The Seashell Game - Round 2

[Lorin]

 ;D

It's a nibble or three from a few other fish in this pond that we want, Peter and Mark.

We promise!...it's catch & release.

- Lorin

[John Carley]

In the oil lamp corpses
of mosquitoes. Someone sobs
in the house.

* I would like to lengthen the verse in English but ... the problem with translating 'solloza' as either 'sobbing' or 'is sobbing' is that there is a construction for that.

* the problem with 'living room' is that the author could have specified and did not.

Hi all, I agree entirely with the criticism of my suggestion of 'living room'. It is a mistake on two counts: it is overly narrowing, and it suggests a pun which is not present in the source text.

I rather like the draft carried over in the quotation above. Perhaps oil lamp is overly specific - but even were that the case it would not distort my appreciation of the sense as much as living room.

Best wishes, John

[Peter Yovu]

I'm going to vote, and I appreciate that being "required" to do so has helped me stay focussed on these poems longer and perhaps more deeply than I might have otherwise. Neva wudda thunkit. My vote goes to Senegal's, because i find it the more realized, the more embodied poem. By this I mean it engages not only the head, but the heart and belly as well. Aoyagi's, though it ultimately has an undertow of feeling, nonetheless stays mostly in my head. The image "ants out of a hole" does not live for me in the way that "mosquito corpses in the lamp" does-- though the latter conjures a stillness, it is dynamic. I had more to say about Aoyagi's poem, but that may speak to its conceptual tone. A fully embodied, living image does not necessary invite being thought about, though it could. More likely, it invites simply being: staying with it. "Shut up and hold me".

These poems and David's challenge have led me to look at my own work, to see if my money is where my mouth is. The proof will be in putting out something alive.

[Gabi Greve]

.
ants out of a hole--

This is the translation for the Japanese kigo for mid-spring

ari ana o izu 蟻穴を出づ (ありあなをいづ)
ants coming out of the hole
. . . . ari ana o deru 蟻穴を出る（ありあなをでる）
ari izu 蟻出づ（ありいづ）ants coming out (again)

Finally it gets warmer and the ants come out again looking for food.
This kigo shows the joy of springtime.

I hope this helps the appreciation of the haiku by Fay.
Gabi



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

Fay Aoyagi
.

[John Carley]

Finally it gets warmer and the ants come out again looking for food.
This kigo shows the joy of springtime

Hi Gabi, isn't the attribution of a specific sentiment more the domain of hon'i than kigo?

Best wishes, John

[Peter Yovu]

I had wondered if the line "ants (coming) out of a hole" is an established season-reference, that is to say, to be found in a saijiki? If so, it gives the poem a whole other context, which may be worth discussion. Will Gabi, or Fay, or someone please confirm this one way or another? Appreciated.

[eluckring]

Yes Peter, as Gabi indicated, and as far as I know, ari ana o izu is a well established  (in saijiki) kigo for mid-spring. Higginson translates it as "ants emerge" in Haiku World : An International Poetry Almanac

brings to mind a poem by Hosai Ozaki
as translated by Hiroaki Sato:
( i don't have the kanji/hiragana for this poem, and though Ozaki was not tied to the use
of kigo, I feel the reference is strong ....)

I kill ants as I kill them they come out

for me those "ants out of a hole" are a  "fully embodied, living image" as you call it, but
our relationship to these things are not necessarily shared in English, as ELH does not have the rich
traditions of kigo culture that exist in Japan

[Lorin]

Finally it gets warmer and the ants come out again looking for food.
This kigo shows the joy of springtime

Hi Gabi, isn't the attribution of a specific sentiment more the domain of hon'i than kigo?

Best wishes, John

Thanks for bringing this up, John.

This hon'i business (as far as I understand it) is the obvious reason why I don't endorse the making of 'instant kigo' for the English language and prefer to use seasonal references or keywords. Here's a reference to it from Gabi's data base:

"This "basic meaning" of a kigo is usually called
hon-i, hon'i 本意 (ほんい)
in Japanese. This is also pronounced ほい ho-i. The basic meaning is something a haiku poet has to learn like a new vocabulary with each kigo.

established essence
genuine purports

Reference : hon-i

http://worldkigodatabase.blogspot.com/2006/12/kigo-use-in-haiku.html

(unfortunately the reference link leads to pages of advertisements from Honda dealers!)

