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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

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.

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.

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!

A reminder: the important thing about a Seashell Game, a concept borrowed from Basho, isn't so much who wins but the reasons that the judges give for their decisions--giving us insight into what constitutes a good haiku for them.

This match gives us the chance to judge and think about, side by side, two of the haiku that have generated the most discussion when I have presented them in workshops. One is by San Francisco poet Fay Aoyagi:

ants out of a hole--
when did I stop playing
the red toy piano?

And the other is by Colombian poet Umberto Senegal:

En el candil cadáveres   
de zancudos. Alguien solloza
en la habitación.

mosquito corpses in the lamp
someone sobbing
in the room

I presented and led a discussion of Fay's haiku at the Haiku North America Conference in Ottawa, August 7, 2009--at a session titled, "Reading the New Haiku." In a revised edition of this workshop, presented for the Southern California Haiku Study Group in Pasadina, July 17, 2010--Umberto Senegal's haiku joined the line-up, sparking lots of talk. Most recently, in the session, "Reading the New Haiku 3" at the Haiku Society of America South Regional Meeting in Hot Springs, Arkansas (November 6, 2010), once again these haiku were considered and explored. Since none of these discussions were recorded, they exist now only in the memories of participants. One nice thing about our Seashell Game is the fact that our ideas, feelings and associations generated by these two contemporary haiku will be preserved in writing.

So, between now and Feburary 6th, please VOTE for one haiku and (most importantly!) give your reasons for choosing it. And tell your friends to join in. The more voices, the more perspectives, the better.

I won't vote, but I certainly have my own ideas about these haiku. This time, I'll save my impressions for later in the discussion.

Have fun!

I admit it: the NFL playoffs, during which my beloved home team, the New Orleans Saints, were so tragically dispatched and sent home by the underdog Seattle Seahawks, inspired me to organize a 21st Century Haiku Tournament. Last year, when Periplum was a blog, I showcased the works of twelve haiku poets from around the world who are pushing the genre in exciting, new directions. My idea is to take twelve haiku from these poets and conduct a 21st century "Seashell Game."

You might or might not know that Basho once supervised a similar Seashell Game, back in Old Japan. The Seashell Game originally was a child's pastime that involved a beauty contest of two shells, viewed side-by-side. Basho extended this format to haiku, placing two haiku side-by-side and determining the winner. The important thing wasn't so much who won or lost, but rather the comments of the judge (Basho), who revealed his concepts about what constitutes a fine haiku.

In this Seashell Game, YOU will be the judge. I will present two haiku side by side and ask you to: (1) vote for the winner and (2) explain your reasons. Just as in Basho's day, the important thing will be the reasons that you give, making explicit to the world your ideas about contemporary haiku.

Ready? Set? Let's go!

Our first head-to-head match pits two cutting-edge, contemporary Japanese haiku against each other: Ami Tanaka's "Atom Heart Mother . . ." vs. Keiji Minato's "In my luggage . . .":

原子心母ユニットバスで血を流す
genshi shinbo unitto basu de chi wo nagasu

Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood

   VS.

手荷物は劣化ウランと夏の海
teimotsu wa rekka uran to natsu no umi

In my luggage
depleted uranium
and the summer sea

Ami Tanaka was born in Tokyo on October 8, 1970, the same day that Pink Floyd's fourth studio album, Atom Heart Mother, was released. Its title derived from the headline of a news story that appeared in The Evening Standard on July 16, 1970. The headline read, "ATOM HEART MOTHER NAMED," referring to a woman who had received a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Band member Ron Geesen saw the article and suggested that they name the album's title track, 23 minutes and 44 seconds of instrumental rock, Atom Heart Mother. The track took up all of side one of an album that was originally sold in a cover that showed a picture of a cow in a field, with no text. Storm Thorgeson, the designer of the cow cover, said this about the title song and his cover: "When I asked them what it was about, they said they didn't know themselves. It's a conglomeration of pieces that weren't related, or didn't seem to be at the time. The picture isn't related either; in fact, it was an attempt to do a picture that was unrelated, consciously unrelated" (Guitar World, Feb. 1998; quoted in "Atom Heart Mother," Wikipedia). One of the song's writers, band member Roger Waters, said in a 1985 radio interview, "Atom Heart Mother is a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again! . . . It was pretty kind of pompous, it wasn't really about anything" ("Atom Heart Mother," Wikipedia).

A unitto basu or "unit bath" is a prefabricated bathroom module that includes ceiling, floor and tub made of the same continuous material. Found in hotels and apartments throughout Japan, unit baths have the advantage of being completely water-tight. They can be easily cleaned by showering the whole room. This is the type of bathroom that our Atom Heart Mother finds herself in, in Tanaka's poem.

The poet and the album were "born" together. The image of Mother in the haiku can thus suggest, on one level, Tanaka's own mother. The blood flowing into the prefabricated bathroom can suggest the act of birth. The "unit bath" can suggest modern Japan. And the "Atom" of "Heart Mother" can imply the atomic age from the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki up to the present moment. Blood pouring into the antiseptic, leak-proof bath unit can suggest the poet's life force. The fact that she came into this world on the same day that a disconnected musical suite was released with an unconnected cow cover says volumes about the absurdity into which she and all of us who are her contemporaries in this atomic world, have been thrown.

