agent Provocateur,
It is rather presumptuous to use 50-cent words where 5-cent words would do. This little epithet could be made much cheaper:
QuoteWe kiss the golden apples that fall from your ass.
We are talking about words. About the cost of them. We shall rate them on a cost-benefit analysis, in terms of value.
At the same time, there are complications. Let's ignore such for now, and add up the word values. Our analysis runs like this:
war = 5
dead = 5
exit = 5 (possibly 10)
out of a = freebie
blue = 5
mathematics = 25
Total word cost = 45 cents (later revised to 50 cents, see below)
Analysis: We wonder which words could be cheaper than war and dead and blue. Each monosyllabic. The cost of war is high, but war itself? This is a high-frequency common noun (and historically rife, to the present). Same with the others, really. For exit: two-syllables--should we revise 5-cents upward? Call it 50 cents. This still has to be one of the cheapest haiku around. Also it's English-typical at 12 syllables. But someone might want to cheapen it a bit, as the word-cost appears -- how can we put this delicately? Effete, elite, arrogant, in some way?
My translator chimp (I mean Gilbert) seeks a suitable primitivism, for "suugaku" (hint: mathematics) in translation. He's rather limited in symbolic vocabulary (being a chimp), but even with his lame Japanese he knows that "suugaku" means only one thing. The Faculty of Mathematics in a university has a name, "Suugaku." (As the Faculty of Letters is "Bungaku (literature+study)") 数学 = suu+gaku. You can find it in the haiku in question. Now let's visit Google Translate. Enter the kanji 数学. The cheapest and only answer = "mathematics." See this: 計算 it is the kanji for "calculation, reckoning." These kanji are not in the haiku. Actually "suugaku" can mean "mathematics" or in the appropriate context "faculty of/study of mathematics." Either way there is no other word for translation which is more literal and direct than "mathematics" for this haiku. The chimp cannot find any way around it: this is pretty much exactly what the poet said in the original. The only conclusion is that the most expensive word in this haiku is the cheapest possible.
Suugaku then, is abstract, isn't it? This is not "applied mathematics" or any sort of reckoning. That would be left to the cost-benefit analysis of the reader, concerning the war dead. Perhaps there is more than a hint of semantic brutality, in a natural/blue/simple/pure mathematics. You can mess with "blue" but not with "mathematics." Unless you want to make up your own poem, just through ignorance.
So we have a very cheap haiku. Though the abstraction "mathematics" costs us dearly. But it's really worse, much, much worse. Because there is collocational neologism (an original terminological coinage, never before seen in print). You know, one of those things Shakespeare and Dickens and a (very) few other artists of repute are noted for.
戦死者が青き数学より出たり
sennsisha ga aoki suugaku yori detari
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
Literally, in given word order:
戦死者 (sennsisha) = war dead (KIA)
が (ga) = (concerning [subject]: war dead)
青き数学 (aoki suugaku) = blue/natural/of nature
but! also:
unripe/unnatural (e.g. "This fruit is still "green" [unripe, not yet ready])
+ mathematics
より (yori) = showing "like" | comparison | connection
出たり (detari) = to come out of / exit
What can we determine in our cost-benefit analysis?
青き数学 = blue mathematics. This is in no dictionary, because this collocation is the poet's neologism. If anyone wants to cheapen this poem in English, they would be wise to do away with the neologism, which is basically the same in English as in Japanese. It is true that "blue" has many added meanings in English. But then, "blue" (as "aoi") has many different meanings in Japanese, as well. In English, blue is a color of nature (ocean, sky) but also the "blue" of the blues, of sadness, tragedy, depression. In other words it (like "aoi") offers contrary, contrastive or contradictory meanings. so the use of "blue" for "blue" in Japanese is actually the only interpretive move, in the translation. The signifiers differ yet in both languages they are semantically complex and paradoxical or agonistic (polarized); a different poem is created, yet with a similar sense of agon, tension (if you can do better, talk to the gimp err, chimp).
The suggestion: "killed from calculations that I find sad" has many expensive semantic assumptions and misses entirely the creative collocation at the core -- the cornerstone of this haiku (in either language). Even a chimp can say that it is this bizzare, abstract neologism which catalyzes this poem, makes it "experimental," challenging and spare, in both languages. However in the original, it would have the added danger of alerting the Secret Police to your person, and we know the mathematics, counted in haiku poets for one, of this human cost. The poem has no "killed" (as a verb), no "calculations," no "from," no "I," and DEFINITELY no "sad." So the suggestion of
"war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad"
Is something even a chimp finds dumb. Such mistakes are expensive when it comes to recognizing the genius of a noted poet from a foreign culture. Who would turn such a work into their own kind of animal? This would be both presumptuous and aggressive. It is right and proper to question the translation. But this has not been done. There has been no questing after veracity, no attunement to questions of emulation of genre qualities or semantic or syntactical realities across cultures and languages. This is what chimps do. They work hard for the bananas.
Dear Agent Provocateur, whomever you may be, please show us your next new addition.
No speak, no see, no hear: Three monkeys (http://qelbdekiler.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/2005641-three-monkeys-with-different-faces-no-speak-no-see-no-hear.jpg)
(Apparently, it's what we do.)
