Haiku

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For other uses, see Haiku (disambiguation).

Haiku (俳句 haikai verse?) Haiku.ogg listen (help·info), plural haiku, is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 morae (or on), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7 and 5 more respectively[1]. Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji or verbal caesura. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to parallel the three metrical phrases of Japanese haiku[2]. Previously called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century.

Contents

[edit] Kireji and kigo

Main articles: Kireji and Kigo

In Japanese haiku a kireji, or cutting word, typically appears at the end of one of the verse's three metrical phrases. While difficult to precisely define its function, a kireji lends the verse structural support,[3] effectively allowing it to stand as an independent poem. Depending on which cutting word is chosen, and its position within the verse, it may briefly cut the stream of thought, suggesting a parallel between the preceding and following phrases, or it may provide a dignified ending, concluding the verse with a heightened sense of closure.[4]

In English, since kireji has no direct equivalent, poets sometimes use punctuation such as a dash or ellipse, or an implied break, to divide a haiku into two grammatical and imagistic parts. The purpose is to create a juxtaposition, prompting the reader to reflect on the relationship between the two parts.

A haiku traditionally contains a kigo, a defined word or phrase which symbolizes or implies the season referenced in the poem.

Among traditionalist Japanese haiku writers, kireji and kigo are considered requirements; yet, as noted above, kireji are not used in English. Kigo are not always included by modern writers of Japanese "free-form" haiku and some non-Japanese haiku.

[edit] Syllables or "on" in haiku

In contrast to English verse which is typically characterized by meter, Japanese verse counts sound units (morae), known as "on". The word on is often translated as "syllable", but there are subtle differences between an "on" and an English-language "syllable". Traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively.

The word onji (音字; "sound symbol") is sometimes used in referring to Japanese sound units in English[5] although this word is archaic and no longer current in Japanese.[6] In Japanese, the on corresponds very closely to the kana character count (closely enough that moji (or "character symbol") is also sometimes used[6] as the count unit).

One on is counted for a short syllable, an additional one for an elongated vowel, diphthong, or doubled consonant, and one for an "n" at the end of a syllable. Thus, the word "haibun", though two syllables in English, is counted as four on in Japanese (ha-i-bu-n).

Most writers of literary haiku in English use about ten to fourteen syllables, with no formal pattern.

[edit] Examples

  • Possibly the best known Japanese haiku is Bashō's "old pond" haiku:
古池や蛙飛込む水の音
This separates into on as:
furuike ya
(古池   や)
(fu/ru/i/ke ya): 5
kawazu tobikomu
(蛙       飛込む)
(ka/wa/zu to/bi/ko/mu): 7
mizu no oto
(水    の  音)
(mi/zu no o/to): 5
Roughly translated:[7]
old pond
a frog jumps
the sound of water
  • Another example of classic hokku by Matsuo Bashō:[8]
富士の風や扇にのせて江戸土産
fuji no kaze ya oogi ni nosete Edo miyage
the wind of Mt. Fuji
I've brought on my fan!
a gift from Edo
  • And yet another Bashō classic:
初しぐれ猿も小蓑をほしげ也
hatsu shigure saru mo komino wo hoshige nari
the first cold shower
even the monkey seems to want
a little coat of straw

(At that time, Japanese rain-gear consisted of a large, round cap and a shaggy straw cloak.)

[edit] Origin and development

[edit] From renga to renku to haiku

Main articles: Renga and Renku

Hokku is the opening stanza of an orthodox collaborative linked poem, or renga, and of its later derivative, renku (or haikai no renga). By the time of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the hokku had begun to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun (a combination of prose and hokku), and haiga (a combination of painting with hokku). In the late 19th century, Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) renamed the standalone hokku to haiku[9]. The latter term is now generally applied retrospectively to all hokku appearing independently of renku or renga, irrespective of when they were written, and the use of the term hokku to describe a standalone poem is considered obsolete[10], although this approach has been challenged.[11].

[edit] Bashō and the appearance of independent hokku

Main articles: Matsuo Bashō and Hokku

In the 1600s, two masters arose who elevated haikai and gave it a new popularity. They were Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) and Ueshima Onitsura (1661–1738). Hokku is the first verse of the collaborative haikai or renku, but its position as the opening verse made it the most important, setting the tone for the whole composition. Even though hokku had sometimes appeared individually, they were always understood in the context of renku[12]. The Bashō school promoted standalone hokku by including many in their anthologies, thus giving birth to what is now called 'haiku'. Bashō also used his hokku as torque points within his short prose sketches and longer travel diaries. This sub-genre of haikai is known as haibun[13]. His best-known book, Oku no Hosomichi, or Narrow Roads to the Interior, is counted as one of the classics of Japanese literature[14] and has been translated into English extensively.