Keiji Minato's haiku, "In my luggage . . ." seems, at first glance, to be a joke: the kind that will get you arrested at an airport security checkpoint. "Depleted uranium" is isotope uranium-238, a byproduct of an enrichment process that creates U-235 used in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. "Depleted uranium" evokes, in my mind, images of steel cylinders bleeding a deadly sludge where children play--but then I see that the poet's "hand luggage" (teimotsu) contains also, along with radioactive isotope U-238, "the summer sea." How are we to feel about this juxtaposition? We picture a voyager, home from a long trip with two improbable souvenirs stuffed in his carry-on bag: depleted uranium and an entire ocean, a summer ocean: warm, heavy, undulating and salty. But at a level above or below that level, the joke isn't a joke, is it? Keiji's haiku collects in its verbal suitcase the artifacts of a trip--an actual trip or perhaps the trip of life itself, life in our time.

These are my perceptions of these competing haiku. I'm wondering what you perceive, and which of the two you would like to send to the semifinals.

Vote! And be sure to include (the important part!) your reasons. Voting will be open for the next two weeks, up to January 23rd.


WORKS CITED

Minato Keiji. "In my luggage . . ." English translation by the author. Cordite 29.1 (2009). Online journal.

Tanaka Ami. 田中亜美。"Atom Heart Mother..." English translation by David G. Lanoue. The Japanese original appears in 『新選２１』(Shinsen 21).邑書林, 2009. 216.

Born in 1985, Yūmu Yamaguchi is one of the young poets of contemporary haiku featured in the collection, Shinsen 21, published in 2009. We have observed, in previous installments of Periplum (see The Haiku Foundation blog archives) the startling range of poetic styles represented in this amazing anthology from Ami Tanaka's abstract verbal games to Chie Aiko's emotionally-charged sensuousness. A sampling of Yūmu Yamaguchi's haiku reconfirms the multiplicity of approaches to haiku art in Japan today. If Tanaka is a puzzle-maker and Aiko a recorder of sensation and heart, Yamaguchi is, in a word, rebellious. He writes:

淡雪や結んで捨てるコンドーム
awayuki ya musunde suteru kondōmu

light snow -
a discarded, knotted up
condom

In its surface attributes, the poem is perfectly traditional. It opens with a seasonal expression ("light snow": awayuki ya) adding up to five Japanese sound units and signaling a caesura with a "cutting word" (ya). So far, the verse is something that Bashō, Buson or any poet of haiku tradition might have scribbled. The rest of the poem, on its surface, is also conventional with a middle phrase of seven and an ending phrase of five sound units. Its content, of course, is obviously not the product of any of haiku's Old Masters. In fact, Yamaguchi is poking fun at them. Whereas the haiku poets who formed the genre sought connection and transcendence in Nature, Yamaguchi discovers in the snow a cold, knotted-up condom. His poem is an act of parodic mischief.

In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Louis Menand observes that

A 'diffused parodic sense' is everywhere. The culture is flooded with ironic self-reflexivity and imitations of imitations: travesties, spoofs, skits, lampoons, pastiches, quotations, samplings, appropriations, repurposings. This has happened on the low end (television commercials that are parodies of television commercials) and the high (postmodern fiction). (110)

It seems to me that Yamaguchi's presentation of a condom in the snow belongs somewhere on Menand's continuum of low and high fun-making.

There are depths to this literary joke. The haiku juxtaposes Nature (snow) with a human artifact, the condom. The latter suggests a moment of passion that is now over. The people who made use of the condom are absent, leaving behind only a tawdry vestige of their sex act. Looking closely, we see Nature again in the poem - though not living: inside the knotted-shut latex, the semen is frozen; the sperm are dead. Instead of connection with Nature, Yamaguchi offers an image of disconnection: the lovers did not completely touch; there was no fertility, no union.

The haiku is irreverent and transgressive: a subversion of haiku tradition. In a famous anecdote, a student of Bashō once presented the master with this verse:

Red dragonflies -

Remove their wings,

And they are pepper-pods.

Bashō is said to have objected: "There is nothing of haiku here." He corrected his student's poem to read:

Red pepper-pods –

Add wings

And they are dragonflies.

Haiku, for Bashō, adds value, in this case, wings to a pepper-pod so that it might take flight as a dragonfly. Yamaguchi's haiku subtracts value. Like Bashō's student who took away wings and the power of flight, Yamaguchi's poem erases or denies connections: the connection of love, the connection with Nature, the connection of sperm and ovum - leaving us with the bleak image of a used condom in a frozen winter landscape.

This, I think, is Yūmu Yamaguchi's artistic mission: to rebel against haiku tradition and, in so doing, infuse it with new life.

Haiku is dead, long live haiku!


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Works Cited

Matsuo Bashō. Qtd. in Philip and Carol Zalesky. Prayer: A History. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 223.

Menand, Louis. "Parodies Lost: The Art of Making Fun." The New Yorker. September 20 (2010): 107-10.

Yamaguchi Yūmu. 山口優夢。『新選２１』(Shinsen 21). 邑書林, 2009. 35. English translation by David G. Lanoue.

Welcome to Periplum, an exploration of haiku around the planet in the twenty-first century.

This forum began as a blog on The Haiku Foundation website, so if you're interested in catching up with the conversation, you can go to the  Periplum blog archive and enjoy cutting-edge haiku by Keiji Minato (Japan), Petar Tchouhov (Bulgaria), Masahiro Koike (Japan), Fay Aoyagi (USA), Jean-Pierre Colleu (France), Casimiro de Brito (Portugal), Saša Važić (Serbia), Ami Tanaka (Japan), Chie Aiko (Japan), Slavko Sedlar (Serbia), Umberto Senegal (Colombia) and Tito Andrés Ramos (Bolivia).

My aim is to present recent haiku from different places, reflecting on what they are saying to me: not "the" meaning, but "a" meaning. I hope that you will share your own reflections as well.

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