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Now that we have an understanding of how Keiko Imaoka only had a basic grasp of English grammar, it's time to turn to her statement of how "17 English syllables convey a deal more information than 17 Japanese syllables.”
She also relates how "many bilingual poets and translators in the mainstream North American haiku scene agree that something in the vicinity of 11 English is a suitable approximation of 17 syllables, in order to convey the same amount of information".
The problem with these statements is that there is no written article that shows how this true. So it is a hypothesis that really has no proof to back it up. It shows how haiku scholarship in the west has a history of taking things at face value, especially if it is a native Japanese who espouses them.
By saying "bilingual poets and translators" I think it is probably a safe bet that she means native Japanese speakers who were active in English language haiku circles. It's all well and good to listen what a native Japanese has to say about haiku written in the English language, but it's another thing to simply take what they have said without critically judging it.
Having gotten the grammatical explanation of English quite wrong, it's very possible "the translators" could have gotten the syllabic equivalency part wrong as well. As far as I know, there isn't anything in print that explains the how and whys of English haiku needing to be shorter than 17 syllables.
So for now, the only thing to do is to look at the way Keiko Imaoka translated from the Japanese into English to see if we can discover the process which shows the reason why for shortened syllable counts.
The statement of "convey a deal more information" is an extremely difficult one to prove unless you go through a dictionary. The problem with taking things out of a dictionary is that you don't get direct translations, you get the equivalent in English, which is a different thing.
Every language has it strategies and thought processes in putting thoughts and emotions into language, including different ways to express the same things, i.e. polite language, slang, implied language etc..and as varied as these can be in your own language, they will be doubly so when translating from another language where cultural differences are thrown into the mix.
Cultural differences usually mean different ways of seeing things and the translations that Imaoka uses to show how 5-7 structure is a natural act for Japanese speakers clearly shows this. The first example she gives is a slogan used during World War II to show how the populace at home is willing to accept sacrifices for the war effort:
hoshigarimasen(7) katsumadewa(5) : "we want nothing till we win (the war)"
Leaving the horrid grammar of this translation aside, slogans in English tend to be short, snappy and rhythmical in nature to catch our attention: "Want not, 'til victory's got" So yes, we naturally shorten thoughts to make it catchy and easy to remember, but this isn't so for Japanese speakers where elegant phrasing is what makes it memorable and pleasing to the ear: "We don't want anything until it has been won."
So, by using proper grammar to translate trying to catch the manner in which the Japanese actually express this sentiment, it ends up with the syllable count that only doesn't match the original because I've used a contraction in making the negative part of this statement.
Other cultures react to different language cues because words have overtones that express implications that are imbedded in native speakers.
kono dote-ni(5) noboru-bekarazu(7) keishichou(5) : "Do Not Climb This Levee - The Police Department"
The word "bekarazu" shows that the order posted on this sign is stated by an authority that has the right to issue it. So, a translation that tries to incorporate that would be something along the lines of :
"You must not climb upon this embankment: The Metropolitan Police Department"
where we end up with 21 syllables.Of course, posted signs in English never are written like this because short, direct, pithy statements are commands which we naturally expect: "Posted Property","No Entrance","No Trespassing" etc…
Aphorisms and proverbs can have the same meaning but the way of stating them are different. Because of Shakespeare we are familiar with this:
owariyokereba(7) subete yoshi(5) : "All's well that ends well"
But the sentiment in Japanese is expressed a little differently:
"If the ending comes out as you like, everything is well," which is 2 syllables more syllables than the Japanese.
This suffers from a lack of articles:
hotaru-no hikari(7) mado-no yuki(5) : "the light of fireflies, snow by the window"
"The lights of the fireflies, the snow by the window" which counts to 13 syllables.