As perhaps first publisher of the "war dead" haiku with English translation (first Japanese publication sometime between 1937 and 1940, according to Ito Yuki), thought I'd chip in... In 2006 I found this haiku challenging and compelling, and still do. That "we are supposed to think it cool and clever" seems unfairly dismissive, as does reducing it to a paraphrasable message. Granted, it has been presented here in English, but some acknowledgement of its being a Japanese poem -- of the challenge of translation and what might have been lost (and gained) in the process -- is in order, as Richard has just indicated.
Probably most Japanese readers - unless they have a strong interest in modern poetry -- would be baffled by the poem; it's undoubtedly towards the abstract end of the spectrum. But "blue mathematics" doesn't seem at all "tacked on"; its cool abstraction (complicated by other connotations of "blue", in Japanese and English) is anticipated by another coolly neutral, Latinate word: "exit". "blue mathematics" strikes me as an idea-image of the kind David Porter considers in his essay on Emily Dickinson's "strangely abstracted images" (in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, 1996). His essay begins by acknowledging a view akin to Paul M's on "blue mathematics":
"Abstraction, we are told repeatedly, is inimical to poetry. Yet in images that are so abstract they have given up their sensuous immediacy to pure meaning, Dickinson asserted her poetic individuality. ... these peculiar figures with no light-catching body perform in her poems on occasion so audaciously as to reveal the interior moment when for her events became apprehended by language."
He later cites Archibald MacLeish's attention to her "drained images":
"'Amethyst remembrance," "Polar expiation," Neither of these exists upon the retina. Neither can be brought into focus by the muscles of the eye. ... And yet all of these present themselves as images, do they not? -- act as images? Where can remembrance be amethyst? Where but in the eye?"
Whether "blue mathematics" succeeds as an image of this sort, in the context of Sugimura Seirinshi's haiku, is bound to be a more subjective matter than most, because it's a more audacious image than most in haiku -- an image that (for me) succeeds in apprehending the nearly inexpressible thought of the "war dead," and in evoking a feeling of anger or hopelessness coupled with horror.
Dear Richard, (or Agent Provocateur or chimp (I kind of got lost in there somewhere) :)
Thanks for the better understanding of the translation. I was reading "blue" as from "the blues" so you can see where I got my sense of sadness. It seemed fitting given the war context.
That said, I have every right to question the "genius" of any poet, foreign or not. And since haiku are considered unfinished until done so by the reader (another foreign genius said that) the turning of the original into an animal of my own making is expected.
Perhaps, in this case, the matter comes down to my desire to have an immediate shared experience. Some form of communication. The phrase "war dead" to me asks for a serious reading, not to instead make those bodies into an intellectual curiosity or puzzle. Maybe that's why I find it clever instead of heartfelt. I simply wonder if the "blue mathematics" haiku couldn't have been written better to give me that. This is something I struggle to say because there are times when I like an abstraction, when I welcome them. A glance at my short tenure at Modern Haiku will hopefully attest to that. So I don't have an objection to them per se.
Sometimes, however, they seem out of place.
A: "I'm a Sanitation Engineer."
B: "So you create studies of waste usage and design better methodologies for its management?"
A: "Uh... no"
B: "What do you do?"
A: "I pick up the trash from in front of your house."
Yet, I could understand Suugaku's possible reluctance to engage the "war dead" at face value, and perhaps wish to insert a metaphor in-between for comfort... distance. To borrow from Mr. Rowland... to deal with "the nearly inexpressible" thoughts... the feelings of hopelessness. That distance is something I try to avoid in my poetry, so my reading is obviously subjective. And I recognize how easy it is for me to say that, not being in a war. However I don't know the circumstances of this poem's composition.
Respectfully,
Paul
Where can remembrance be amethyst? Where but in the eye? - Phillip Rowland
Hi everyone,
Since this is the off-topic place, I'm just going to head off-topic for a moment! :)
"Amethyst remembrance" could very well be read as making perfect sense, if one were to consider Victorian England's mourning rituals (for the upper-classes at least).
If a woman's husband were to die, she would wear black dress and no jewellery for 18 months. There were various other rules for other members of one's family, including children, siblings, parents and in-laws. (And, of course, different rules for men!)
After 18 months, the widow could move to the "second stage" and add jet (black) jewellery and diamonds if in wedding rings. Dress was still black and without lustre. This lasted for nine months. BTW this stricture on black meant she wore black from her skin to her outer clothes, everything!
The third stage of mourning - three to six months long - saw a move back into fashionable clothes and into dull colour, often shades of purple (starting at the darkest end and moving through into lighter hues as time passed), or black with lustre. Jewellery was once again allowed and stones such as amethyst and garnet were popular as "half-mourning" jewellery.
Queen Elizabeth owns at least one set of amethyst jewellery (the "Kent amethysts") but doesn't often wear the larger pieces. It has been passed down to female monarchs or consorts from Queen Victoria's mother. Queen Mary's gorgeous amethyst tiara was sold, reputedly by the Queen Mother, and it is often recorded that neither she nor her daughter are fans of the stone. (Right, way, way off topic.)
I have read that Queen Victoria's death in 1901 was the last time that these excessive rituals of mourning were observed - the massive casualties of World War 1 put an end to the etiquette.
So, amethyst can = remembrance in a very literal sense.
Thank you for reading to the end :)
Sandra
Dear Paul,
I understand that you do not like the poem. You threw down the gauntlet when you wrote: "I have pondered and pondered this haiku . . . I think it fails. It is a bunch of twenty-five cent words when five cent words would have done. One challenge in this poem is to stand up to the new orthodoxy and point out its lack of pants."
