False Optics: Keiko’s Haiku Rules (Part Three)

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Haiku in the West has always had a minimalistic bent. Japanese Haiku is inherently a minimal form, but it always has been an even shorter form in English because the early translators who became famous in the West presented it as being something that was both philosophically minimal in its essence and translated it into a truncated language.

R.H. Blythe translated and wrote about haiku as always being about "zen enlightenment" and Kenneth Yasuda distilled this down to haiku always being "an aesthetic moment" that presented precise imagery and nothing else. These are both Minimalistic positions because they are boiling down the whole 250 years of haiku history into only being about one style of writing. Sure, some Japanese haiku was written in this vein, but most wasn't because in Japan haiku is thought of as a poetic form, not a philosophical vehicle.

As for the language they used when translating, Blythe ignored counting syllables and spun out translations with brevity and with such a small specific focus that he ignored a lot of what was written in the originals. As engaging and gregarious as his prose is, there is no argument about him being a minimalistic writer when it came to translation.

Yasuda did write 17 syllables out, but he also rhymed the first and the third lines all the time which doomed him to have little influence how western haiku would be written on the page, but he did have a huge influence in what the poets would write about because he did coin the term "haiku moment" which came to be the defined mindset of what mainstream haiku became.

A "haiku moment" is where the writer concisely writes in the present tense about something in the world around them that they had experienced without any showing what they felt or thought about it. Hence, you just wrote clear imagery and left it up to the reader to decide what it meant. Imagery is an important part of creative writing but deeming that the only thing you can write is imagery is a minimalistic view of writing.

The avant guard in West picked up theses minimal views of haiku and, mixing them in with theories from other writers who explained the philosophy of zen, came to the conclusion that, following the Japanese, they too could only write haiku that presented imagery without any subjective emotions by the author, and also, because Japanese writers never used any, they should never employ any of the poetical devices that western poets traditionally use.

These positions were popularized and enforced by magazine editors who were either determined that haiku in English must remain true to the Japanese prototype or else committed to making sure haiku remained a minimal poetic form. A "prototype" that was a huge misrepresentation of haiku in Japanese. 

The impetus for any list of haiku rules that you run into, past or contemporary, is to keep haiku scaled down so it is written to a preset mindset where how you write, and what you write about, is shoved into something that has a nominal range of human experience. 

The rules on the Haiku Society of America's webpage are just a set of instructions that demand you minimalize the scope of your writing to conform to the set of conditions they've presented, and if you don't follow them, then the cry comes that what you've written really isn't a "haiku." "Pseudo haiku" is generally the term you run into. Any poet who tries his hand at writing haiku generally gets thrown into the bin of "not really writing haiku" because they don't follow the prescribed style. It's monolithic.

The problem with minimalistic writing is that it can never be more than what it already is. Once you expand your style you no longer are a minimalist. So you are always in a self made box. This is the reason why since the beginnings of it all the haiku magazine editors have fought tooth and nail to keep western poetic devices out of what they publish. They can only be ideological zealots.

People had hid behind the idea that haiku must be written "exactly" in the same style of the Japanese as shown by the early translators, and the myriad of translators that came after that copied them, but in the late 1990s, Haruo Shirane, a professor of Japanese literature, began publishing books and articles that showed how the imbedded western ideas about Japanese haiku were for the greater part wrong. 

The main thrust of Shirane's writing was that this unassailable position held by the haiku community that Japanese haiku poets historically never used any established literary devices like western poets did was totally false and that the “haiku moment” idea, now so prominent in the west, was something that had been picked up as a skewed version of Masaoka Shiki’s influence on Japanese haiku in the 20the century.

This sparked an existential crisis in mainstream haiku, the minimalistic approach to writing that had been established had always been argued as a true style of literature because it was under the rubric of following literary conventions from a different culture, thus making it an intellectually valid pursuit. With this cover blown away by Shirane, the question of how haiku should go forward was a hot topic. Should western haiku start allowing the usage of metaphor, allusions, etc… and was it alright if “moments” were imagined rather than experienced directly??

This article by Brian Tasker is a touchstone into how the haiku mainstream wove an argument that would let them keep their intellectual integrity. The rationalizing cornerstone beneath this is that it doesn't matter what the history of Japanese haiku was, or if western writers had ever gotten any of the scholarship about it wrong, the fact was western haiku on its own had made its own traditions. 

