The Haiku Foundation Forums

I don't have an i-pod that can download apps, but my girlfriend Kathleen does. Yesterday, at my behest, she downloaded the free "THF Haiku" app, and we started playing with it. The very first haiku that appeared on the little screen was Ami Tanaka's "Atom Heart Mother" poem. Followers of Periplum, from its first year as a blog and through its second year as a forum, will remember this haiku and all the fun we had puzzling over its many layers of possible meaning and feeling.

But all good things must come to an end. And, incidentally, all bad things must also come to an end. I won't dare speculate which kind of thing this blog-turned-forum has been. I only know, I don't have time for it in the near future. The book that I'm trying to write, about Issa's animals, has stalled halfway through chapter one, the frogs. I need to get past froggies and on to chapter two, sparrows!

Which means, I must take a long, perhaps permanent, sabbatical from Periplum. I hope that someone will volunteer to continue keeping the conversation going. For now, I bid you all a fond farewell.

Thanks for tuning in!

I wanted everyone to know that I'll be traveling from May through July, so Periplum will need to go on hiatus.

When I get back in August, I have two ideas for topics: a discussion of haiku written by Greek poet Zoe Savina, and a look at some contemporary Russian poets.

If you have an idea for a topic--a contemporary poet on the world scene whose work you think merits discussion, please post it here and when I get back we'll see what we can do. If you suggest a poet, let me know how to get access to their work (magazine, book, website).

Thanks!

David

Thanks, Maggie, Lorin and Karen! I wanted you to know that I find your feedback very helpful. I'm a bit bogged down with "real life," these days, but soon I hope to be back to this project and submitting my revised translations based on your insights. Stay tuned!

Thanks for your thoughts, Chibi, and I thank you for the correction, Gabi. I copied the romaji from Ueda's book. Perhaps he had a typo: "toriyage" for "tori-age." He didn't supply the Japanese text, so I based this on the romaji.

So, to set the record straight, here's what I think the original haiku must have looked like:

とりあげ婆が右の手也の紅葉哉
toriagebaba ga migi no te nari no momiji kana

it's become a  midwife's
red right hand . . .
maple leaf

Sanboku

In the past month I have taken up a challenging but pleasant task. A Columbian haiku poet, Fernando López Rodríguez, has allowed me to translate his book, Luciérnagas en las manos, the title of which I plan to render into English as "Fireflies in My Hands." In recent discussions on Periplum, our musings on non-English haiku have led inevitably to issues of translation. This, I think, is how things should be. When confronted with an English translation (or, if you prefer, "an English version") posted alongside a source poem in a different language, we naturally crave insights into the meanings and nuances of the original words. In undertaking such exploration, we as readers follow the path originally walked by the translator: becoming aware of the choices, the twists and turns on the way, that must be made for a poem to BE A POEM in English. If word-for-word, literal translation sufficed for poetry, we could just plug a haiku into Babelfish and call it a day. Clearly, this is not, and will never be, enough.

Those of you who read Spanish will notice that the first fork in my translation path came at the third word of the collection's title, Luciérnagas en las manos. Literally, the firefly is in "the" hands, but I felt that translating it, "Fireflies in the Hands," lacks the warmth that the original title conveys in Spanish. Fernando takes his title from one of the haiku in the book that reads, "Entre las manos/ del niño aún ilumina/ la luciérnaga": "Still lit/ in the child's hands/ a firefly." With this image of a male child (niño) holding a firefly in mind, I considered rendering the book's title, "Fireflies in His Hands." In English, however, the phrase "his hands"  suggests a speaker who is detached from the action, objectively describing something happening to someone else: a "he." Spanish, on the other hand, capaciously allows las manos to refer to the hands of anyone: his hands, her hands, my hands, or even our hands. I decided, therefore, to render the title, "Fireflies in My Hands," to suggest, I hope, tenderness and immersion in the scene. A literally-minded reader might object: Shouldn't I keep the fireflies in "the hands" since this is where they reside in the Spanish original? Yes, I would reply, but only if this literal translation can be a full translation: evoking in English both the words' objective meaning and feeling. The problem with "the hands" is not one of meaning but of feeling. It is only half of a translation: faithful to the surface but not to the emotional depth of the original. By substituting "my" for "the," I choose to value emotional depth over surface meaning in this instance.