So hon'i would be the primary 'dictionary definition' of a kigo, would it not? It would never be open to interpretation, never shift in meaning (in itself) & provide the solid ground for the reader, no matter how obscure or personal the rest of the haiku was.

Thus, 'ants of of a hole' would be read, by Japanese people, as making a reference to "the joy of Springtime", if that's the 'dictionary definition'. Whatever we non-acculturated, non-Japanese make of 'ants out of a hole', what Freudian references or the like, would be (as Richard Gilbert points out) "misreadings". (Though misreadings through which the reader might bring to the poem quite interesting readings)

I also note that Gabi states on this same page and elsewhere:

"You should not try to use Japanese kigo that do not fit your cultural background or region."

Yet that is, of course, exactly what happens with all of the various EL 'kigo' lists, so, for example, we get not only a 'withered moor' in Japan (moors on islands mainly surrounded by the Pacific?) but it turns up on the USA Yuki Teiki 'kigo' list as well. The source would've been:

Travelling, sick
My dreams roam
On a withered moor.

   * (Unknown translator)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Matsuo_Basho

- Lorin

[Gabi Greve]

poem by Hosai Ozaki
as translated by Hiroaki Sato:
( i don't have the kanji/hiragana for this poem, and though Ozaki was not tied to the use
of kigo, I feel the reference is strong ....)

I kill ants as I kill them they come out

Hosai in Japanese reads

蟻を殺す殺すつぎから出てくる
ari o korosu korosu tsugi kara dete kuru



The kigo  蟻穴を出づ ありあなをいづ
仲春
蟻出づ（ありいづ）、蟻穴を出る（ありあなをでる） 
is listed in the Big Saijiki  (here in an online version, without the further explanations)
http://www.geocities.jp/tokihikok/masaji/haiku/kigo/haru/6doubutsu.html


Gabi

[Mark Harris]

Aoyagi uses "ants out of a hole" for its power as image and idea, and she is also using it to tie her poem into a vast fabric of other poems, and literatures, and beyond that a shared cultural context. Not all of us share that cultural context. In a small way, we do, now that we've had this conversation.

From Haruo Shirane's Traces of Dreams:

Haikai was known for its freedom, its ability to explore the contemporary world, and for the broad expanse of languages and subcultures embodied in the horizontal axis, but ultimately haikai poets, including Basho, gravitated toward the vertical axis, to traditional poetic topics, which became not only the object of parody and comic inversion but also the arena of haikai recontextualization and refamiliarization, in which seasonal and topographical sites were given new, contemporary form. The traditional seasonal topics and their cultural associations, however, were not simply displaced; instead, as we shall see, they provided the horizon of expectations against which the haikai poem established its newness or implied difference. The brevity of the hokku is in fact possible because each poem is implicitly part of a massive, communally shared poem.

[John Carley]

So hon'i would be the primary 'dictionary definition' of a kigo - Lorin

I guess that depends on who is writing the dictionary Lorin! But seriously, in marketing speak: hon'i adds value to kigo. It takes it on a step.

In classical Japanese poetry, each poetic toponym and seasonal word has an established essence (hon'i), which determines not only what but also how landscape should be portrayed from Professor Peipei Qiu
The Author of Bashô and the Dao an interview by Robert D. Wilson http://simplyhaiku.com/SHv3n4/features/Peipei-Qiu_interview.html

The key word here is how. You will find any number of references in ushin renga treatises and the like to the fact that a poet should always associate ideas through their poetic essence (hon'i) rather than through that which they actually percieve. Basho stood a lot of this on it's head - quite deliberately; the entire point of his frog is that it wasn't all about globeflowers, rilling streams and artistic singing.

So I'm wiith Ozaki - stamp on 'em!