As Tasker puts it "we've chosen to write haiku as a kind of poetry that stands apart from other kinds of poetry....Even though haiku elude a specific definition, there is still a haiku tradition. A Western haiku tradition and particularly a tradition of haiku in the English language."

Whether or not how sound you find this argument to be, he really isn't talking about haiku per se here, he's is talking about a minimalistic tradition that must be maintained no matter how inherently risky its intellectual foundations are. Again, this is the intrinsic problem with minimalism, it can never expand into something else, it can never grow bigger, it can only shrink smaller. So it's no surprise when towards the end of the article he writes "If we need to experiment, we could experiment by writing less for a change."

Keiko Imaoka gave what these confirmed and committed minimalist craved: a shorter way to write haiku. There's no surprise that her argument about how whittling 17 syllables down to around 11 syllables was necessary to match the content in Japanese haiku was like manna to the haiku community. Besides arguing for shorter writing, it also told them that they would be writing "like the Japanese" as well. Why else would you argue about content per syllable unless you wanted to duplicate the original language? One stone, two birds. 

Of course, this is a bit problematic. Japanese people can have trouble getting through sentences in English because their natural breathing during speech is different from English speakers, and this is more so when they encounter longer speech patterns and patterns that have a lot of diction in them. 

The only way they can get through them without stumbling is to break their speech pattern into segments that use beats to mark where the speakers takes breaths. Her writing about "writing in 3-5-3 syllables or 2-3-2 accented beats" is symptom of this. It doesn't mean that if you follow this beat pattern you are "writing like a Japanese," it means you are writing like a Japanese who is communicating in English.
 
You only have to look at her comments in the section titled "Relative Ease In Segmentation" where she clearly doesn't understand how English speakers navigate line breaks or punctuation breaks in the middle of lines. The reason why she can't navigate the second version of the haiku with a comma in the middle of the line is because she doesn't know how to breath words into speech without having a pattern of beats running through it. This is prevalent in her prose too.

The effect that "writing less" has had on the haiku community is that it changed a lot of haiku writers away from the 17 syllables that they were writing out to produce a shorter style of haiku. Shorter haiku means that the language becomes snappier and imagery is lit up more, but when you write "in the vicinity of 11 syllables" you kill the linguistic flow of your words and you flatten out speech to the point where you can't produce diction and everyone has same the tone in their words.

Imaoka wrote about how she was captivated by English language haiku and found that it was "just plain and simple language that even grade school kids could understand." Her call for shorter haiku just compounded this situation because it means longer words would be harder to include in haiku. Again, an automatic limiting that mainstream haiku writers were more than willing to accept.

Imaoka honest appraisal of western haiku as being "plain and simple" and understandable by "grade kids" is the very reason why mainstream literature has never accepted haiku as a serious form of writing. Tasker explains that “At their best, haiku are truly subversive: they question all the notions of creativity which poets hold so dear” as a salient point, but English language poets have historically been subversive and questioning about their creativity too. That's why there are different eras. It's not about being different, it's about how you use language in being different and presenting moments in grade school kid language isn't going to impress many people into believing that what you're writing is worthy literature.

By the 2010s the rise of the internet led to the situation where people from different language backgrounds could co-mingle, which has led into a giant influx of English as a second language writers into the haiku world. There wasn't much self reflection about how this was possible, i.e that the language bar was at such a basic level that non-native speakers could excel at the same level as a native speaker. So foreign writers flourished, were praised, and were published in numbers. 

Given that a second language speaker only has to follow this minimal style of haiku, it shouldn't be surprising that it happened. Haiku is so short now that grammar no longer matters. If you go through the online archives of the longtime e-zines you'll see how this is true. Sentences have evaporated into simple phrasing. The reason of it: Minimalism can only go one way: simpler and simpler. 

Just to show how monolithic minimalism is in haiku, some people are now arguing that Keiko Imaoka's rules are the standard of what haiku is in English and that all haiku written in 17 syllables really aren't haiku. I hope that these three essays about this subject show how these are suspect rules that deserve inspection before you accept them.

Also, I think it's important to know that all the information the mainstream haiku establishment gives you about their genre is really instruction on how to practice minimalism. It's something you should understood and the reason why, if you ever decide to write a haiku, it is OK to write any style, or any device, you want, just follow the form of 17 syllables with one break in it. This is the one true definition of haiku you'll ever need.

