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To answer Karen's question, why no punctuation in my English translation?

The poet sent me a book-length manuscript and gave me permission to publish for the first time many of his recent haiku, along with my English translations, for a piece that came out last fall in Modern Haiku: "Umberto Senegal Revisited." MH Haiku 41.3 (Autumn 2010): 50-59. I agonized over the capital letters and punctuation that pervade his haiku (standard procedure in Latin America, though some poets have recently begun to buck this trend). In the end, I decided to re-make his haiku in the most contemporary style for haiku in English. One goal of a translator is to keep invisible those things that are invisible to readers in the original language. For Colombian readers the capital letters and punctuation are expected and thus, almost invisible; for most English readers they SCREAM and, I fear, get in the way of a direct experience of the poems. At least, that's what I felt then--and still feel.

Zancudo is the Colombian word for "mosquito." Habitación is indeed the word one uses when ordering a hotel room, just like it is in English. "I'd like a room, please." However, like in English, the word by itself, without a hotel context, means "room"--not "hotel room" and certainly not "house." Of course, if a reader wants to make it a hotel room in his or her imagination, the language allows for this. "Living room" is possible, but the poet doesn't specify this--once again, it's the reader's choice. The candil, yes, is a type of oil lamp. I left out the word "oil" in my translation because I felt that the rhythm and sound are better in English with just the word "lamp." I hoped that readers would figure out there must be some sort of flame involved--due to the corpses. Maybe this was a mistake.

The bottom line: This poem is a thousand times better in Spanish but (I think) quite evocative even in an imperfect English translation--as evidenced by the discussion so far.

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!

And the winner of the round is (drumroll)... Keiji Minato's haiku "in my luggage" (4-3).

Less important than the votes, as was true when Basho did this, are the reasons behind the votes and the discussion generated. According to my count, Alan, Lorin, Don and Mark favored Keiji's verse; Chibi, Carlos and Eve favored Ami's "Atom Heart Mother." Even though Ami's haiku didn't win in the voting, I think we all can agree that it should receive special commendation for generating the most discussion. This is quite a provacative work of word-art, isn't it?

John and Sandra commented without voting--which is OK, but it would be better, next round, if everyone weighed in with a judgement that forces us to think deeply and clearly about what constitutes a good contemporary haiku.

Now, on to Round Two!

This is fun!

Yes, I translated nagasu as "spurt" because there's a sense of violent flowing. All that blood in the bathroom could, indeed, suggest a miscarriage--something I hadn't thought about. Ami (a female poet, I should mention, since someone was wondering about this) alludes to an album that was released on the day of her birth. So, my first thought was that the "Mother" in the haiku is her own mother, giving birth to her. Her "own mother" could also be Mother Japan--which I associate with the sterile, ultra-modern and trendy "unit bath" or, as I translate it here, "pre-fab bathroom."

If the blood spurting is a miscarriage, the poet might be saying something contradictory and disturbing about her own birth.

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

As for the sytax (since Eve asked), the Genshi Shinbo (Atom Heart-Mother) is the subject, as I read it. This subject, located in the prefab bathroom, is spurting or gushing blood. At least that's my understanding of it. Maybe a Japanese person would see all kinds of different nuances and levels. But my question is: Does the poem work in English? Does it bring us somewhere? Is the journey worthwhile? And which haiku, "Atom Heart Mother" or "in my luggage" packs the bigger punch?

I won't vote since I'm the moderator. Let's see if anyone else weighs in between now and the deadline (Jan. 23rd).

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.

When my students ask me "What's the difference between prose and poetry?" I suppose it's a cop-out, but I tell them, "Look at how it's arranged on the page." If the words are broken into packages and not running from margin to margin, it's a poem, I say. (I avoid the topic of "prose-poems"!) My students usually don't question this answer, but they could easily challenge this definition by visually turning any random bit of prose into "poetry":

In a village of La Mancha,
the name of which
I have no desire
to call to mind,
there lived not long since
one of those gentlemen
that keep a lance
in the lance-rack,
an old buckler,
a lean hack,
and a greyhound for coursing.

Have I justy now made Cervantes' opening for Don Quixote into a poem? Maybe! When you read it, do you find yourself lingering on the words and perhaps savoring their music a bit more than you might when you see them printed on the page as prose? I do! I think that the reader's poetic frame of mind is essential to perceiving words as poetry. I always bring that frame of mind to my reading of haiku.

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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