You then re-wrote the haiku, into what struck me as a text having little to do with the original poem.
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
-- Sugimura Seirinshi (trans. Richard Gilbert and Ito Yuki)
"war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad"
(English-translation, adapted, Paul Miller)
I can't consider your adaptation as haiku, as there is no cutting. You've penned an epithet, and as was pointed out, had seemingly complete disregard for the original text. We are entitled to our taste, but your critical comments: "it fails," "five cent words would have done," "lack of pants" this is another matter. It seems you are proposing your adaptation as a preferable haiku to "blue mathematics," as a way of revealing your taste and editorial position. As well, the reach of your mind, or sensibility, with regard to certain varieties of haiku.
Any negative critique, particularly of a notable haiku (or poet), needs to be informed. It would be unconscionable, to my mind, to have the reader of your adaptation find that it in any way had to do with the original haiku. That you have put it forth as an interpretative translation -- even as haiku -- this is a matter needing to be addressed, and we have done so, above.
I'd like to briefly comment on another matter. You write: "And since haiku are considered unfinished until done so by the reader..." The experience (reader phenomenology) of a haiku is a different matter than what exists as published text. The text itself is in black & white on the page. Because this haiku appears in English with Japanese kanji/romaji, and is penned by a noted poet, the text, in terms of translation, is treated as finished. I hope you grasp the difference.
You find this poem "clever instead of heartfelt." Others strongly disagree with you. In that there are strong polarizations of opinion on this poem, it may serve as a worthy example of important differences not only in taste but in genre-sensibility -- a broader issue than this poem in particular. Recently, I read Avant-Garde Community and the Individual Talent --The Case of Language Poetry, by Marjorie Perloff (http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/avant-garde-community-and-the-individual-talent/) (2004).
The first half of this essay contains a comprehensive discussion of the modern literary history, and types, of "avant gardes."
Reading down to the section, "Word Order = World Order"?, the irruptive syntax and intellectual and sociopolitical intent of Language poetry is described. Perloff begins by providing a quotation of an insipid poem, as contrast ("Haitian Suite" by Orr); it seems about as hackneyed, to my sensibility, as your "adaptation." Several paragraphs down, we find:
- Bernstein had studied Wittgenstein with Stanley Cavell at Harvard, and his notion that "there are no thoughts except through language," is a version of Wittgenstein's "The limits of language mean the limits of my world" (1992:§5.6), that "Language is not contiguous to anything else" (1980: 112). The articles of faith of 60's poetry–—Olson's "Form is never more than the extension of content" and Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought"– were thus overturned in a new call for poetry as making, construction—the importance of each and every word and especially of word order. But unlike the New Criticism, which demanded unified and centered structure, the "aura around a bright clear centre," as Reuben Brower called it, the constructivist aesthetic of Language poetry insisted on the making process itself, in all its anti-closure, incompletion, and indeterminacy.
and
- Here, in a nutshell, is the animating principle of much of the poetry to come: poetic language is not a window, a transparent glass to be seen through in pursuit of the "real" objects outside it but a system of signs with its own semiological relationships. To put it another way, "Language is material and primary and what's experienced is the tension and relationship of letters and lettristic clusters, simultaneously struggling towards, yet refusing to become, significations."
What Perloff is alluding to here in Language poetry represents a significant difference between haiku-compositional groups, regarding sensibility. Perloff's article may be useful in that it provides historical and scholarly context to how "war dead / exit out of a blue mathematics" might be received. When the poem was originally penned, it seems doubtful that there existed an appropriate literary content, which might contain (hold, support) its soul. However we are now in a post- Language poetry era, and a number of practicing poets and critics in the haiku genre, being influenced by this and succeeding movements, utilize principles and techniques stemming from it.
My example of Language poetry here may seem excessively historicist; after all, Perloff's essay is already a decade old. Yet your interpretive comments strike me as a pernicious echo of a "poet writing his or her 'sincere,' sensitive, intimate, speech-based lyric, expressing particular nuances of emotion" -- ("killed from calculations that I find sad") -- a big step back into the "naive confessional" mode, with its passe conventions.
My thought is that while Language poetry may not have always succeeded in within individual works, its intellectual (and societal) influence has become increasingly important to our literary culture over the last three decades, within and without the university. A certain number of haiku in English represent new advances in style and approach, incorporating the history Perloff discusses -- rather than denying or avoiding it.
Richard -- I agree that Paul Miller's
war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad
has "little to do with the original poem," but would be very surprised if he meant it to be read as a haiku; I took it to be a slightly mocking paraphrase, deliberately poor, poetically. Well, just thought to point out that he merely (if, IMHO, misguidedly) put it forward as what he thought the poet was "trying to say."
Phil,
You write
Quote from: Philip Rowland on August 07, 2014, 08:09:48 PM
... that Paul Miller's
war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad
has "little to do with the original poem," but would be very surprised if he meant it to be read as a haiku
I agree in part, yet he states "it [the translated English] is essentially a rewrite of:
war dead
killed from calculations that I find sad"
It is hard to determine how unlike a haiku "essentially a rewrite" is meant to be taken. If it's not meant to approach a rewriting of a haiku, then it's merely a non sequitur. I take the implied meaning to be that
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
-- Sugimura Seirinshi (trans. Richard Gilbert and Ito Yuki)
is actually of a lesser quality and value than the "essential rewrite" he penned. In this sense, I treated it as a haiku; to what extent the rewrite is meant as parody is something Paul could perhaps comment on.