False Optics: Keiko’s Haiku Rules (Part Two)

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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.

False Optics: Keiko’s Haiku Rules (Part One)

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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.

BUSON- HEAVY LUTE

行く春や重たき琵琶の抱き心

Yuku haru ya Omotaki biwa no daki kokoro


The passing spring!
The heart of one 
holding a heavy 
lute in their arms.


In the book "Buson to Kanshi" (Buson and Chinese Poetry) the author, Narushima Yukio, argues that this haiku is an allusion to a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Changling entitled "Spring Melancholy at the Western Palace."


Cheryl Crowley in her book "Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Bashō Revival" also notes this allusion and gives this translation of the Chinese poem:

In the quiet night of the Western Palace, a hundred flowers are fragrant
I thought to roll up the jeweled blinds, but I pass the spring night in sorrow
With a pipa leaning in my arms, I gaze at the moon.
Zhaoyang is hidden in trees that are colored in pale, pale light.


The allusion brings out Buson's sense of loss with the passing of spring. The kigo of "Yuku haru" means the time period of when spring is near its end. The high humidity of summer begins when the rainy season ends and the hot tropical weather begins, with this clear demarkation between the two seasons, it's easy to have feelings of regret and sorrow when coming to grips with the fact of having to deal the soon to be here sweltering heat. 


Feelings that can be similar to a royal courtesan or consort that is facing the reality of having had fallen out of favor with the royal nobility that has put her in their palaces. And, or course, Wang Changling could have been writing about long pangs that follow the acceptance that one's love has been in vain or death has taken it away, given whatever situation that he was writing about. 


Putting the allusion aside, the image of a "heavy lute" has added a personal resonance for me because I do find the rainy season to be gloomy at times, especially if the intermittent showers and low grey cloudiness of the season lasts for more than three or four days without ever clearing up. The word "omotai" in Japanese can be translated as "gloomy of depressing" besides "heavy", so I tend to read this haiku as being about the mental state I tend to find myself in at times when spring is nearing the end.


There is a translation mistake in the picture I included with this post. The women here is holding a zither, but in the poem the word "pipa" means lute and not that. The Chinese word of "pipa" and the Japanese word of "biwa" have the same Chinese character so it's hard to understand the miss here. 


The Japanese biwa is associated with the songs sung about the Heike Monogatari, which is a tale about how the cultured ruling class is routed out of power by a clan that is less cultured in the arts, which leads into another reading of this being a metaphor of the singer lamented the passing spring the way the biwa traditionally laments the passing of the Taira clan. It's up to you to decide if you want to read in the allusion or not!

BUSON – THE HAZE

指南車を胡地に引去ル霞かな

Shinansha wo kochi ni hiki saru kasumi kana

The south pointing chariot 
leaves into
Northern hinterlands: 
the haze!!


Buson studied Chinese poetry and history and wrote many haiku that have allusions to scenes from famous Chinese poems. This haiku is built around an allusion to the Battle of Zhuolu which is recorded as having been fought in Northern China in the 26th century BC.


The battle at Zhuolu happened because a warlord from the east, named Chi You, decided to conquer the lands of Huangd Di, The Yellow Emperor. The mythology surrounding this battle is that as the soldiers of The Yellow Emperor started to finally turn the tide of the battle, Chi You magically produced a sandstorm, and then haze, which stopped the advancing enemy army in its tracks and kept it at bay.


To counter this a divine vision came to the Yellow Emperor with the design of the south pointing chariot, a cart that has a statue of man on it whose finger, because of a complicated set of gears, always points south no matter what direction the cart is pulled. This vehicle enabled the Yellow Emperor to maneuver his troops through the haze to defeat Chi You.


I have a book titled “Haiku Taikan” (A Comprehensive Survey of Haiku) which writes that the kigo of “kasumi” is well used here. “Kasumi” translates as mist, or haze, and as a kigo is defined as the atmospheric condition where enough water droplets are in the air to impede visibility. 


The book argues that the kigo combined with the act of the chariot leaving, this gives the expanded time frame of a chariot being pulled by people disappearing into the haze, as well as the the width of the hinterlands it is disappearing into, and how wide and far reaching this haze must be.


