Kawahigashi Hekigodo tr. Ueda

Comments (3)

1. An ontological verse, in the deep sense of the term, applied to haiku craft.

   Am I right, Keith, in saying that this verse has only 15 onji? Then again, Hekigotō departs from orthodox haiku form here.

   As for me, it does not really matter. I look at the verse for what it is: a form of ontological enlightenment.

   I have always loved philosophy, and I prefer a verse that makes me wonder to a verse written according to the canon of haiku rules but leaves me cold.

   Obviously, if this verse were written today, it wouldn’t stand a chance of being published… and that is a pity.

   And yet, humans do not inhabit a world of stable objects. We live in a world continuously generated by attention, intention, and action.

   I could travel for several minutes, every day, inside this verse — and that is a gift from Hekigotō.

   1. Thanks, Sebastién. In onji / morae it’s broken down to 6+5+4 but there is a technical analysis well beyond my knowledge that makes it equivalent to 17 through a poetic phenomenon to do with the transfer of beats, known as ji-amari (hyper-meter) and ji-arazu (hypo-meter). You’re on your own there…

      Hekigodō / Hekigotō was one of a number of Japanese haiku poets in the early part of the 20th century who broke with tradition in several ways. Concerning morae count, Bashō himself had a few that don’t ‘conform,’ but for some very long haiku indeed, try Ippekiro.

      I agree that contemplation, insight, enlightenment are of the essence in haiku: part of the elusive ‘haiku spirit.’ But that would take another short essay.

      One or two contemporary ELH editors are enlightened enough to take haiku of a ‘philosophical’ nature and from Thursday next week we have a couple alongside some from the Japanese classics . Even without mentioning Issa’s ‘little snail’ and ‘dewdrop world’ and ‘we walk this world above Hell gazing at flowers’ or Soseki’s ‘without knowing why, we love this world where we come to die.’ There’s also a ‘philosophical’ verse in this week’s re:Virals (by Ravi Kiran / tsuri-doro) and a commentary from you would be most welcome!

2. Another syntactically continuous haiku.

   蝿打つまで蝿叩なかりし
   hae utsu made haetataki nakarishi
   —Kawahigashi Hekigodo

   蝿 hae fly (the insect)
   打つ utsu to strike, hit, swat
   まで made until
   蝿叩 haetataki (sometimes haetara) flyswatter (compound of 蝿 (fly) + 叩 (something that strikes) from tataku to strike or bash)
   なかりし nakarishi: negative of to be/exist, with し shi, here as past tense auxiliary.

   until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter

   Or,

   Until I hit the fly, the fly-swatter did not exist.
   —tr. Makoto Ueda

   Hekigodo was a protégé of Shiki’s along with Kyoshi. They split after Shiki’s death. Hekigodo liked to push the boundaries of haiku, while Kyoshi was a traditionalist and became editor of the prestigious journal Hototogisu

   This famous haiku is a statement. It is assertive. It is philosophical in content. It is epigrammatic. It is another verse with just one theme, and can be written as a single sentence; although Ueda’s inversion with a comma separating the two clauses has more of a haiku feel about it for us. And it is in the past tense, although some translators have introduced “this” fly-swatter or even “this” fly to get around what appears to be an (another!) inconvenient breach of ELH convention, e.g. “until I hit the fly ‘this’ was not a fly-swatter”. The verse could equally well have been part of week three (insightful —aha!—verses that comprise statements) or week five (verses in the past tense) of this month’s Haiku of the Day. It has a good dose of haikai humour. What makes it for me is not only the humour, but the apparent paradox, a koan-like challenge to meditate.

   There is no canonical cut in it; -shi is here used as the past auxiliary. Or is there? That’s discussable, I think (‘keri’ is also used as a perfective verb auxiliary and as a kireji at the end of a verse). Nevertheless… Hekigodo has ‘sort-of’ cut the verse at the end with an old past form customarily followed by a noun, according to online grammars. Leaving the verse somewhat hanging, waiting for something… And that ‘something,’ which might be said to bring it to a present moment, is I suggest the unwritten complementary part which the reader intuits and adds:

   “until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter… ”
   “…but there is now!”

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