As a further note, Paul writes above: "I don't know the circumstances of this poem's composition." Yet, Alan Summers earlier provided a link to this article:
NEW RISING HAIKU -- The Evolution of Modern Japanese Haiku and the Haiku Persecution Incident
http://www.simplyhaiku.com/SHv5n4/features/Ito.html
which well-explains the circumstances (sociopolitical context) of the poem's composition. The poem in question, "war dead..." was first published in the context of this monograph (we translated the series of anti-war haiku found within, including "war dead" as preparation for publication). I'm unclear of the exact dates of our submission of these poems to the Noon journal--certainly Noon was the first appearance of this poem, outside of the monograph. For your information, here is the group of poems we selected (out of a number) for translation:
機関銃眉間ニ殺ス花ガ咲ク 西東三鬼
kikanjuu miken ni korosu hana ga saku Saitô Sanki
a machine gun
in the forehead
the killing flower blooms
戦死者が青き数学より出たり 杉村聖林子
sennsisha ga aoki suugaku yori detari Sumimura Seirinshi
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
枯れし木を離れ枯れし木として撃たれ 杉村聖林子
tareshi ki o hanare kareshi ki toshite utare Sugimura Seirinshi
leaving a dead tree
being shot as a dead tree
埋めてゐて敵なることを忘れゐたり 波止影夫
umete ite teki naru koto o wasure itari Hashi Kageo
during burial:
this is the enemy,
forgetting
Context is important to a deeper understanding of these haiku (the monograph by Itô Yûki is gripping -- Red Moon Press was inspired to produce the monograph, at its own expense, as I recall). At the same time, I think most would agree these haiku are effective as autonomous poems, and more, are among the most powerful haiku on war we possess, in English.
Hi Richard, Good to revisit the illuminating "New Rising Haiku" monograph.
Re. "I'm unclear of the exact dates of our submission of these poems to the Noon journal": it was May 2006; selections finalised in June; publication September 2006. I remember being particularly pleased to be able to include a selection of these anti-war haiku; and getting some insight into the translation difficulties in discussion of a couple of pieces I picked that don't appear in the monograph:
安死術夜戦の谷の蟹にある 平畑静塔
anshi jutsu yasen no tani no kani ni aru Hirahata Seito
砲音に鳥獣魚介冷え曇る 西東三鬼
houon ni choujuu gyokai hie kumoru Saito Sanki
Dear Richard,
You write: "The experience (reader phenomenology) of a haiku is a different matter than what exists as published text. The text itself is in black & white on the page. Because this haiku appears in English with Japanese kanji/romaji, and is penned by a noted poet, the text, in terms of translation, is treated as finished. I hope you grasp the difference."
Are you dismissing active participation with the poem by the reader? Clearly there are a number of poems here: the original, the translation, and my interpretation of the translation. All are valid poems. Since the poet has shared his version with us I believe he is giving us explicit permission to create our own reading. Phillip was correct that my "version" was a paraphrase of what I thought the poem meant—not a haiku itself (please give me some poetic credit). But frankly, your translation is a paraphrase of what you think the haiku means. The fact that you chose "blue" over "natural" proves that.
I'm perhaps more troubled by my perception that you seem to over-value process and newness than result. If someone slaps me in the face I don't so much care that they are foreign, did it in a new way, and under the watch of a morally-corrupt government; I'm concerned about the pain. I get that you and others like this poem for a variety of interesting reasons, and I sincerely think that's wonderful; I am just not one of those.
Paul
ps. for what it is worth, the essay "New Rising Haiku" doesn't address the circumstance of the haiku's composition, other than the social-political that you mention. So I don't know if he wrote this standing over the dead body of a friend or from his apartment. I'd hardly equate the two.
Phil,
Thanks for the reminder and emendations. So the first appearance of these poems was in Noon. Most excellent. Was there ever a conclusive translation published, of those two you posted in Japanese? I don't have my Noon copies here at home. Please feel free to post these last, if you like.
Paul,
Virtually all of my published work deals with reader-phenomenology. I think my works such as The Disjunctive Dragonfly illuminate the issue; a short comment can't suffice. My mention of "text" has to do with the process of translation. There is something in your PS that strikes me as strange. You write: " I don't know if he wrote this standing over the dead body of a friend or from his apartment. I'd hardly equate the two." By this literalistic logic, one would need to know where all the poets were, in all the haiku, in order to judge the veracity of any and every given poem. I think there's hardly a poet that doesn't re-write/edit their works, for that matter. So, for you, I assume if in his apartment, the poem is false, and if standing over a dead body of a friend, true? I guess we should all be grilled, upon submission.