As interesting as this argument is, you have to perform quite a few mental gymnastics to get yourself into a position that lets you read Buson as giving you an bird’s-eye account of something that happened more than 4000 years before he was alive.


The only way to truly get Buson’s eyes into this haiku is to acknowledge that he has pulled the allusion of the south pointing chariot out of the mists of history to make an unstated epic simile (literally) for the haze he now finds himself in.


I’m not sure how much haze it takes to stop an advancing army in its tracks, but I think Buson once found it enough in his daily life to stop him and transmitted it to the world in an unforgettable way. 


Haze accented with an exclamation works back across the break and links to the part of the allusion that didn’t need to be restated because it is the kigo.

BUSON – FIRST FROST

Hatsushima ya Wazurafu tsuru wo tooku miru

Cranes migrate from the colder climes in Northern China and Siberia to spend the winter in Japan. Their arrival are considered a sign of the start of winter weather. The fall of the first frost makes Buson realize that the cranes will soon be arriving. 

There is no real future verb tense in the Japanese language and the dictionary form of verbs are often simply used to imply it, especially for the near future.  The use of the exclamative kireji prioritizes the first frost in Buson mind, which means the later verb is to be meant to be read as a future action. 

If he had placed the ‘ya’ at the end of the phrase about the cranes seen afar, then you could read the haiku as stating that the cranes come on the same day as the first frost. 

It is interesting that Buson used the adjective “worn and suffering” to sketch out the image of the cranes clearly. I think that this haggard condition of the cranes would be more noticeable after they have completed migration and are spending more time on the ground than in the air, so Buson must be sketching from prior observations of the cranes. It’s almost impossible to see the actual physical condition of birds while they are upon wing. 

I find Buson’s ability to mix personal memories into the scenes he writes about makes him a very unique poet. It allows him to create haiku with a spacial and temporal range that other poets can’t match. He was a man who not only saw the world around him, he reacted to it in a way that was vital and alive within it.

Art work by Akemi Karkoski, translation by James Karkoski

Buson – Fallen Plum Petals

紅梅の落花燃らむ馬の糞    与謝蕪村

Koubai no rakka moyuramu uma no fun    Yosa Buson


Probably it’s 
what’s making the fallen red 
plum petals blaze:
horse shit.


The two interesting things from a writing standpoint is the use of the verb ending  “ramu” with no actual kireji employed by Buson. 


“Ramu” is a conjugation that expresses speculation about the something in the present, 


Buson is wondering about why the fallen petals seem redder and the explanation he finds is that the horse excrement they have fallen to makes them stand out more. Fresh horse droppings are a solid dark dung pile and things that land on top of them usually stand out with depth. I like to imagine that it was Buson’s own horse that has left the now adorned poop he is admiring.


It has been argued that any letter in the Japanese syllabary can be used by as a kireji because voicing can make cuts without any of the established kireji used. We can end any phrase or sentence with any letter of our language depending on the context or grammatical pattern the final word is used in, so can the Japanese. Indeed, all of the self proclaimed puncuation-less haiku in English is proof of this being true.


I contend that the “moyuramu” followed by “uma”  makes a “mu - um” voicing that forces a slight pause between the two sounds and this is just enough a cut in the phrasing to call it one. If you don’t agree with this assessment, then your translation of the haiku would move “horse shit” to being placed right before “what’s” to get the uninterrupted flow of having no break.


I think having the break is the whole poetry in this haiku because I have to work through a line of thought before I can see the main image of the blazing red petals. After I reading the haiku, I must to stop and first see the dark horse shit in my own mind before I can move on to 
see how it’s making the petals seem brighter, a process that in the end leads me to see the redness of the petals in sharper definition. In my mind, this sharpness is lost if you decide to ignore the break. The power of the break is what makes haiku poetry.


Needless to say, the fresh invention of using the disparaging image of dung to bring out the beauty of the red petals has made this a very memorable haiku.

Buson – Warbler Mouth Opening

うぐいす の啼くやちひさき口明て　　　与謝蕪村

Uguisu no naku ya Chihisaki kuchi aite     Yosa Buson


The bush warbler 
will let 
loose it’s call! 
It’s mouth is slightly opening …


The first thing to notice about this haiku is that ‘ya’ is placed at the the eighth counting spot, breaking the haiku in an unusual spot.