Best wishes, John

[Lorin]

"Basho stood a lot of this on it's head - quite deliberately; the entire point of his frog is that it wasn't all about globeflowers, rilling streams and artistic singing." - John

ah, so he did.  8)

But in doing so, was still playing off the convention, was in dialogue with the hon'i/ accepted 'poetic essence', which has to exist for there to be a point in anyone doing that.
Like Shakespeare, here? (sort of)

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

etc

And Ozaki,  :D whose attitude to the ants is rather like that of Bruce Dawe in his poem 'A Footnote to Kendall' [allusion to Kendall's 'Bellbirds', ..." The silver-voiced bell birds, the darlings of daytime!"] which begins "Yes, I remember the little buggers..." and ends on "giant dogs... their claws click-clacking on the lino". In context of the ant hon'i, 'joys of Spring', Ozaki's ku is quite funny. He might even be alluding to all the haiku he has to read with the equivalent of 'Joy of Spring!' in them. (If so, I can certainly identify with the urge to stamp on the little buggers) Without the knowledge on the hon'i, the context it provides, the point is lost. And how many of us non-Japanese-speaking or reading, EL haiku readers and writers know the hon'i for either the translations from the Japanese that we read or the phrases on the EL kigo lists that are so often used?

- Lorin

[Lorin]

" She has presented something rather challenging: a poem written in English for English speaking readers (most of whom, presumably, are not English speaking Japanese, as FA is) and yet which is founded in a cultural environment which I am outside of.  So how am I to respond?" - Peter

Indeed.

I now realise, but only in retrospect, that I had a similar interesting experience in my one and only renku with a Japanese sabaki, done on an Australian internet site and with three Australians, one Kiwi, one American, one French person and one Indian person involved (and an English person coming in, too, at the end).  Pieces of the puzzle begin to fit. I've gone back and checked and there is, among the threads, a brief and unexplained reference to "kigo as code word". Now that I've caught the smell of hon'i for the first time, I begin to understand a little better.

So 'ants out of a hole', for Japanese people, references not only 'mid-Spring', but also 'the Joy of Spring' in kigo culture.

My personal associations with 'ants out of a hole' (especially when I find 'red' in the same haiku) are ' Terror of the Sting, Summer' rather than 'the Joy of Spring', since watching out for and navigating around bullants on the foreshore track to the beach was part of my childhood, and the music I'd be accompanying that memory with would be something bloody and Wagnerian. ( high noon/ a bullant at ten paces/ from my toes. . . they leap, and cling on as well! The pain is unforgettable. ) So overlaying my own experience/ memory with a 'Joy of Spring' interpretation would be rather like doing a hypnosis job on myself, overlaying real memories with false ones, actual experiences with ...OMG, Orwell's 1984 comes to mind!

But knowing what someone else (or a whole culture) associates with 'ants out of a hole' certainly helps in reading such a short poem as a haiku.

"Nonetheless, I do feel played with. Am I a red piano?" - Peter

If you, or we, were, you are no longer.  :) Perhaps we're red-detectives now.

I feel a loss, too... but it's mainly the loss of my naivety (again)

The whole issue is a caution against cultural insularity, on the part of any of the players.

- Lorin

[AlanSummers]

Reading all the comments I'm pleased that Fay's haiku not only compares favourably with Umberto Senegal's poem, but shows us the power, depth, and uniqueness of Japanese kigo, and why it's such a useful tool.

I don't say "useful tool" lightly, as I know it's been called the soul of haiku, but to emphasise that although the haiku may be difficult to read along the vertical axis, it's a rewarding and purposeful process.

As much as I admire Umberto Senegal's haiku, my vote in a head to head such as this, is to Fay's haiku.

Alan

[Gabi Greve]

. . I had wondered if the line "ants (coming) out of a hole"
is an established season-reference, that is to say, to be found in a saijiki?
Peter

Dear Peter and all,
please feel free to check the WKD for kigo from Japan, it covers more than 6000 by now (and growing).
http://worldkigodatabase.blogspot.com/
here in ABC order

And if you find any kigo you would like more in-depth information about, feel free to ask me, please.
I can only add so much of the hon-i  meaning of each as I find the time.
Just listing them was a major task of about 5 years.

And it is much more rewarding for me to answer to the detailed needs of haiku readers and help them understand the background and cultural context of Japanese haiku.

Many of the Gendai Haiku that Fay introduces in her daily translations feature a kigo too.

Greetings from a cold morning in Japan.
Gabi

ADD:

Here is a link to a Japanese saijiki, with AEIOU alphabet, and explanations of the hon-i
http://kigosai.sub.jp/aiu.html

Sponsored by Hasegawa Kai

But running this through google translate will not be the answer ...  >:(

.