Translation, like the old addage goes, is an act of betrayal (in Italian, tradurre e tradire: "to translate is to commit treason" -- and note that I have just now committed teason with my clunky rendering of the pithy Italian maxim!).  When faced with choices, we must choose where to swear our allegiance: to the literal surface or the emotional depth? And then there's the problem of connotations. I choose to translate luciérnaga as "firefly" -- not, for example, "lightning bug." I associate the latter expression with a rural North American setting, so "firefly" feels more appropriate for a poet from South America.

Enough about the title. Now let's look at three of Fernando's haiku along with my English translations and impressions. Feel free to share your own feelings and insights--and if you would like to bring up a question about my translation choices, please do!

1.
Cuarenta y tres años.
Por primera vez
un violín en mis brazos.

Age forty-three.
For the first time
a violin in my arms.

The fact that the violin is in his "arms" and not his "hands" suggests to me a world of difference. I think the violin could be a lover, responding to the poet's embrace like a finely tuned Stradivarius. If so, it's sad to think he had to wait 43 years for such a feeling. Better late than never? Or is the violin just a violin?

2.
En el dedo que lo señaló
quedó eterno el meteoro
de la otra noche.

In the finger that pointed it out
the other night's meteor
is eternal.

This one is mysterious to me. It vaguely reminds me of Carl Sagan proclaiming that we are made of stardust (remember that TV astronomy series, Cosmos?). Why and how is the meteor "eternal" in the finger of the poet or whoever did the pointing? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

3.
La última gota
del rio cintila
en el ojo del pez.

The river's last drop
shines
in the fish's eye.

Now and then in Fernando's book, his haiku echo Basho. This one reminds me of the image of a salted sea bream in a fish shop with Basho's focus zooming in to its cold gums. It also brings to mind my early morning visit to Tsukiji, the fish market in Tokyo, which inspired me to write, on the spot, "fish in plastic bags/ one/ still flapping." But the interesting thing about Fernando's haiku, to me, is the expression, "last drop" (última gota). Has the river dried up, leaving its last drop of moisture in the eye of a dying fish? Or is the poet using the word "last" in a different way? Could the drop of water in the fish's eye be the "last" remant of the river that it has been taken from? This poem, to me, is apocaplytic. Your impressions?

I thank you in advance for your thoughts. Hearing feedback on these translations-in-process should help a lot as I refine them.

I appreciate your reflections, Lorin. Indeed, our 21st century judgment was, for the most part, closely in tune with Basho's. The midwife's bloody hand is a strong and daring image. I'm a little surprised that no one questioned the use of metaphor--a rhetorical ploy that is out of fashion in EL haiku these days. Maybe we forgive the leap from midwife's hand to the autumn leaves because the juxtaposition is so striking and original. Maybe Basho felt the same way. Still, there's a problem with metaphor, even a bold one like Sanboku's: for me, as a reader, there's too much cleverness in it--akin to the use of rhyme but not quite as bad--that pulls me away from the moment and into a consciousness of the poet's wit. As such the poem puts artifice in the foreground instead of hiding it in the background, as great poets (from Basho on down to 2011) have done. I have a feeling that this poem, even though it's the better of the two, wouldn't be accepted for publication today.

I thank all of you for participating in these Seashell Games. If you feel like adding more thoughts, please do. Otherwise, we can all pat ourselves on the backs for a job well done: a high-level discussion that (as I think I've said before) made me feel like I was in a graduate seminar--the kind of course that I wish had existed back when I was a grad student. Ah well, better late than never.

Speaking of late, as I write this it's approaching 3:00 a.m. on Mardi Gras morning. The partying throngs (who woke me two hours ago) must have crawled back into their holes until tomorrow. Happy Carnival to all! Perhaps, tomorrow when I'm watching the Rex parade and screaming for beads, an idea for the next Periplum topic will conk me on the head like a Zulu coconut. We shall see!

Sure, Gabi. Here is Ueda's translation of the two haiku, FYI:

How like it is to
A midwife's right hand--
Crimson maple leaf!

