The clear waterfall;
Falling into the ripples –
Green pine needles.

This is another straightforward summer hokku by Bashô, and it provides a good example of how an old hokku is put into English.

The original is literally

clear waterfall ya  waves in falling green pine-needles

Ya is the cutting word in the original that is not only used to separate the two parts of the hokku, but also marks a strong and definite pause so that the reader may focus on the clear waterfall before continuing on to the rest of the hokku.  In English such a pause is generally best represented by a semicolon:

The clear waterfall;

And then to add the rest, we need a long connective pause to indicate that what we are talking about in the second line is fully revealed in the third line; so we add a dash, like this:

Falling into the ripples –
Green pine needles.

So the completed verse again is:

The clear waterfall;
Falling into the ripples –
Green pine needles.

We need not go further in Japanese cutting words, because we do not write in Japanese.  It is sufficient to say that their job is done in English — and done even better — by punctuation.  So the separation of the two parts of the hokku is provided by either a semicolon, a comma, an exclamation point, a dash, or a question mark, depending on which is required.  But a period is used only at the end of a hokku, because its finality is inappropriate as a connective mark, and of course the two parts of a hokku are always connected.

Let’s look again at the hokku:

The clear waterfall;
Falling into the ripples –
Green pine needles.

It is a standard hokku, meaning that it can be easily divided into its component elements — setting, subject, and action. 

The setting is “the clear waterfall.”
The subject is “green pine needles.”
The action is “falling into the ripples.

We can write innumerable hokku using these three elements, which may be combined in differing order.

David

A few old hokku cannot be translated directly into English and still make sense to the average reader.  For example, Issa wrote a summer hokku:

dai no ji ni nete suzushisa yo sabishisa yo

Blyth translates the first part (dai no ji ni nete) as

“Lying with arms and legs outstretched”

That is about as close as one can get in meaningful English.  But what the line really says in a literal translation is,

“dai’s character in sleeping.”

That requires explanation.  Hokku generally used two different and combined writing systems — Chinese characters borrowed into Japanese, and the more “cursive” phonetic hiragana “alphabet.”  Issa is saying that he is sleeping in the shape of the Chinese character the Japanese pronounce as dai, meaning “big.”  The shape of the character dai looks like a simplified body with arms and legs outstretched, which brings us right back to Blyth’s translation.  Blyth does not translate literally what Issa says, but he certainly tells us the overall meaning of the verse, which is sometimes the best one can do.

One might translate it,

Lying limbs outstretched,
How cool it is!
How lonely!

The verse is a bit top-heavy, but we must make allowances when translating.

Issa used this in other verses as well, among them

dai no ji ni funbatagatte hirune kana

dai’s character in stretched-out midday nap kana

Stretched out
In the character dai –
A midday nap.

Not as good as the first verse, but used here merely as an illustration.

An American reader will of course not get what is meant by “in the character dai” without explanation, and that is why hokku cannot always be directly translated into English.

It is important to point out that none of this is necessary to know when writing original hokku in English.  It is just a sidelight on translation from Japanese originals, and demonstrates why I commonly use old hokku that translate well into English and that easily adapt themselves to an English-language cultural context as models.  We want our hokku to be thoroughly American or thoroughly British or Australian or whatever the local cultural context happens to be where they are written.

David

Blyth remarks at the end of his Summer-Autumn volume that there is a strong resemblance between Bashô and [Thomas] Hardy.  Hardy is well known for his novels, but less for his poetry.   Blyth continues that in both Hardy and Bashô, we see “the hollowness and evanescence of things which they deeply perceived and painfully expressed,” — the transience so obvious in hokku, the inherent sadness of things when seen from the temporal, human perspective.  Even when things seem superficially the same and unchanging, they are not.  Thomas Hardy wrote

The Second Visit

Clack, clack, clack, went the mill-wheel as I came,
And she was on the bridge with the thin hand-rail,
And the miller at the door, and ducks at mill-tail;
I come again years after, and all there seems the same.

And so indeed it is: the apple-tree’d old house,
And the deep mill-pond, and the wet wheel clacking,
And a woman on the bridge, and white ducks quacking,
And the miller at the door, powdered pale from boots to brows.

But it’s not the same miller whom long ago I knew,
Nor are they the same apples, nor the same drops that dash
Over the wet wheel, nor the ducks below that splash,
Nor the woman who to fond plaints replied, ‘You know I do!’