‘Ya’ is an interjectory particle that functions, to quote Haruo Shirane, “as a light exclamation that creates overtones.” Here it functions to alert the reader that Buson is excited about his realization about what the bush warbler is about to do.


‘Ya’ can be used at any break in a sentence and in haiku and it is usually used in the 5th counting spot to highlight the kigo or placed at the ending of phrasing at 12 to bring attention to the description there within. 


“Kana”, the other exclamatory often used, is an ending particle that always occupies the 16th and 17th spots in haiku. It carries a little more emotional weight that ‘ya’ does, and since it is always is placed last it gives the poet a anchor of sound to write the syntax of the rest against.


Having the written the above I’ll add, “ya” represents an intellectual reaction to something whereas “kana” shows a deeper emotionally charged state of mind.


This is a famous haiku that shows all the qualities of Masaoka’s Shiki’s ideas about ’shasei’ sketching from life style of writing that could be found in haiku history, making Buson a poet whose brilliance Shiki brought to the modern world’s attention. It is also argued that all the ‘i’ sounds that are in the phrasing after the break are a harkening back to Matsuo Basho’s keen and clear aesthetical style of poetry in contrast to what was being written before Shiki’s influence.


As for the meaning, well, any bird must open its mouth before it sings, but if you check out any video on-line of Japanese bush warblers singing in the wild, you’ll notice that these birds will always slightly open their mouths, pause, and then open wide to belt out with their notes. I’d imagine they first open up to gulp air into their lungs, enabling them to get the unusual volume of sound they produce. Buson must have had caged warblers and have spent time watching them, which is why he gets excited when one first breaks its beaks, he knows it is building up for a song!

Buson: Farther Lights

Buson’s verb use lets us into the world where he contrasts a scene against a scene in his memory, making this a haiku which traverses time in a way that most haiku don’t. We’ve all had the experience of the changing seasons affecting the natural lighting around us, so the visual imagery of the haiku isn’t striking per se, but what does stand out is the exclamation he ends the first line with, which turns the haiku from just a statement about the faltering light into a metaphoric image of what the feeling of the coming autumn is like. The exclamation softens the image and lets us absorb it into our memory and draw out from own experinces the first soft appoach of fall weather. This is also a good example of how Buson is able to present a wider visual spacial image than other haiku writers, he is master at giving space and time to the reader to contemplate.  Art work by Akemi Karkoski, translation by James Karkoski.

Haiku: A Form Not A Style

(photo courtesy of Kayoko Sato)

There is no unequivocal doubt about the fact that many Western ideas about Japanese haiku have been completely wrong. How these wrong ideas about came into fashion is probably something that happened because haiku opened up to the West in an era when ideas about poetry were being rethought, but it is now paramount for poets in the West to come to the truth that the idea that Zen is the underlining tradition that defines the haiku genre is false and must be discarded.

Honestly, it is quite frightening to see it being still argued by people serious about poetry. It was more than unquieting to see Stephen Adams in “Poetic Designs” (pg. 99) offer this up as the definition for what the form of haiku is:

“most poets imitate not its formal pattern (or its other elaborate Japanese conventions) but it’s paradoxes and logical dislocations, the Zen spirit that underlies the tradition and that seems compatible with Western theories like imagism.”

The reason why that “Zen spirit, a.k.a haiku” is compatible with theories like imagism is because translators have mistakenly made it so. And there are no better examples of this than the two haiku that Adams used in his book.

The first is by Matsuo Basho:

On the wide seashore
a stray blossom and the shells
make one drifting sand.

To honest about it, some haiku translations are so far away from the original that it is quite hard to be sure of what haiku it is if the original isn’t quoted. Adams got these translations from a book by William Howard Cohen, “To Walk in Seasons: An Introduction to Haiku”, and in its preface Cohen states “these translations are freely made poems based on the originals” and he since he didn’t bother to include the original he was working from, one has to make an educated guess of what Basho haiku is being dealt with here. I’d think that it was this:

波の間や小貝に混じる萩のちり

Nami no ma ya kogai ni majiru hagi no chiri

“Nami” is “wave”
“no” is the possessive (‘s) which translates to “of”
“ma” means “interval” or “pause”
“ya” is a interjection that is an exclamation (!)
“Kogai” is “small shells”
“ni” is “in” or “at”
“majjiru” is the verb of “mix”, “mingle” or “blend”
“hagi” is “Japanese Bush clover tree” that have pink or red blossoms “no” is the possessive (‘s) which translates to “of”
“chiri” is “dust”,”trash” or “rubbish”

To put this into a more poetic form:

The pauses between waves! 
Pink bush clover 
rubbish 
mixes 
with the small shells. 