For those interested in the topic of anti-war haiku and fascism in Japan during the "Wartime Period" in relation to gendai (modern, contemporary) haiku, there is a follow-up interview (done by email exchange) between Udo Wenzel and Itô Yûki, which was published in English and German, in Haiku Heute (Germany). The English version is here:
Forgive, But Do Not Forget: Modern Haiku and Totalitarianism (http://www.haiku-heute.de/Archiv/Ito_Yuki_2007-12/Ito_Yuki_2007-12_e/ito_yuki_2007-12_e.html)
Itô Yûki talks with Udo Wenzel (17 December 2007)
http://www.haiku-heute.de/Archiv/Ito_Yuki_2007-12/Ito_Yuki_2007-12_e/ito_yuki_2007-12_e.html
"I feel that, wherever they are in the world, haiku poets should not limit the possibilities of the poetry, haiku, in any sense." -- Itô Yûki (2007)
Phil,
I'd like to draw you out a bit more, concerning your recent poet in FN7, on the topic of abstraction -- if this is even the right word. You write (http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/forum_sm/index.php?topic=6827.msg69048#msg69048):
QuoteFor Barthes, the quintessential haiku's "propositions are always simple, commonplace, in a word acceptable (as we say in linguistics)"—as Ashbery's plainly are not:
I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors
Commonplace? Acceptable? The apparent absence of any concrete outside reference draws attention away from the "natural world" and towards—in the poet's own words—"the experience of experience." Does such abstraction necessarily preclude "evocation of haiku spirit" [found in the "The Nature of English Haiku" pamphlet]? Arguably—again with reference to the terms of the [British Haiku Society] consensus—Ashbery's work bears witness to "the continuous flow of experience" that is intrinsic to the "haiku moment" precisely by incorporating the mediation or "interference" of language in the experiencing of that flow—or as he himself puts it, "the way a happening or experience filters through to me." This practice does of course tend to displace more concrete subject matter, but also yields flashes of particular insight into the poetic process.
I would like to know how, and follow, your thoughts in this dimension, concerning the poem under discussion,
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
-- Sugimura Seirinshi
I find "war dead" -- particularly placed into its contextual era of wartime Japan -- to be a much more realistic poem then the Ashbery you quote. As Paul Miller points out, there is the abstraction of "blue mathematics" -- which he takes issue with, in reference to intention or motivation. As haiku, Ashbery goes much further. You state: "Ashbery's work bears witness to "the continuous flow of experience" that is intrinsic to the "haiku moment" precisely by incorporating the mediation or "interference" of language in the experiencing of that flow..."
How can "interference" of language relate to the "haiku moment" -- and what do you mean by "haiku moment" within this specific area of concern? Most relevantly, how would your thoughts here apply to "war dead"?
Additionally, you quote Ashbery, concerning his haiku approach (or poetic approach): "the way a happening or experience filters through to me." There seems a world of potential obfuscation in the word "filters." I'm not sure your point (or his point) is made clear.
I do think, if I read correctly, that you are posing a dialectic between "simple / commonplace" and (language or textual) "mediation / interference" -- yet perhaps implying that both poles of this dialectic can pertain to organic (?) expression, i.e. "the way a happening or experience filters through..." into haiku.
I find for example in Paul Miller's objection to "war dead" -- particularly where he writes:
Quote"having an emotional reaction to a poem is the first and most important reading you should have . . . for me the abstraction distances me from a real event. The advantage realism has is that the reader is forced into a real situation that they must grapple with. "blue mathematics" is just too cute and clever for me to deal with. It also makes the poem intellectual rather than emotional--for me.
-- how much cuter and cleverer is Ashbery's "I inch and only" in this regard? Paul advances the provocative proposition:
"The advantage realism has is that the reader is forced into a real situation that they must grapple with."
I think Paul is connecting "force" here with a clearly (enough) envisioned situational reality, evinced in the reader, by the haiku. For realism, "advantage" is thus pragmatically connected with emotional impact.
Yet by contrast, it's evident that many readers share a viscerally potent emotional (as well as intellectual) reaction to "war dead." In other words, Paul's proposition is one defining (in part) his sensibility, but not that of other readers. We might inquire into what others ways emotional impact is being imparted to readers, in "war dead."
This said, I wonder if even here "emotion" is actually questionable, as an axiom to hang your hat on. I doubt that the primary intent of Ashbery's "I inch" is impactful emotional reaction (certainly not that caused by a realistic situational immediacy). You conclude differently, with "flashes of particular insight into the poetic process" -- which, for those into "flashes" (like me) would be rather an emotional thing -- though I would extend your metaphor to "dwelling" within (this concept draws on a more extended sense of "home" or psychological, rather than literal/realistic landscape, evinced by the poem). Personally, by the end of the ku "gone in spare colors" I'm dis-embodied and possessed by a feeling of 'childlike disappearance into space.' I find this ku to be rather lovingly/playfully "twisted" and a big tease. Its veracity is that it exists! (Rings the bell in terms of creative uniqueness, and idiosyncracy, and yet it's a readable, scannable non-nonsense nonsense.) With an abundance of impossibility and uniqueness, I witness a "language" statement (proposition) and a line drawn in the sand, regarding genre in haiku.
So a further question for you -- is there any sense of (genre) direction here that we might articulate in a more embodied or pragmatic way, concerning haiku?
Richard, Re.
安死術夜戦の谷の蟹にある 平畑静塔
anshi jutsu yasen no tani no kani ni aru Hirahata Seito
and
砲音に鳥獣魚介冷え曇る 西東三鬼
houon ni choujuu gyokai hie kumoru Saito Sanki
the versions we ended up with were:
clean kills: in a night war a canyon a crab
and
at the shriek of artillery
birds beasts fish shellfish
chilling dim
My guess is that the second of these is more in need of revision, tho the first is tricky, too...