David

Punctuation is very important in English-language hokku.  This is paradoxical, given that old Japanese hokku (like the rest of the language at that time) were unpunctuated.  But English is not Japanese, and in English punctuation plays a significant role.  Specifically in hokku, it enables fine shades of pause and emphasis impossible without it, and further, it guides the reader smoothly and effortlessly through the verse, avoiding confusion, puzzlement, and awkward hesitation.  It not only takes the place of the “cutting words” used in old hokku, but it does the job even better.

Modern haiku, for the most part, has abandoned normal punctuation, and that is in keeping with its fragmented, confused, and unsettled character.  It seems caught in a time warp in which poetic experiments on form in early 20th century America are replayed on an endless loop.  Hokku, in contrast, makes full use of both capitalization and punctuation. 

Whenever people have trouble with punctuating hokku, the root of the problem is generally that they did not learn to properly punctuate in elementary and secondary schools, and consequently have a kind of uncertain aversion to and fear of it.  But there is nothing to fear.  It is not only simple but straightforward.

How does one do it?  As in any writing, the punctuation used will depend on the verse one is punctuating. 

 Here is a  simple and direct summer verse by Bashô in “unfinished” condition:

spider webs
are hot things
the summer grove

We can see that “spider webs are hot things” should be separate from “the summer grove,” and we do that by inserting a semicolon, which in hokku indicates a definite, meditative pause that enables us to “absorb” the first part before we move on to the second.  So we punctuate the first of the two parts in this verse thus:

Spider webs
Are hot things;

Note that we have also added not only the capitalization common to beginning a sentence or line in English, but we have also capitalized the beginning letter of the second line, as is customary in traditional English language poetry. 

Now we can move on to the second part, which we treat in similar normal fashion:

The summer grove.

As in any sentence, we begin with a capital letter and end with appropriate punctuation, in this case a period.

From this one example we learn:

1.  The two parts of a hokku should be separated with an appropriate punctuation mark.

2.  The initial letter of each line of the verse should be capitalized.

3.  The verse should end with an appropriate punctuation mark.

So the completed verse is:

Spider webs
Are hot things;
The summer grove.

The punctuation we have just applied will fit countless verses, but we will need variations for some.  Here is what we do in a “question” hokku — a verse that asks an unanswered question:

Buson wrote:

was it a flower or berry
that fell into the water
the summer grove

What needs to be done to this? 

1.  We capitalize the initial letter of each line. 

2.  We separate the two parts of the hokku with appropriate punctuation

3.  We add the final, ending punctuation mark.

So the first stage looks like this:

Was it a flower or berry
That fell into the water
The summer grove

The second stage looks like this:

Was it a flower or berry
That fell into the water?
The summer grove

And the completed verse is this:

Was it a flower or berry
That fell into the water?
The summer grove.

The two important decisions to be made are obviously what punctuation mark is used to separate the two parts in any hokku, and what mark is best used to end it.  The first decision is based on what kind of pause is required, whether a firm and definite meditative pause (semicolon), a long connective pause (dash or ellipses), a brief connective pause (a comma), a questioning pause (question mark), or an emphatic pause indicating something surprising or unusual (exclamation point).

Some verses may require more punctuation than others, for example:

Issa wrote:

In the falling rain
Where is it going
The snail

To punctuate that, we need only remember that a line beginning with a preposition (in, on, under, around, over, through, before, after, etc.) generally is best served by a brief, connective pause.  So we begin with

In the falling rain,

We can see that what follows is a question, but we see also that there should be a pause between “where is it going” and “the snail.”  This is how we treat it:

Where is it going –
The snail?

Here is the completed verse:

In the falling rain,
Where is it going –
The snail?

We can see that this eliminates any awkwardness or puzzlement on the part of the reader, who is guided smoothly and effortlessly through the verse.

It is not surprising that once one begins to read correctly punctuated verses and to write them, the kind of uncapitalized and unpunctuated or haphazardly punctuated verses (the ubiquitous hyphen!) found in modern haiku begin to look rough, abrupt, needlessly confusing, inconsiderate of the reader, and unfinished. 

But it is not only the absent or haphazard punctuation characteristic of modern haiku that we should avoid.  We must also take care that our hokku are punctuated correctly.  For example, look at this verse by Onitsura:

Evening,
The bellies of trout seen
In the shallows.