"I haven't crimsoned.
Come and look! So says the dew
On an oak branch.

Poet LEFT: "real" name Sanboku

it's become a midwife's
red right hand...
maple leaf


Poet RIGHT: "real" name Dasoku

no autumn reddening for me -
come look!
oak branch dew

I put "real" in quotes since these were their made-up haiku names, just as "Basho" was.

Here's what Basho had to say about these two haiku, as translated by Makoto Ueda in Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1970) 149.

The first poem employs a unique conceit in dealing with the subject of colored leaves. The second is well said, but it shows the poet to be a man of queer tastes: he likes a colorless oak tree and has no liking for the world of colors. The first poem suggests, with its lines about a midwife's red right hand, that the poet is well versed both in the art of love and in the skill of giving birth to vigorous language. It ranks thousands of leagues above the second poem. Therefore, if invited to come and look at such a happy product, the writer of the oak poem should withdraw his wooden sword and flee.

What do you think of Basho's judgment--both its content and tone? Does it tell us anything about our view of haiku in the 21st century? Are we still playing the Seashell Game by the same rules--or have the rules of what constitutes a good haiku changed over the past 339 years?

Hi Everyone,

There was a typo in the Japanese. Gabi alerted me to it, and so I went back and deleted the hiragana "ka" before "kashi" (oak tree).

I don't mind at all if we discuss translation issues, as long as we then steer our attention back to what the poets are saying and then try to judge their work comparatively. Momiji is a challenging word. It can mean:

red leaves
crimson leaves
autumn leaves
autumnal tints
Japanese maple

As a translator, I had to make a choice, so when you read these poems, keep in mind that all of this is suggested.

If these poems seem "retro" compared to the ones we have been looking at so far, this is because they were written in the 17th century. In fact, they are two haiku that appear in the original "Seashell Game" of Basho. I wanted you to see them without knowing this, at first, so that you could form your own opinions--looking at them as if they were written yesterday and submitted to a journal. Which one would you accept for publicaiton? One? Both? Neither? And...the key question: WHY?

You can probably guess by now that our "Mystery Guest" will be Basho, who will give his judgment--later. Let's see if your 21st century thinking matches up with his ideas!

Hello Judges (and by "judges" I mean anyone who happens to be reading these words - if you're here, I hope you vote and give your reasons!). Are you ready for some Seashell Gaming? In Basho's day little Japanese girls liked to amuse themselves at the beach, collecting shells and then matching them one-on-one in beachcomber beauty contests. Basho applied this technique to haiku in his earliest haibun, The Seashell Game (Kai ōi:1672). In that text Basho was the one and only judge, proclaiming his decisions and backing them up with reasons that shed light into the young haiku master's mind. Our game invites the world to play Basho's role, but just as in the 17th century, the important thing is to articulate justification for our choices.

For this round, we return to Japan, but for reasons that I will reveal later on, I won't give the poets' names right away. Let's call them Poet LEFT and Poet RIGHT.

Poet LEFT:

とりやげ婆が右の手也の紅葉哉
toriyagebaba ga migi no te nari no momiji kana

it's become a midwife's
red right hand...
maple leaf

Poet RIGHT:

紅葉ぬと来て見よ樫の枝の露
momijinu to kite miyo kashi no eda no tsuyu

no autumn reddening for me -
come look!
oak branch dew

The English versions are my translations. Let's give ourselves a week to chat about these haiku (till 2/27/11), at which time I promise a Mystery Guest will weigh in.

Peter and All,

If the Third Round attracted fewer comments than the first two, perhaps this is just a reflection of life and how busy people are becoming. I find that the deeper we go into the "work year," the less time I can scrounge for important things like comparing seashells. Or...maybe we have lurkers about who haven't felt the need to contribute since there has been a solid majority vote for Petar Tchouhov's haiku (in my count 5: you, John, Chibi, Maya and Sandra)--with one vote (Lorin's) going to Slavko Sedlar's haiku. This being the deadline day for voting, I believe I can officially declare "the longest night" the winner, though, as I've said before, the point isn't the decision but the conversation that has led to it.

I have a special surprise for Round 4--complete with a Mystery Guest who will enter the fray at some point. Stay tuned!