Turning to Imaoka's haiku translations:
yuku haru-ya (5) tori naki uo-no me-ni namida (12) - Basho
spring passing -
birds cry, tears in the eyes of fish
"The passing of Spring! The birds cry, tears are in the eyes of the fish." Which is 16 syllables.
neko-no meshi shoubansuru-ya (12) suzume-no-ko (5) - Issa
sampling the cat's food -
a baby sparrow
The Japanese verb of "shoubansuru" doesn't mean "sampling" as translated above, it means "accompanying a main guest at a meal or a feast and be treated with hospitality," which usually means it's for free.
"Accompanying for free the cat at its meal! A baby sparrow." 17 syllables.
This translation seems to me to be childlike in its construction, so let's put into an adult like phrasing:
ware-to kite asobe-ya (9) oya-no nai suzume (8) - Issa
come play with me -
you motherless sparrow
"Come along and play with me! A sparrow without any mother." 16 syllables.
uguisu-no naku-ya (8) chiisaki kuchi akete (9) - Buson
uguisu singing - (uguisu : a nightingale-like bird)
with the small mouth open
"The bush warbler shall sing! Its tiny mouth is opening….”
Base verbs usually indicate the future tense in Japanese, which is why I used "shall" in the above. 14 syllables. I could have went with "is going to sing" which would have made it 17 syllables as well and would make it more poetic in tone.
dou owaretemo (7) hitozato-o (5) watari-dori (5) - Issa
hunted mercilessly
migrating birds still
fly over towns. 15
"Even though hunted they still come where humans are, the migrating birds”which is 17 syllables.
Looking at these examples, it is hard to see anything that supports the contention that 17 syllables in Japanese amounts to around 11 syllables of information in English.
Of course, it's easy to compact down the English language down to fewer syllables because we often use condensed language for effect, but that doesn't mean English is inherently shorter than Japanese because we can express the same amount of information in longer sentences as well.
Native Japanese speakers tend to have trouble with articles on nouns in English as well as with assonance and tone because their language doesn't have these tools of expression in it. Although their language does have a conjugation system for verbs that works similar to our use of auxiliary verbs, they often have problems with the implications that come when we use them. Just because the use of such things make English seem "longer" for them doesn't really mean that it really is.
Putting things into proper sentences, using articles on nouns and various auxiliary verb usages doesn't make English inherently longer, it means it just has different strategies to present and share information and emotional responses to this information. Proper use of language also means elegant expression.
This whole "too much information" argument really isn't about difference between the language, it's is about the use of "minimal" language in English language haiku because it makes it easier for Japanese people like Imaoka to digest and experience what they are reading.
The question of Minimalism has always been around in English language haiku. It plays a big part in the reason why Keiko Imaoka's article has gained credence in the haiku community which I'll discuss more about in the third part of this essay.
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False Optics: Keiko's Haiku Rules (Part One)
In the mid-1990s Keiko Imako wrote an essay that has been influencing haiku written in English since. It is the document that informs the style of haiku that you'll find in any mainstream haiku publication either in print or on-line.Imaoka is a surprising candidate for being the intellectual leader of haiku in the west. She tells us that she had to learn Japanese literature in school, begrudgingly so, to borrow her own phrase, and since traditional Japanese were verse forms seemed boring and irrelevant she could never imagine herself ever writing in them.
Her interest in haiku started after she came to America where she found that "There was no specialized vocabulary, no archaic grammar to contented with in English haiku; just simple and plain language that even grade-school kids could understand." So, how does someone with minimal training in Japanese haiku become the voice of how it should be written in the English language?
She did it by comparing the abilities of both languages and arguing that Japanese is a much more grammatically flexible than the English language because it's grammatical particles make it possible to for word units to be rearranged in many ways "without altering its core message." This "remarkable malleability and redundancy of the Japanese language…allows for a multiple of options in expressing a single thought. In languages such as English and its relatives whose grammar are heavily dependent on word order, haiku must and will take a much different form from that in Japanese.”
This "remarkable malleability" stands in contrast to the English language which "owes much of its grammatical simplicity to the fact that the word order plays a major role in determining the relationships between words and phrases (subject, object, etc.). In such a language, words and phrases cannot be moved about freely without changing the meaning of a sentence.”