Quote from: Philip Rowland
the versions we ended up with were:
安死術夜戦の谷の蟹にある
anshi jutsu yasen no tani no kani ni aru
clean kills: in a night war a canyon a crab
-- Hirahata Seito
and
砲音に鳥獣魚介冷え曇る
houon ni choujuu gyokai hie kumoru
at the shriek of artillery
birds beasts fish shellfish
chilling dim
-- Saito Sanki
My guess is that the second of these is more in need of revision, tho the first is tricky, too...
Right! Thanks Phil. There is the weird (creepy/horrific/ironic) rhyme-sense-rhythm of "no tani no kani ni aru" [lit. night war's canyon's/valley's crab is /: a crab exists]. And Sanki's "hie kumoru" [chilling dim] is about as bizarre in Japanese as English. Ito and I had many discussions about this. I was tempted to think of "hie kumoru" as "extinction" (of all life, of wildlife, or ? but perhaps this is conceptually overwrought). In the end, our imaginations failed us -- we finally returned to just trying to say in English what it says in Japanese, without a further "figuring out." I wonder if a sensitive bilingual poet/translator might offer an alternate translation -- Fay, where are you!?
Re: Richard' reply #15, above:
First, the comments of mine (of 15 years ago) on Ashbery's haiku were not meant to be taken as particularly relevant to "war dead", though in terms of the perceived "abstraction" of both (Ashbery's further along in that direction, agreed), some slight connection may be made. The BHS consensus on "the nature of English haiku" that I referred to in the essay and Paul Miller's comment on the "distancing" effect of "blue mathematics" may be related (similar). Hopefully, my take on the Ashbery haiku is clearer in the context of the whole essay (in which, as I wrote, my broadest aim was simply "to challenge or at least complicate the received view that it is necessarily 'concrete images, not abstract words, that carry the meaning and create the tension and atmosphere in haiku'"). "Haiku moment" and "the continuous flow of experience" were terms of the BHS consensus (the notion that the haiku arrests a moment in time, registering its temporality), and my adopting those terms in reading the Ashbery haiku was a bit tongue-in-cheek.
I agree that the "war dead" haiku is more realistic; Ashbery's ku more surrealistic -- or abstract expressionist? In the latter, there seems to be no "event," other than "the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice" (Stevens), to which to relate it. It is playful (and to be playful, you have to feel pretty much at home), and, I agree, it's a line drawn in the sand, one kind of limit, regarding genre in haiku ("tundra", for example, another). I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's "a big tease," though (has nothing to do with pole-dancing, I presume!); I find it "makes sense" rather beautifully; its "veracity": that it's damned hard to explain or paraphrase! -- or as you put it, "that it exists!" (In the David Porter piece on Dickinson that I referred to in an earlier post: "Abstract expressionist artists since Kandinsky have sought representations of this sort of experience that unknowably is.) "The twisted pole gone in spare colors" touches on something that's hard to put your finger on, in somewhat the same way as "blue mathematics".
Sugimura's "war dead" seems, in contrast to Ashbery's piece, uncanny, not at home in the world to which it refers. It is "abstract" in the sense that it takes an ineluctable fact and tries to come to terms with it metaphorically, via an idea-image (or "strangely abstracted image").
I have to keep this brief, but thanks for the thoughts in response!
Phil
PS. (re: #17): Yes, i love that "...yasen no tani no kani ni aru" - how to reproduce some sound-sense of that?! Right now I prefer "...in a night war's canyon a crab" to what we had.
Very happy to read: "Abstract expressionist artists since Kandinsky have sought representations of this sort of experience that unknowably is".
I have waking and more often hynagogic moments that slide across my consciousness like continents of oil on the skin of a bubble which elude, allude, illude . . .
Ordinary language will not do to say what such experience "unknowably is", and one finds the upwelling of "the twisted pole gone in spare colors" as refreshing rain from the bubble's burst.
Blue. The Dictionary of Word Origins says this:
"Colour terms are notoriously slippery things, and blue is a prime example. Its ultimate ancestor,
Indo-European bhlewos, seems originally to have meant 'yellow' (it is the source of Latin flavus 'yellow' from which English gets flavine 'yellow dye'. But it later evolved via 'white' (Greek phalos 'white' is related) and 'pale' to 'livid, the color of bruised skin' (Old Norse has bla 'livid'. English had the related blaw, but it did not survive, and the modern English word was borrowed from Old French bleu. . ." .
math, n. a mowing. --ME. math, fr. OE. maep, 'harvest, crop' . . .
"blue mathematics" reminds me how little English is spoken in haiku, which typically favors restraint and spare language. To do as Shakespeare did, and Dickinson, and draw from many roots, to yoke Anglo-Saxon and latinate words, or words of Greek origin, so as to juxtapose in sparkful dissemination . . . seems not be the way, perhaps cannot be the way.
And so I often think of English language haiku as translation, as approximation of Japanese, as examples to give some sense of how haiku is (and does) to those who do not know Japanese, and beyond that as examples of examples. The way forward may be by way of the English language itself. But then, the way forward may not be haiku.
Quote from: Field Notes on August 06, 2014, 07:11:24 PM
SNIP
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
-- Sugimura Seirinshi (trans. Richard Gilbert and Ito Yuki)
SNIP
Thank you so much Peter for creating this space, and that we can discuss and breakdown various matters, but in particular, for me, 'blue mathematics' and touching on the color blue in other haiku away from the 'norm of colour'.