Bashō was deified by both the imperial government and Shinto religious headquarters one hundred years after his death because he raised the haikai genre from a playful game of wit to sublime poetry. He continues to be revered as a saint of poetry in Japan, and is the one name from classical Japanese literature that is familiar throughout the world.[15]

[edit] Time of Buson

Grave of Yosa Buson

The next famous style of haikai to arise was that of Yosa Buson (1716–1783) and others such as Kitō, called the Tenmei style after the Tenmei Era (1781–1789) in which it was created. Buson attempted to revive the values of Bashō, and rescue haiku and renku from the stultified condition into which it had sunk since Bashō's day.[16]

Buson is recognised as one of the greatest masters of haiga (an art form where painting is combined with haiku or haikai prose). His affection for painting can be seen in the painterly style of his haiku.[17]

[edit] Kobayashi Issa and a humanistic approach

No new popular style followed Buson. However, a very individualistic, and at the same time humanistic, approach to writing haiku was demonstrated by the poet Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), whose miserable childhood, poverty, sad life, and devotion to the Pure Land sect of Buddhism are evident in his poetry. Issa made the genre immediately accessible to wider audiences.

[edit] Shiki's revisions

Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) was a reformer and revisionist. A prolific writer, even though chronically ill during a significant part of his life, Shiki disliked the ‘stereotype’ haikai writers of the 19th century who were known by the deprecatory term tsukinami, meaning ‘monthly’, after the monthly or twice-monthly haikai gatherings of the end of the 18th century (in regard to this period of haikai, it came to mean ‘trite’ and ‘hackneyed’). Shiki also criticized Bashō[citation needed]. Like the Japanese intellectual world in general at that time, Shiki was strongly influenced by Western culture. He favored the painterly style of Buson and particularly the European concept of plein-air painting, which he adapted to create a style of haiku as a kind of nature sketch in words, an approach called shasei, literally ‘sketching from life’. He popularized his views by verse columns and essays in newspapers.

Hokku up to the time of Shiki, even when appearing independently, were written in the context of renku[12]. Shiki formally separated his new style of verse from the context of collaborative poetry. Being agnostic[18], he also separated it from the influence of Buddhism, with which hokku had very often been tinged.[citation needed][clarification needed] And finally, he discarded the term "hokku" and proposed the term haiku as an abbreviation of the phrase "haikai no ku" meaning a verse of haikai[19], although the term predates Shiki by some two centuries, when it was used to mean any verse of haikai[20]. Since then, "haiku" has been the term usually applied in both Japanese and English to all independent haiku, irrespective of their date of composition. Shiki's revisionism dealt a severe blow to renku and surviving haikai schools. The term "hokku" is now used chiefly in its original sense of the opening verse of a renku, and rarely to distinguish haiku written before Shiki's time[21].

[edit] Senryū

Main article: Senryū

Senryū is a poem that is written in a similar form and emphasizes irony, satire, humor, and human foibles rather than seasons; it may or may not contain a kigo and kireji.

[edit] Haibun

Main article: Haibun

Haibun (Japanese: 俳文 haikai writings) is a combination of prose and haiku, often autobiographical or written in the form of a travel journal.

[edit] Haiga

Main article: Haiga

Haiga is a style of Japanese painting based on the aesthetics of haikai, and usually including a haiku. Haiga began as haiku added to paintings, but included the calligraphic painting of haiku via brushstrokes[citation needed], with the calligraphy adding to the power of the haiku. Earlier haiku poets added haiku to their paintings, but Bashō is noted for creating haiga paintings as simple as the haiku itself[citation needed]. Yosa Buson, a master painter, brought a more artistic approach to haiga[citation needed]. It was Buson who illustrated Bashō's famous travel journal, Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior)[citation needed]. Today, haiga artists combine haiku with paintings, photographs and other art.

[edit] Kuhi

The carving of famous haiku on natural stone to make poem monuments known as kuhi (句碑) has been a popular practice for many centuries. The city of Matsuyama has more than two hundred kuhi.