What is wrong with it?  It is the comma at the end of the first line.  A comma in hokku is a brief, connective pause.  This verse, however, requires a firm, definite, meditative pause to separate “Evening” from the rest.  It should be as though the writer were to say, “Here is the evening; feel it and experience it, and then we shall move on.”  So a comma is out of place here.  What we need is this:

Evening;
The bellies of trout seen
In the shallows.

A comma is correctly used, however, not only when a first line begins with a preposition, but also when it begins with an action during which an event happens, as in this hokku by Issa:

Swatting the fly,
I also hit
A blooming plant.

We can see that during the action in line one, something else occurred — the hitting of the blooming plant.  It is common to use a comma to end the first line in such cases, because it provides the necessary brief, connective pause.

Of course there are other variations in other verses, but this is the overall concept one applies in punctuating hokku.

Now that we have it correctly punctuated, let’s finish with a closer look at this hokku:

Spider webs
Are hot things;
The summer grove.

We do not ordinarly think of spider webs as hot.  But this verse is expressing the heat of summer through the webs strung here and there among the trees and bushes.  It is such a hot day that the heat has even penetrated the silent shadows of the forest, and when we enter it, we feel that dry heat manifested in the webs through which the hot air passes easily, the webs that irritate us as they brush our face, expressing the heat further in that irritation.  All of that in only eight words and three short lines.

David

Today is an interaction of yang and yin — the heat of the day, the clouds constantly changing form, the air heavy and full of moisture; it is the transition from hot and dry weather to cooler and wet.  It is not one moment, not one thing isolated from all the rest, but a constant motion, a constant change.  And that is precisely why Blyth tells us that hokku should not be thought to be, or written as, isolated, separate verses; a hokku is just one part of what is really not “parts” at all, but a continuous whole, one unity

“…more timeless in transience,
More eternal in its dwindling….”

As Aldous Huxley wrote.

It does not matter if we write hokku as a part of renga, as was done for centuries; nor does it matter if it is written as part of a travel journal or a daily journal.  What matters is that be not separate, not disconnected from the rest of life.  We should not think hokku is one thing and life another.  One is just an expression of the other, one breath in a life of breathing, each linked to what came before and to what comes after.  That is the real renga, the true linked verse of which the kind on paper is but a pale imitation.

David

Recently “Rengajim,” a regular participant here, posted this comment in regard to the article Oddities of Translation (August 12, 2008):

“This is Reichhold’s translation, for those interested:

‘is it a spider
with a voice crying
the autumn wind’

Reichhold explains her translation, which is not obscure in the way Barnhill’s is, by referencing a “riddle technique”. This is also referred to, sometimes, as “elegant confusion”, a technique borrowed from the Waka tradition where it is widely used.“

It occurred to me that readers might find this a bit puzzling if they have not previously encountered the term “elegant confusion” in regard to hokku.  But the puzzlement is unnecessary because almost everyone is already aware of this technique, though they may not realize it and likely will not know it under that particular term.  In fact for years I have used an old verse of Moritake as both a classic example of the technique and a clear illustration of what to avoid in hokku: 

A fallen blossom
Returning to the branch?
A butterfly!

That is why I caution novices in hokku, “Do not pretend one thing is another.”   And that tells us exactly what is meant by this technique.  Though it is applied somewhat differently in various aspects of Japanese culture, here it means pretending to see or perceive one thing as another for poetic effect.  It is obviously artificial and not in keeping with the principle of sincerity — it is “phony” in the language of Holden Caulfield, and is thus a practice best left to to the artificiality of early, pre-Bashô hokku.

It is of course not limited to Japan, but is found in literature all over the world.  I recall a line from an old Swiss-German dialect poem that illustrates it, surprisingly, much as it is found in waka.  A little boy wakes in the spring to find a tree covered with blossoms.  He cries excitedly to his father, “Lueg, Vatti, lueg!  S’hot g’schneit!” — “Look, Daddy, look!  It snowed!”

This pretended perception of one thing as another for “poetic” effect is said to have been borrowed into Japanese verse from the poetry of China in the Six Dynasties period.  In Japanese it is called mitate.  Donald Keene calls it, sensibly, “feigned ignorance,” and it became a hackneyed technique in Japanese verse.  Keene gives an old waka by Ki no Tomonori as an example (my translation here):

In Fair Yoshino
Blooming in the hills –
Cherry blossoms;
I thought them snow
But was mistaken.