Why does 'blue mathematics' continue to work for me after hundreds of re-readings? Just that some haiku I read, can be read that many times, as much as summer grasses can be, despite the fact it was not anti-war, but perhaps a completely neutral poem.
Yes, true, in the English versions of Basho's verse there are no higher register words yet 'blue mathematics' contains one higher register, to a degree, and the combination, at least in the English version, of 'blue' and 'mathematics' might appear to be a phrase in a higher register than necessary, yet that 'phrase' haunts me, as calculations are constantly made regarding counter-aggressive actions such as the recent attacks against ISIS in Iraq for instance. What group of politicians and bureaucrats would not consider the effect on a political election sometimes over and beyond the actual need for action to defend non-combative civilisations?
Basho was an envoy, and a double agent. Yes, it appears so. His double life was being a poet and not a stooge for the more urbanised group of people in his time. Just as Sugimura Seirinshi has not forgone his duties as a poet by being a stooge for the growing corporate companies who wanted Japan plunged into war for territory.
"If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world."Reginald Horace Blyth (1898 - 1964)
Source: Zen Quotes
Contributed by: Zaady
Quote from: Richard Gilbert on August 07, 2014, 08:45:58 AM
戦死者が青き数学より出たり
sennsisha ga aoki suugaku yori detari
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
Literally, in given word order:
戦死者 (sennsisha) = war dead (KIA)
が (ga) = (concerning [subject]: war dead)
青き数学 (aoki suugaku) = blue/natural/of nature
but! also:
unripe/unnatural (e.g. "This fruit is still "green" [unripe, not yet ready])
+ mathematics
より (yori) = showing "like" | comparison | connection
出たり (detari) = to come out of / exit
Thanks, Richard. This is useful. It's hard for me to know how to value an interpretation or rendition because I'm never sure if the English words carry even the mood that the author conveyed in the original, let alone the meaning, which also depends on things like movement, pace and emphasis, not just the words.
Quote from: Richard Gilbert on August 07, 2014, 08:45:58 AM
青き数学 = blue mathematics. This is in no dictionary, because this collocation is the poet's neologism.
. . .
It is true that "blue" has many added meanings in English. But then, "blue" (as "aoi") has many different meanings in Japanese, as well. In English, blue is a color of nature (ocean, sky) but also the "blue" of the blues, of sadness, tragedy, depression. In other words it (like "aoi") offers contrary, contrastive or contradictory meanings. so the use of "blue" for "blue" in Japanese is actually the only interpretive move, in the translation. The signifiers differ yet in both languages they are semantically complex and paradoxical or agonistic (polarized); a different poem is created, yet with a similar sense of agon, tension .
And that, above, too.
Yes, blue has many hues and many associations, but why has the poet chosen 'a blue mathematics'? When two words are put together like this, each changes the other. In relation to mathematics, my experience of 'blue' (in my imagination) becomes colder (is this just me, just a personal peculiarity?) It also becomes more the blue of distance (the further away things are ...like hills ...the more blue they appear to be to the human eye) What I'm trying to say is that 'mathematics' must have an effect on how we experience 'blue', on what sort of blue we bring to mind, it's not just the other way around ('blue' as adjective qualifies 'mathematics' as noun)
出たり (detari) = to come out of / exit
Who is coming out of, exiting, leaving? (genuine question! ) Could it be the author/ poet himself, the one reflecting on the subject of the 'war dead'? Or is it the 'war dead' who leave, exit, the last of their existence being as numbers accounted for in records? Becoming a number as well as being dead seems to make those people ('the war dead' ... no names, nobody's son etc. ,nothing personal) into abstractions, but then...
Or do they return to mind, come out of abstraction as 'the war dead', individually and in groups, into the memories of the living? Come out of, exit the cold, distant numbers of the death toll and haunt the living? Weigh on the poet's mind?
Blue with associations of cold and the colour of distant things, mathematics as measurement (and "measurement began our might" or the like from Yeats). The colour blue measured as having a shorter wavelength and higher frequency than all other visible colours apart from violet since the C19 (so, though 'leaving' the visible spectrum , not as far toward the end as violet ... & therefore more present than Dickinson's 'amethyst remembrance' that Sandra mentioned)
I'm a bit like Paul M. The childhood fairytale that's lasted in my mind is 'The Emperor's New Clothes', so I admit to a chuckle at Paul M.'s "no pants" comment. :D The reality, though, is that I'm more open to this 'war dead' ku than I am to many relatively contemporary American 'war dead' haiku, which strike me as sentimental and manipulative of the reader and all much the same.
For me, this poem is cold and mysterious, with a haunting quality. I can't say I get it but I can't dismiss it. I know how I feel when I recall how many horses were killed in WW1. And how many Australian horses. The numbers are a cold weight.
Why is the mathematics blue, though? I can't fathom that any more than I can fathom the convention, in traditional Japanese verse, of having the autumn wind as white.
But I've not seen any objections to 'white wind' as a kigo.
Forgive the musings and stumblings and rambling ... it's all I can offer, it's where I am with this one.