The reason why the Japanese language has this malleability is "because of grammatical particles (joshi) that are suffixed to nouns and mark their syntactic relationships, word units become independent and can be moved about more freely without altering it's core message."
Ok, but doesn't the English language have things that attach "to nouns and mark their syntactic relationships" too? We call them articles though, and we what we call particles can not only relate to nouns but with verbs as well. And we also have pronouns that mark relationships. These are part and parcel of our grammatical structure, so how does having particles (joshi) make Japanese more malleable than English?
Imaoka gives this statement sentence as an example, "Mother gave it to the kitten" and states that these "words cannot be rearranged without altering the meaning," and follows up by giving six examples of how you can do that with this sentence when it is in Japanese. But, isn't the idea that in English this sentence can't be rearranged a bit preposterous?
Mother gave it to the kitten.
Mother, to the kitten, gave it.
To the kitten, mother gave it.
The core meaning hasn't been changed at all. We can change things around because the particle, the article and the pronoun in this sentence mark out relationships that make units which can be moved, the exact same thing that Imaoka tells us that the Japanese particles do.
As for the number of ways you can change this sentence, the English language has more articles than the Japanese so if you replace "the" with an "a" in the above you' ve now reached six ways of stating the sentence. "It" is a pronoun that can be changed because the Japanese word of "sore" (it) which Imaoka used can also be translated as the pronoun of "that," so between using the two articles and two pronouns it's now up to at least twelve ways of rearranging and maybe more because using "that" means they are more ways to rearrange the grammar than there is with "it”.
I came to Japan in late 1990, which is in the same time frame as when Imaoka wrote this article, and it was weird the way the learned class over here saw the English language. They all had studied it from junior high school through university, in same cases still after, and for some reason that gave them the confidence that they understood English as well as they understood their own native language. The general consensus was that English wasn't as sublime as the Japanese language, which is what Imaoka is really telling you when in the article she writes "more flexible", "grammatical simplicity", "more freedom", "further flexibility", and "a multitude of options in expressing a single thought.”
At first, back then I would bristle at some of that inane comments about the English language that were made by some Japanese interested in English, but in time I just started laughing at the farcical nature of it. It is very presumptuous for a speaker of a second language to instruct a native speaker about the grammatical structure of their birth language.
Of course, this was over thirty years ago and Japanese ideas about how their language is more tactful than English have disappeared and the acknowledgment that English is as sublime as their own language is widely accepted now, but this article, which still has relevancy to how haiku is perceived and written, was written back in time when there were certain attitudes that colored Japanese people's minds about the English language. The only way to react to the statement by Imaoka of "the available options in English would be "Mother gave it to the kitten yesterday," and "Yesterday, mother gave it to the kitten," is to understand it as being nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of English grammar.
The Japanese school system spends a lot time drilling formal English grammar into the students because the verb in Japanese is always at the end of the sentence, making English, where the verb is in the middle, a difficult language for the Japanese to learn. Imaoka writing that English is "heavily dependent on word order" is a symptom of this.
Having a strict "word order" makes it easier for her understand our language but native English speakers don't need as much "ordering" as she does and can and do break the rules to speak intelligently and convey meaning to others. Colloquial language and poetic license are a huge part of the way we converse and create expression with a multiplicity of meanings, things which Imaoka was limited in using.
Plus, Japanese speakers have a lot of trouble with intonation, which is how a native speaker expresses emotion into words, a thing that is naturally brought out when we invert grammar, which is the "multitude of options in expressing a single thought" that Imaoka states as our language intrinsically lacking in comparison to her own native tongue.
She also told us that "17 English syllables convey a deal more information than 17 Japanese syllables," a statement which will be examined in another essay. But, the point of this first essay should be clear enough: Keiko Imaoka didn't understand English grammar well enough to write authoritatively about it.
The Haiku Experiment 