(Incidentally, as an aside, look at line three and you will see a pivot;  there are really two verses here:

In fair Yoshino,
Blooming in the hills –
Cherry blossoms.

Cherry blossoms;
I thought them snow,
But was mistaken.

Neither of course works as good hokku, but they are rather typical of waka, and show the origins of hokku in waka.)

But back to the original topic.  Did Basho intend his spider verse to be an example of mitate, of pretended ignorance for “poetic” or “artistic” effect?

Let’s take another look:

Kumo nan[i] to ne nani to naku aki no kaze
spider what sound what voice autumn ’s wind

In Reichhold’s version, Basho pretends to hear a spider crying in the autumn wind.  Contrariwise, in my understanding, Bashô, realizing that other creatures such as crickets and wild geese express the loneliness and poverty of autumn through their cries, wonders with what sound a spider might express the season.  He does not say, as in Reichhold’s understanding, that a spider does cry; he simply wonders openly (to raise a questioning feeling in the reader, as is done in ”question” hokku), how a spider might express the season in sound.  One may consider this just another version of “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood,” and practically speaking, it is.  But it is the unanswered question that is the goal in Bashô’s verse, set in the lonely and withering context of autumn.

We have already seen that as essentially the understanding of Blyth, though he presents it a bit more poetically:

     With what voice,
And what song would you sing, spider,
     In this autumn breeze?

It is also the understanding of Makoto Ueda, who gives another version in his book Matsuo Bashô (Kodansha International, 1982):

Spider, I say!
In what voice do you chirp?
An autumn wind…

Ueda considers it an example of humor.   But I, in keeping with the sense of the season, see it rather as an expression of the sense that all things have a way of manifesting autumn — that it is in the cry of the wild goose, that it is in the sound of the wind; and a spider — with what sound, with what voice might a spider express it? 

If any readers feel more confused (”elegantly confused”?) than illuminated at this point, then focus on these things:

1.  We should avoid artificiality in hokku.
2.  Some old hokku were unnecessarily vague, leading unfortunately to widely differing interpretations.
3.  How one understands an old hokku relates intimately to one’s understanding of hokku in general.

Aside from all that, we can say that the “spider” verse is not a particularly good verse in any case, so I have used it here simply as a useful excuse to discuss these matters. 

David

Some “heat” hokku in keeping with the present heat wave in my region:

Even asleep,
His fan still moves –
The heat!

That is a verse by Fukoku.  In the original no “his” or “her” is specified, so you may take your pick.  We see the strength of the heat in the fan that still moves in the hand of the sleeper — each reflects the other.

And one by Kisu:

No birds come;
The heat
Of the copper roof.

The short middle line in English is unconventional, but that enables me to keep very close to the original.  To have added an adjective like “unbearable” to fill out the middle line would have been redundant.

And one by Chiryû:

Are they moving?
Looking at the bamboos –
The heat!

Of course he is looking at the bamboos in hope that he might see them stirred by a breath of wind, even if only a few leaves move.  The heat is felt in his looking.

One by Jofû:

A hot day;
Inside the stable,
Sacks of bran.

The heat of the day is reflected in the dryness of the sacks of bran, in which one feels the heat revealed even in the shadowed interior.

A verse by Sampû:

It follows after
A passing horse –
The hot dust.

We see the heat of the day in the dust that rises behind the passing horse, which we cannot help feeling is nonetheless moving quite slowly. 

And finally, (given that it is such a hot day!), one by Hyakuri:

At ebb tide,
The heat
Of an unmoving boat.

In spite of the water, we feel the heat in the motionlessness of the boat, which reminds one of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

David

Yesterday I discussed the peculiarities of translation in regard to one of the lesser-known hokku of Bashô.  In doing so, I mentioned two English translations of his verse, that by David Barnhill and that by Jane Reichhold et al.

Today I want to make the observation that if one really wants to read all the hokku of Bashô and to go into them deeply, unquestionably the best books for that purpose are the two-volume set by Toshiharu Oseko.  Oseko has done a really valuable service in that he has not only collected all the hokku of Bashô and presented them in English, he has also carefully analyzed the original Japanese verses, presenting each not only in Japanese but in transliterated Japanese as well.  Then he has gone through the verse word by word, explaining both vocabulary and grammar, and has added to that appropriate notes and commentary.