[edit] Haiku movement in the West

Although there were attempts outside Japan to imitate the "hokku" in the early 1900s, there was little understanding of its principles. Early Western scholars such as Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) and William George Aston were mostly dismissive of hokku's poetic value. One of the first advocates of English-language hokku was the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. In "A Proposal to American Poets," published in the Reader magazine in February 1904, Noguchi gave a brief outline of the hokku and some of his own English efforts, ending with the exhortation, "Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets!" At about the same time the poet Sadakichi Hartmann was publishing original English-language hokku, as well as other Japanese forms in both English and French.

In France, haiku was introduced by Paul-Louis Couchoud around 1906. Couchoud's articles were read by early Imagist theoretician F. S. Flint, who passed on Couchoud's (somewhat idiosyncratic) ideas to other members of the proto-Imagist Poets' Club such as Ezra Pound. Amy Lowell made a trip to London to meet Pound and find out about haiku. She returned to the United States where she worked to interest others in this "new" form. Haiku subsequently had a considerable influence on Imagists in the 1910s, notably Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" of 1913, but, notwithstanding several efforts by Yone Noguchi to explain "the hokku spirit," there was as yet little understanding of the form and its history.

An early[when?] translation of Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi to Spanish was done by the Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz in collaboration with Eikichi Hayashiya.

[edit] Blyth

Main article: Reginald Horace Blyth

R.H. Blyth was an Englishman who lived in Japan. He produced a series of works on Zen, haiku, senryū, and on other forms of Japanese and Asian literature. In 1949, with the publication in Japan of the first volume of Haiku, the four-volume work by Blyth, haiku were introduced to the post-war world. This four-volume series (1949-52) described haiku from the pre-modern period up to and including Shiki. Blyth's History of Haiku (1964) in two volumes is regarded as a classical study of haiku. Today Blyth is best known as a major interpreter of haiku to English speakers. His works have stimulated the writing of haiku in English.

[edit] Yasuda

Main article: Kenneth Yasuda

The Japanese-American scholar and translator Kenneth Yasuda published The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, with Selected Examples in 1957. The book includes both translations from Japanese and original poems of his own in English, which had previously appeared in his book titled A Pepper-Pod: Classic Japanese Poems together with Original Haiku. In these books Yasuda presented a critical theory about haiku, to which he added comments on haiku poetry by early twentieth-century poets and critics. His translations apply a 5–7–5 syllable count in English, with the first and third lines end-rhymed. Yasuda's theory includes the concept of a "haiku moment" based in personal experience, and provides the motive for writing a haiku. His notion of the haiku moment has resonated with haiku writers in North America, even though the notion is not widely promoted in Japanese haiku.

[edit] Henderson

In 1958, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashô to Shiki by Harold G. Henderson was published by Doubleday Anchor Books. This book was a revision of Henderson's earlier book titled The Bamboo Broom (Houghton Mifflin, 1934). After World War Two, Henderson and Blyth worked for the American Occupation in Japan and for the Imperial Household, respectively, and their shared appreciation of haiku helped form a bond between the two.

Henderson translated every hokku and haiku into a rhymed tercet (a-b-a), whereas the Japanese originals never used rhyme. Unlike Yasuda, however, he recognized that seventeen syllables in English are generally longer than the seventeen morae of a traditional Japanese haiku. Because the normal modes of English poetry depend on accentual meter rather than on syllabics, Henderson chose to emphasize the order of events and images in the originals. Nevertheless, many of Henderson's translations were in the five-seven-five pattern.

[edit] Contemporary English-language haiku

Main article: Haiku in English

Today, haiku are written in many languages, but most poets outside of Japan are concentrated in the English-speaking countries.

It is impossible to single out any current style or format or subject matter as definitive. Some of the more common practices in English are:

  • Use of three (or fewer) lines of 17 or fewer syllables;
  • Use of a season word (kigo);
  • Use of a cut (sometimes indicated by a punctuation mark) paralleling the Japanese use of kireji, to contrast and compare, implicitly, two events, images, or situations.

While traditional Japanese haiku has focused on nature and the place of humans in it, some modern haiku poets, both in Japan and the West, consider a broader range of subject matter suitable, including urban contexts. While pre-modern haiku avoided certain topics such as sex and overt violence, contemporary haiku sometimes deal with such themes.

The loosening of traditional standards has resulted in the term "haiku" being applied to brief English-language poems such as "mathemaku" and other kinds of pseudohaiku. Some sources claim that this is justified by the blurring of definitional boundaries in Japan[22].

[edit] Worldwide

In the early 21st century, there is a thriving community of haiku poets worldwide, mainly communicating through national and regional societies and journals in Japan, in the English-speaking countries (including India), in Northern Europe (mainly Sweden, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands), in central and southeast Europe (mainly Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania), and in Russia.