- Lorin
Among other things, I think this poem interestingly speaks to the notion of translation. A poem like Basho's frog pond is probably "fairly" straightforward to translate since for the most part its pieces are objective and relate in logical ways. Not necessarily in the sense of explaining the cut parts, but we know what an old pond is, we know what a frog jumping is.
The "blue mathematics" haiku, on the other hand, is very abstract, and as we have seen "blue" might not even be the right word (as in: preferred by the poet over the choice of "natural" etc). This is not a critique of the translators who are doing their best with what they have—which is most often not the poet themselves.
I have always thought of haiku as a shared activity, where a poet tries to share his "moment" or impression or experience with a reader. When the pieces are fairly objective I think a translation can capture the poet's intent, and thus allow the reader to discover it as well—or at least get close. For abstract poems I'm not sure that is true. As Lorin asks, why blue? And what does that have to do with mathematics? In a way we have multiple cuts of meaning; the poem ceases to be cut once between the two parts, but additionally between individual words. I think my interpretation of sadness (from the blues) is most likely a western construct and probably has nothing to do with the poem. But I don't know.
Paul
ps. I happily acknowledge that there may be a range to my idea of sharing, and that perhaps some poets ask me to create my own poem/moment from the raw materials. ala "Language poetry". While I find such poems engaging, I do wonder how they fit into the haiku "tradition" with its basis in sharing (ala renku).
An engaging article regarding " the notion of translation":
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/18/books/why-you-ll-never-have-fun-in-russian.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar
Back later,
;D Karen
Re: Paul's "as we have seen 'blue' might not even be the right word (as in: preferred ... over the choice of 'natural' etc":
"aoi" is a colour word; it can indicate youth or naturalness or inexperience, immaturity, unripeness, but it would, I think, be taking liberties to translate it as other than "blue".
For me, "blue" (in "blue mathematics") works because of the various and somewhat contradictory/ironic connotations, which never quite resolve; with the total effect working intuitively, too, partly due to the feeling of coldness i get from the image -- "blue with associations of cold and the colour of distant things," as Lorin wrote. If "blue" simply connoted sadness, fpr instance, it would be a considerably less interesting poem. I brought in some examples of Emily Dickinson's "strangely abstracted images" earlier to emphasise that we don't always need to be able to explain or account for the logic of an image for it to "work" imaginatively or intuitively. Some other examples, from haiku in translation, that come to mind: Sayumi Kamakura's
The child deep
in green sleep;
the mother sleeps
in purple
Why purple? I could ask, but don't feel much need to. (Which is not to say it's not sometimes worth asking.) My guess, however, is that "sleep[ing] in purple" is more accessible than "blue mathematics"; likewise Tomas Transtromer's:
The white sun's a long-
distance runner against
the blue mountains of death.
Or even (returning to haiku written in English), perhaps more challengingly, Ashbery's:
a blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing
As with "I inch..." (mentioned in my FN "Challenge" and in Peter Yovu's post on this page), it may not be necessary to make clear sense of the poem referentially for it to "make sense" poetically; the interplay of syntax, sound and images (quite vivid in "a blue anchor...") takes precedence. I wouldn't be surprised if many baulk at Ashbery's haiku, for amounting to little more than the play of technique, but presumably few would argue that modernist and postmodernist conceptions of poetry be disallowed in haiku?
Paul, Philip et al,
Returning to this today, I'm reminded how specific English probably is compared with Asian languages, perhaps especially in relation to object and to time. I have nothing but admiration for the efforts of translators of poetry who labour in attempt to give us some idea of what the original poem might be like.
How differently might this haiku be read with the seemingly unimportant swapping or omission of the definite article for the indefinite?
戦死者が青き数学より出たり
sennsisha ga aoki suugaku yori detari
war dead
exit out of a blue mathematics
to
war dead exit out of the blue mathematics
?
The Japanese might actually be more like:
war dead exit out of blue mathematics
?
If in the Japanese there are no articles or similar indicators, just "out of blue" , then it'd be up to the reader to infer collective ('blue mathematics'), indefinite ('a blue mathematics' ... one of several or many instances of blue mathematics) or definite/ specific ('the blue mathematics') which also allows the 'out of the blue' colloquialism to come into play.
Only the author himself could tell us, I suspect.
- Lorin
in Fukushima's waves half life (https://youtu.be/pa0Fmcv83nw)
Quote from: martin gottlieb cohen on January 16, 2017, 08:23:11 PM
in Fukushima's waves half life (https://youtu.be/pa0Fmcv83nw)
The power of this really scares me, Martin!
marion
I worry that the love of the gun will increase as tensions build up even more around the world:
she carries the warm gun's child
https://isletpoetry.wordpress.com/2017/01/21/950/
Alan:
Yes yes yes,
It absolutely amazes me how many international, industrial-nation cities participated in the 1/21/17 human rights and dignity demonstrations; the impetus being reactionary to Trump's lack of values.
Everything I saw on t.v., in regards to the marches, showed a sense of decorum and peaceful demonstrations, with singing and speeches.
History holds many examples of resistance movements in the past. And agreed, guns eventually become actualized when the voices are ignored.
--There is a growing disregard for "police" in America, and an example just last week here in Texas, of another officer killed.
--Trump seems to be moving to a police state, but it is early.
--I do believe even non-gun owners are buying handguns at this time.
--Even here in this active living (senior) complex, the ladies in the gossip groups are talking guns, "for protection". Those who own them are glad to share knowledge on the topic.
Jan