This is another great conversation. Welcome, Maya (I hope to see you again this summer in Blagoevgrad!) and welcome Polona and Sasa. And welcome back, everyone else!

I promised to share my impressions of these haiku. First, Petar's.

The longest night, the night of winter equinox, is frigid, dark, disturbing. Our ancient ancestors feared this night: with days growing shorter and shorter, nights growing longer and longer; would not the inevitable result be a cold and perpetual darkness? Hence solstice rituals and magical-religious celebrations to coax back the sun and its life-giving light. But in Petar's scene there's no promise of light or warmth, no miracle. The raven blinds the poor man of snow, leaving him in a permanent darkness that is truly "the longest night." At first view, it seems an atrocity. Or, I wonder: Is this raven a trickster, as the Chinook and other Native American tribes see him, playing a mischievous prank? Should we be horrified? Should we laugh? Or...should we simply accept and understand? If the eyes that he steals are berries and not lumps of charcoal like we used for our Nebraskan snowmen back when I was a kid, then the raven's theft is a forgivable act of survival in a harsh, cold world.

My sympathies flit from snowman to raven, back to snowman. Life is hard all over. The world is cold all over. And now that the black bird has flown off with the snowman's eyes, our eyes, we are left alone in a frozen darkness without a glimmer of hope, of light, of spring. Brrrrrrr!

About Sedlar's haiku: When I first read this and wrote about it for the Periplum blog last year, I felt it was surreal and "slippery." I wrote:

What appears impossible in the external world can ring with psychological truth. The body takes a journey from beach to home, and the mind is not the same. A day of communing with the sea--perhaps swimming in it, perhaps simply watching its undulating waves, the suchness of the undulation--has profoundly changed, well, everything. As he walks in the door, are two parrots in a cage singing the story of what he has gained and felt today with perfect precision, with their wild, raucous voices? Or, perhaps, has the poet opened his own mouth to say something and discovered, by truly listening to it, his voice sounds different, for it has become the chirping of two parrots?

Now, thanks to this discussion, I am able see the haiku differently and less magically: the parrots' (budgies') owner coming home from the beach (river or sea), affectionately chirping to/with his birds. This is a sweet interpretation. Still, I prefer (obstinately) to read the haiku as a magical moment: the poet's voice becomes, in fact, the voice of two parrots. Why? I don't know! But I like it.

By the way, as I'm writing this I'm listening to music on my headphones (it's past midnight but the neighbors have a loud party going)--and just now Petar's band, Gologan, started playing. He was kind enough to give me a disk with several of his band's "Bulgarian folk-rock" tracks when he visited New Orleans two summers ago. I think there's one or two samples on You-Tube. A talentented guy! Check it out: here. (That's Petar playing the guitar.)

So far in our Seashell Game, we have evaluated works by contemporary poets from Japan (Ami Tanaka and Keiji Minato), the United States (Fay Aoyagi) and Colombia (Umberto Senegal). For Round Three, I'd like us to turn our attention to that hotbed of cutting-edge haiku, the Balkans. Let's look at two haiku that were featured last year on the Periplum blog: Petar Tchouhov's "the longest night..." and the recently deceased Slavko Sedlar's "The moment I return..."

Here's Petar's haiku in Bulgarian with an English translation by the poet. It first appeared in Ginyu #28 (October 2005).

най-дългата нощ
ван краде очите
на снежен човек

the longest night
a raven steals the eyes
of a snowman

And here's Slavko's haiku in Serbian with a translation by Saša Važić, taken from his book, T A К В О С Т 2 ("SUCHNESS 2") (Belgrade: 2010).

А дође с плаже                             
Мој глас постаде цвркут             
Два папагаја   
            
The moment I return
from the beach - my voice becomes
the chirp of two parrots

If you are new to the Seashell Game, you might want to look over what was written in Rounds One and Two. Your task here is to dredge to the surface your deep-held beliefs about haiku by forcing yourself to choose between the verses. Be sure to give reasons for your vote. Deadline: Feb. 20th.

As the moderator, I won't vote, but I do plan to share some of my own thoughts on these works later on.

Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

Let Round Three begin!

And the winner is ... US!