[edit] India

In the early 20th century Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore composed haiku in Bengali. He also translated some from Japanese. In Gujarati, Zeenabhai Ratanji Desai 'Sneharashmi' popularized haiku[23] and remains a popular haiku composer.[24] In February 2008, the World Haiku Festival was held in Bangalore, gathering haikuists from all over India and Bangladesh, as well as from Europe and the US.[25][26]

[edit] Internet

Online journals that exclusively publish haiku poetry (see the list in Haiku in English) and haiku sites owned by various haiku writers can be found online, as well as scores of pseudo-haiku (also known as zappai).

[edit] Famous writers

[edit] Pre-Shiki period

[edit] Shiki and later

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Lanoue, David G. Issa, Cup-of-tea Poems: Selected Haiku of Kobayashi Issa, Asian Humanities Press, 1991, ISBN 0895818744 p.8
  2. ^ van den Heuvel, Cor. The Haiku Anthology, 2nd edition, Simon & Schuster, 1986, ISBN 0671628372 p.11
  3. ^ Brief Notes on "Kire-ji", Association of Japanese Classical Haiku, retrieved 2008-10-16
  4. ^ Haruo Shirane. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900, Columbia University Press, 2004, ISBN 9780231109918, p.521
  5. ^ T. Kondo, "In support of onji rather than jion," Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of America', 1:4, 30-31 (1978).
  6. ^ a b Richard Gilbert, Stalking the Wild Onji
  7. ^ see: Matsuo Bashō: Frog Haiku (Thirty Translations and One Commentary), including commentary from Robert Aitken’s A Zen Wave: Bashô’s Haiku and Zen (revised ed., Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).
  8. ^ Etsuko Yanagibori, BASHO'S HAIKU ON THE THEME OF MT. FUJI: FROM THE PERSONAL NOTEBOOK OF Etsuko Yanagibori, link
  9. ^ Higginson, William J. The Haiku Handbook, Kodansha International, 1985, ISBN 4-7700-1430-9, p.20
  10. ^ van den Heuvel, 1986, p.357
  11. ^ Coomler, David. Hokku: Writing Traditional Haiku in English: The Gift to be Simple. Springfield, Ill.: Octavo Press, 2001. ISBN 0-87243-255-6
  12. ^ a b Hiroaki Sato. One Hundred Frogs, Weatherhill, 1983, ISBN 0-8348-0176-0 p.113
  13. ^ Haibun Defined: Anthology of Haibun Definitions
  14. ^ Yuasa, Nobuyuki. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other travel sketches, Penguin 1966, ISBN 0-14-044185-9 p.39
  15. ^ Rimer, J. Thomas. A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature, Kodansha International 1988, ISBN 4-7700-1396-5 pp.69-70
  16. ^ Toshiko Yokota, What Does It Mean to Read Haikai Linked Verse? A Study of the Susuki mitsu Sequence in Kono hotori ichiya shi-kasen, in Simply Haiku v5n1 2007
  17. ^ Ross, Bruce. Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku, Tuttle Publishing, 1993, ISBN 0804818207 p.xv
  18. ^ Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958, p.163
  19. ^ Earl Miner, Japanese Linked Poetry. Princeton University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-691-01368-3 pbk.
  20. ^ Takiguchi, Susumu. A FALSE START? THEN, START AGAIN! - Reflections on Haikai, World Haiku Review, Volume 6 Issue 1, March 2008
  21. ^ Book review in Modern Haiku, 2003. Retrieved 2008-09-11
  22. ^ Grumman, Bob. A Divergery of Haiku, ToxanAtomyzd in Modern Haiku 34:2, 2003, 20–26
  23. ^ Article on Sneh Rashmi on website of Gujarati Sahitya Parishad (Gujarati Literary Council). In it, we read: "જાપાની કાવ્યપ્રકાર હાઈકુને ગુજરાતીમાં સુપ્રતિષ્ઠિત કરી તેમણે ઐતિહાસિક પ્રદાન કર્યું છે" ("By pioneering and popularizing the famous form of Japanese poetry called Haiku in Gujarati, he has gained a place in history").
  24. ^ Ramanathan S. & Kothari R. (1998). Modern Gujarati Poetry: A Selection. Sahitya Akedami. ISBN 8126002948, 9788126002948
  25. ^ Modern haiku Summer 2008
  26. ^ Special feature on WHF 2008 in World Haiku Review

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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