re:Virals 129

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly poem commentary feature on some of the finest haiku ever written in English. This week’s poem was

 
     PECES VOLADORES
 
     Al golpe del oro solar
     estalla en astillas el vidrio del mar.

     FLYING FISH
 
     The solar gold clash
     smashes into splinters the sea’s glass.
          — José Juan Tablada, El jarro de flores (1922) 
          (Translation from the Spanish by Danny Blackwell)

Dan Schwerin wants room to manouevre:

This feels overstated. Very little ma or space for my taste.

Lynne Rees also gets claustrophobic:

The English feels overstated. (I know it’s translated quite faithfully from the Spanish but I don’t really know how that comes across to native speakers.)

But everything is explained here, the words explicitly directing me. And this reponse isn’t because of any expectations of haiku. I’d have the same response if this was presented as a short poem, or even part of a poem.

I don’t need solar and gold.
I don’t need smashes and splinters. But I do like ‘splinters the sea’s glass.’

But these comments apart, for me the three lines don’t rise above vivid description, a scene captured/remembered. There’s no space for me within the poem and no poetic closure that allows me to travel further and reflect and expand on it through my own experience. It is what it is. An end in itself.

Clayton Beach reads Tablada within his historical context:

This is one where the musicality of the original is lost in translation and the poem suffers as a result. “Al golpe del oro solar” has a nice alliteration to it with the repeated o’s and the ol/el/ol. It’s a very spacious and sensuous line in the way it rolls off the tongue. “At the strike of the sun’s gold” might capture the falling cadence of it a bit better. Reminds me almost of Tennyson’s eagle (“like a thunderbolt, he falls”). In the second line, “estalla en astillas” also has a sonic resonance that is lost in English. If I’m reading it correctly there’s a slight cut through disjunctive syntax between lines one and two that has been smoothed over in English.

This poem comes from 1922, Tablada was the first non-Japanese to write a collection comprised entirely of haiku, and thus beats Kerouac by several decades in terms of being the first prolific writer of haiku outside of the native language.

Thus, Tablada wrote this without the aid of Blyth, without the nearly 100 years of haiku theory and trial and error that others now benefits from in terms of having a template to draw from; trail blazing is never as clean as driving on paved streets.

I think there’s also a touch of chauvinism in too harsh of a critique of this poem, in terms of the line of thought that “that’s not the way we do haiku.” It’s interesting to me to see differing interpretations of the form in other languages, as English language haiku orthodoxy can get so self-righteous at times as to attack the legitimacy of contemporary haiku in Japanese, it isn’t surprising that this poem would raise some hackles with its unconventional approach.

Nevertheless, if I find Tablada interesting, but not always fully satisfying, I still have to give credit where it is due. I think it’s better poetry than any of the hokku Pound, Lowell or Cummings were doing up to that point, though I still think Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” poems are as good as early non-Japanese haiku gets. English language haiku would take another, what, 60-70 years to have the courage of playing with the language and breaking the mold this much while still calling the results haiku?

Ajaya Mahala finds magic here:

I somehow see the magic, the observation, though limited to sensory perception of one kind—that is, visual—gives us a lot of gladdening items to fill the visual platter: flying fish; the splintered, golden surface of the sea; movement; clash . . . Too many objects do not clutter, rather they effectively render a slice of life in the turbulent sea.

Alan Summers takes the bait:

Okay, I’ll bite.
I didn’t like this at first, but in a historical
context it deserves its place.

Danny said in his email to me:
“I’m interested to see what people’s reactions are to this rather
unorthodox Latin-American haiku.”

In the context of its time, and he did have haiku in his first but lost
novel China Boat, I don’t see this as an unorthodox attempt at haiku.

In the early 20th Century a lot of attempts were titles followed by a
duostich or couplet. I quite like an alternative first line of ‘a bruise
of sun.’

Haiku continues to warp and weft, morph and twist, evolve, add and drop
approaches and variations etc. . . . etc. . . .

The author was perhaps the first to add haiku to a novel, before Jack
Kerouac, as it was written in 1902. Sadly the only manuscript was
destroyed. He is an early pioneer, and deserves his place in the history
of haiku outside Japan.

Of course I don’t see this as a haiku, but an early attempt. It feels too
‘complete,’ but lacking in that intangible fullness that an incomplete
haiku poem can achieve.

It doesn’t gather the power of The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop or The Fish by
Mary Oliver, because it doesn’t continue on its journey of fishiness and
the sun smashed against the hard surface of the water. It does resonate a
little for me, but I wonder if it could have become an untitled tercet
instead?

e.g.

a bruise of sun
smashes into splinters . . .
the sea is glass

It still feels clunky, and is still a one-image poem, can it include the
title somehow?

e.g.

flying fish:
a bruise of sun smashes
into splinters

It still feels awkward and ‘dated,’ which even hokku and other early haikai
verses by Basho; Buson; Chiyo-ni; and Issa never do.

It is worthy of its place in history, both in general/global development,
as well as by a Hispanic author, reminding us that haiku is not just
Japanese or English.

Daniel-san defends himself:

As is my wont, I find myself adding a word or two on my translation.
Obviously I have taken certain liberties in order to generate in the English version a rhyme, and thereby create a similar effect to the one that a Spanish-speaker would get when reading “solar” and “mar,” at the end of each line. As the poem includes the word “glass” alongside a reference to the beating/hitting of the sun, I chose the word “smash,” which may not be the closest word in the literal sense, but I think is a fair trade for the payoff of having a rhyme and getting an idea of the cadence in the original. And I think, overall, the rhythm of the poem is relatively unaltered in terms of the beats, so to speak.
Clayton felt that the alliteration was lost in the line “Al golpe del oro solar” and, while that may be true, I think that the musicality of “estalla en astillas” is well-matched with the equally sibilant “smashes into splinters” in my translation, the two phrases also maintaining more or less the rhythmic beats. (Although I admittedly have zero objectivity and welcome the criticism nevertheless.)
I’ve consulted other translations of Hispanic haiku with rhymes (which are common) and find that the more literal renditions completely miss the musicality, which at times, in Tablada for example, appear to be more of an active compositional motivating factor at times than content, which, as the comments above prove, led some poets to create poems that some would consider have superfluous elements, as a result of going for something more, let’s say, “poetic.”
Anyone wanting to know more, would do well to consult Ty Hadmann’s poet profile of Tablada in the Haiku Foundation archives. And also Charles Trumbull’s One Hundred Bridges.

As this week’s winner, Alan gets to choose next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be as long or short, academic or spontaneous, serious or silly, public or personal as you like. We will select out-takes from the best of these. And the very best will be reproduced in its entirety and take its place as part of the THF Archives. Best of all, the winning commentator gets to choose the next poem for commentary.
Anyone can participate. A new poem will appear each Friday morning. Simply put your commentary in the Contact box by the following Tuesday midnight (Eastern US Time Zone). Please use the subject header “re:Virals” so we know what we’re looking at. We look forward to seeing some of your favorite poems — and finding out why!
 
re:Virals 129:

 
     nil by mouth—
     peeling and dicing
     the moon
— Helen Buckingham, water on the moon (2010)