We've all learned from another great exchange of perceptions and assumptions about contemporary world haiku. In terms of the voting, my score card has two votes for Fay's red toy piano haiku (SusanD and Alan) and six votes for Umberto Senegal's mosquito corpses haiku (John, Lorin, Chibi, NM Sola, Melissa and Karen). Peter voted for Umberto but then decide to withdraw his vote, unable to choose between the two. Mark also found himself in this situation.

It's still the day of the deadline (Feb. 6), so feel free to add more thoughts on these provocative haiku, if you have any. Otherwise, I'll see you in Round Three!

Hi Everyone,

"Love means never having to say you're sorry." - The Love Story.

"Love means having to say you're sorry every fifteen minutes." - John Lennon.

In this case, I agree with the first proclamation. I took no offence at any of the previous posts. This forum is a place for the free exchange of ideas - like I told Eve yesterday, it's like a high-level graduate seminar in contemporary haiku without the term paper requirement. Pure joy!

I promised to share my ideas about the two haiku. Here goes...

When I presented Fay's red piano haiku for discussion at HNA in Ottawa, she was sitting in the audience. After everyone else had reported their thoughts and feelings, I asked Fay to share her own. Her first point was a thing that a few of you have mentioned (I told you this seminar is high-level!): the season word (ants emerging in springtime) is important to how she feels about the scene. She went on to say that, for her, the out-of-tune plunking sound of the toy piano is central to "the" meaning to her - but she's not upset that no one else in that room, that afternoon, came up with this particular association. She said that she was happy to hear her poem live so many different lives in different minds. This is not only OK but what she aims at as an artist.

The haiku leaps from an external view of ants to an inward, childhood memory, presenting for our contemplation an emotionally charged artifact of half-remembered childhood. Fay's writing of the haiku (and our reading of it) is an unlocking of remembrance. Ants emerge one by one from their hole, hinting at an inner process of memories rising from the subconscious mind, suddenly unearthing the red toy piano. I love the surprise.

Umberto's haiku also "leaps" (to use Robert Bly's term): from sight (the cadavers of mosquitoes in the cemetery of a lamp) to sound: someone sobbing in a room. I don't get the feeling that the sobbing person is grieving for the little deaths in the lamp. In my imagining, I see a triangulation of mosquito corpses, a sobbing person and the poet, who is also there, looking at the mosquitoes and hearing the sobbing. It is the poet's consciousness that brings together the two stimuli: the seen and the heard. Interestingly, he doesn't describe the sobbing person but instead chooses to focus on the dead mosquitoes in the lamp. Senegal is the author of a collection of atom-sized fiction titled Cuentos atómicos (2006). As in many of those stories, here he evokes a micro-drama, a mini-tragedy of pain, loss and unspoken suffering. He leaves the reader to meditate and conjure.

The imagination must choose, and mine chooses to picture this unspecified sobbing person in different ways. In one vision she is a grieving woman whose pain is so keen the poet cannot bear to look at her and so instead gazes at the dead mosquitoes in the lamp. It might even be his once-wife and literary partner who, after a messy divorce, burned ten years of his manuscripts. But this biographical detail flits into my mind only because I happen to know about it; it's not essential to the poem. In another vision, the sobbing person, though seeming to be external to the poet (after all, Senegal describes this individual as a third-person "someone") is the poet. In his contemplation of the tiny-sized deaths, the poet finds himself interrupted by the sound of sobs coming from the mouth of "someone": himself! I like imagining the scene in both ways and feel no need to pick one or the other. One of them hints at a story of a man and a woman; a husband and a wife, perhaps--rich with history and subtext. The other suggests the psychodrama of a personality coming unglued: a fragmenting of self such that the poet, detached and alienated from his own grief, notes its expression--the sobbing--with eerie objectivity.

I should mention: when we discussed this haiku in Pasadena and Hot Springs, people brought up the association of mosquitoes and tropical diseases such as yellow fever. Also, in both discussions, people imagined a corpse laid out for a wake (in the room) but the poet cannot bear to look, so his eyes remain fixed on the mosquitoe corpses-avoiding the human one. A rich brew of images and possibilities, this one...

Glad I don't have to vote!