The first thing to say about this is that the Japanese bush clover bloom many small blossoms that fall and can scatter as much as the cherry blossoms do, although not quite as dramatically, which makes it very improbable that Basho was writing about a single blossom as Cohen gave us.

Besides this, the translator also changed quite of few of the images images around, he added in “seashore” when none was mentioned, proffered “drifting sand” instead of the “pause of the waves” devalued the “bush clover” into a nondescript “blossom”, changed “rubbish” into “stray” and ignored the size of the shells and depersonalized it by ignoring the exclamation Basho used to point out his emotional attachment to the scene.

Cohen’s rewrite simply erases all the subjective use of language that the original uses and so blurs the descriptive elements of the haiku into an objective act of writing, thus changing the haiku from a poet on the shore expressing delight at the beauty of an occurrence in nature into a tour de force image that paints an impersonal view of a wide expanse of nature.

Cohen gives you the sense that this is a completely deserted shoreline, something which is impossible in the Japanese because the language is implicit in having Basho at the shoreline describing the scene. In Japanese exclamations are only used as spoken particles by an “I” speaker, which in haiku means the poets themselves. When we see an exclamation point used at the end of a sentence we English speakers also understand that what it is attached to is something that is being spoken by someone and it is the same for Japanese speakers.

The whole idea that this haiku has “the Zen spirit” which Adams states as being “its paradoxes and logical dislocations” is immediately undermined by this because the heart of the language of haiku, especially the ones that use exclamatory interjections (of which there are plenty) immediately shows a different thought process than what Adams is paraphrasing from Cohen.

No one has to be a Zen adept to understand this, all you have to do study the Japanese language a little to understand that Basho never could write what Cohen has ascribed to him. Poets who write with exclamations are making emotional connections with what they experience in nature and are not involved in paradoxes or dislocations of thought.

The second haiku is by Kobayshi Issa and it does follow the original a bit more:

White, sifted mountain 
reverberates in the eyes 
of a dragonfly 

遠山が目玉にうつるとんぼ哉

Touyama ga medama ni utsuru tonbo kana

“Touyama” is “distant mountain”
“ga” is a particle the makes the noun it follows the subject
“medama” is “eyeballs
“ni” is “in”
“utsuru” is verb meaning “reflect”
“tondo” is “dragonfly”
“kana” is an interjection that is exclamation

The mountains far 
are reflected 
in their 
eyeballs, 
the dragonflies! 

It’s hard to understand how Cohen got “white, sifted” when the original only says “far mountain”. It might have been used to imply that the mountains are snow covered, but the “kigo” (seasonal word) for “dragonflies” means that the haiku is set in the autumn, so it is hard to see how having them white fits in with the implied context that the seasonal word brings to this haiku.

The verb “reverberate” he used is acceptable, but it implies that the dragonflies actually have the mountains in their eyes, and the footnote that he put on this haiku in his book actually states that:

“This beautifully evoked encounter between the tenuous and the permanent recalls the Buddhist idea of the unreality of the visible world, in that the great mountain exists momentarily in the insect’s eye even as the great world exists in the mirror of the mind for the brief instant that is life.”

No one in Japan believes that the dragonflies actually have the mountains reflected it their eyes because the opening image of “far mountains” parenthetically makes it implausible to be so. What the “far mountains” at the opening of the haiku do is get the reader’s eyes up into the air which make you see the image of the dragonflies, posited at the last line and accented by the exclamation, as being airborne.

This makes you realize that Issa is punning about the dragonflies’ eyeballs reflecting the mountains because he is using it a device to imply something not mentioned in the haiku. Dragonflies are very active when it’s warm, and since they are flying about it means it is a clear blue sky autumn day, making easy to imagine that it is so clear that Issa might feel that the tiny dragonflies are able to see the mountains too.

