THF Galleries: Photo Haiku of Hiroyuki Tsuda
Hiroyuki Tsuda
The Haiku Foundation honors the work of contemporary masters of the dual art of haiga: visual image wedded to haiku. This month’s featured artist is Hiroyuki Tsuda.
A haiku poet, Tsuda was born i\on Dec. 1966 in Chiba-Prf. Japan. He received a bachelor’s degree in science from Kobe University, and began to write haiku in 2002, first publishing in May, 2011.
He does not belonged to any haiku associations. He loves classical and modern literature, photography, travel, and is currently living in Nagano Prefecture. Japan. He has been a member of the Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center (CINIC) from 2018.
He offers the following Artist’s Statement:
It has been three years since I began to read English haiku. I took the opportunity of reading a haiku (“hokku”) anthology from Basho to Shiki in English to begin with. All of those finely translated haiku were so heartful that I felt as if I read them in Japanese. And then, I also began to translate my original haiku into English, and became interested in American-European haiku. Now, I’m delighted to be able to share the same sense by words with another language world.
Generally speaking, there are some different points between Japanese traditional and American-European haiku besides their language. Japanese traditional haiku poets insist on seasonal words and the fixed form, but it seems that American-European ones have broad-mindedness included. I believe that is because there are different manners to see nature, and rhythms to sound beautiful among each culture. Japanese haiku poets and haiku fans should consider that, even in Japanese traditional haiku, the conditions to be needed as poetry are not only the seasonal words and the fixed forms.
Although Japanese haiku has about 100 to 150 years of history from the age of Shiki, it was only recently when I learned that American-European haiku also has an almost equivalent history. Furthermore, there are few examples to introduce American-European haiku to Japanese haiku poets and fans, so many of them have no concern about them and don’t know its history and diversity. I hope that this situation will change in the future, and our communication between the two worlds will develop.