It’s often said that the reader’s personal experience is what makes a haiku and what I’ve written above is based on my personal experiences of seeing the dragonflies fly around my house and over the rice paddies that checker board the area I live in. This doesn’t mean that you can’t read this haiku as being about one dragonfly as Cohen did (the Japanese language really doesn’t use plurals) and the dragonflies don’t have to be airborne either. However, one thing that you can’t read out of the haiku is that Issa has told you that he subjectively feels that the dragonflies have the mountains in their eyes, which is what Willard Howard Cohen’s translation did completely.

The phrase of “me in utsuru” (literally means “reflects in the eyes”) is an idiomatic expression that means “meet my eyes” or “to be able to have seen” and this echoes in the phrase of “medama ni utsuru” that Issa uses in the haiku. So, there is a bit of verbal play being employed to pull off the implied meaning in this haiku. This is, of course, quite contrary to Cohen’s belief that “deep dish imagery” was the way most haiku was written when he explained in his book that:

“we can put our fingers on one of the main devices by which the haiku achieves its characteristic effects. This consist of a simple ‘charged’ image with atmospheric, emotional of ‘mood’ effects. The ‘charged’ image is a way of conveying intense emotional content through a simple objective image.”

Cohen’s “charged image” theory is really only a paraphrasing ideas about the “deep image” style of writing which was a “stylized, resonant poetry that operated according to the Symbolist theory of correspondences, which posited a connection between the physical and spiritual realms” which is “narrative, focusing on allowing concrete images and experiences to generate poetic meaning.”

Unfortunately, to repeat the point I made above, the language that the Japanese haiku poets used immediately rules out this style of writing because they wrote with exclamations that colored subjective emotions onto the images they wrote with, which is something that the “deep image” was never about.

Exclamation becomes a kind of a trigger that alerts the reader that the poet is emotionally moved by what they are experiencing and then they go on to explore or express that emotion in the rest of the haiku. I think the two haiku being talked about here are good examples of how this works with the exclamation being set at the beginning and the end of haiku. Basho expresses wonder at the pauses in the waves and then fills in the reason why after, and Issa builds up the reflection in an eyeball and then gushes out what eyeball it is.

Having said this, it is important to note that I am not saying that there has never been any haiku written with “pure imagery”, or that Basho and Issa themselves never wrote anything but exclamatory haiku, but there is no getting around that fact that the “main way” the great haiku of the past was written is with exclamations.

The irony of Stephen Adams’ passage about haiku is that it is in a section titled ‘Stanza and Form’ because Adams explains absolutely nothing about the “form” of haiku. Indeed, he simples throws the idea of haiku as a form under the bus by writing “most poets imitate not its formal pattern (or its other elaborate Japanese conventions)”. Instead, he talks about how it “seems compatible with Western theories like imagism and “creates an implied metaphor by juxtaposing elements.”

What Adams is really telling you is that haiku isn’t a “literary form”; per se, rather it is only a poetic sensibility that is defined by a narrowed style of writing. This is something that the Japanese find quite absurd because they see the genre as a form and a form only, not a defined and regulated poetic style. It would be like arguing that a sonnet could only be written with paradox and bright imagery.

Another interesting thing is that Adams’ choice of apt examples of haiku in English is from a translator that is not known at all in the haiku world. Cohen’s translations do have a poetic heft to them that you rarely find in original English language haiku, but this isn’t question of Cohen’s ability as a writer, it is about the narrow range of possibilities that his ideas about writing give to haiku. Ideas that didn’t have a very long life cycle with our poets anyway, and ones that ignore all the possibilities that the Japanese can offer to us.

I can only unpoetically say it: it is time to flush this idea that a “poetic style” is what defines haiku as a “poetic form or stanza.” If one takes a look at what this “form” in Japanese original is, at the bare minimum it is a stanza form which calls for two breath pauses, one longer than the other with some kind of a cut between the two. If you want to count syllables, then this pretty clearly shows that it needs to be on an even number rather than the 17 that the original has. As for the poetic sensibility, that is up to the individual poet to find best what suits their talents.

And who knows, maybe there might be a day when people who write books to explain poetics will find enough original English language haiku written well enough to actually learn what one is. To be fair, Adams isn’t the real culprit here, so he can be let off the hook. It’s the people who have been writing haiku that have set it in such a deplorable state that it is neither been explained as plausible poetry in translations from the east nor written as believable original poetry in the west.