Though we would present the verses a bit differently in modern hokku format, Oseko at least used normal English-language capitalization and punctuation (which Barnhill and Reichhold did not), and his verses present Bashô in a literal fashion helpful to the average reader who really wishes to understand the relationship between original and translation. 

So there is no point in going to Barnhill or Reichhold  (both of whom used Oseko); go directly to Oseko’s superior volumes.   It is hard to praise his work enough, and those who really want to study the hokku of Bashô will prefer Oseko’s volumes above all others.

The only problem is that Oseko’s volumes may be a bit difficult to obtain at present.   The best thing to do if you wish to read them is to request them through your local library’s interlibrary loan service.  And if you wish to own them, watch the used book services.  But expect them to be expensive.  My local bookshop at present has a copy of volume one, the larger of the two volumes, signed by the author for about $75.   I see another on one of the online book services for $95.

They are produced by Maruzen Co. Ltd. in Japan, and are titled Bashô’s Haiku (though the paper band adds in parentheses (”hokku”).  They are fine volumes described on the cover as “Literal translations for those who wish to read the original Japanese text, with grammatical analysis and explanatory notes.”

That alone should tell any Bashô enthusiast that these are the volumes to buy rather than the lesser versions that have appeared more recently in English.  And that is why Oseko is one of the few books I mentioned in my own book as worthwhile when it came out a few years ago.  Oseko should be better known and appreciated for his great labor and the useful volumes he has given all those interested in hokku.

David

I have mentioned before that some old hokku are rather vague and obscure, and may be understood very differently by translators today.  Obscurity is not something to be emulated, and we should be careful to avoid it in modern hokku.

The issue of translation arises, however, whenever one reads an old hokku put into English.  The average reader does not know, first of all, if the original was clear or vague, or whether the English translation simply transfers the meaning from language to language, or if the translator has added considerably from his or her own imagination.  So what one reads in English as hokku is not always what was originally intended, nor does what one reads always even make sense.  Blyth of course was not always literal in his translations, but his intent was to give us the overall meaning of the verse, and in that he succeeded. 

One has the feeling, however, that some modern translators, lacking Blyth’s insight and with minds predisposed to haiku rather than hokku, really have missed the spirit of the thing, and that throws their translations askew.  I just noticed two such translations recently in two different recent books — both volumes marred, in my view, partly by misapplication of the term “haiku” to what is really hokku, and partly by oddities of verse format more appropriate to haiku than hokku.  David Barnhill and Jane Reichhold offer what are to me two very strange versions of one of the lesser-known hokku attributed to Bashô, which in the transliterated original is:

kumo nani to ne o nani to naku aki no kaze

I doubt that the average reader, seeing either Reichhold’s (Bashô: The Complete Haiku by Matsuo Basho; Shiro Tsujimura, and Jane Reichhold, Kodansha International, 2008)  or Barnhill’s translation of this particular hokku, could make head nor tail of it.  Barnhill’s version, for example, reads thus:

spider, what is it,
     in what voice–why–are you crying?
           autumn wind

(from Basho’s Haiku [sic]: Selected poems of Matsuo Bashô, State University of New York Press, 2004)

Note again that Barnhill has adopted the odd “no capital letters” format common to much of modern haiku and distinguishing it from English-language hokku.  But aside from that, commentators remark that the original verse is based on a mention in the writing of Sei Shônagon of a bagworm that makes a certain chirping sound (it doesn’t, really, and neither do spiders); but even though Barnhill dutifully notes that allusion, it gets us no farther than we were before, and it obviously was no help to either of the translations mentioned.

So let’s look more closely at the original verse.  Literally translated, it is::

Spider what sound what cry autumn wind

And my own translation would be

A spider –
What is its sound – its cry?
The autumn wind.

The meaning of this is to me rather obvious.  Crickets chirp, geese honk, and these are expressions of autumn; but with what sound, with what voice, can a spider express the feeling of autumn, the poverty and loneliness that we sense in the autumn wind?  To understand this, however, one has to realize the importance of season in hokku, and the truth of the old saying that all of autumn is in a single fallen leaf. 

One might also, incidentally, translate the verse perhaps somewhat less pleasingly as a vocative, for example,

Spider,
What is your sound, your cry?
The autumn wind.

I suspect that was Bashô’s intention, given that he omitted the ya particle that would have focused on the spider as the subject.  It is also, incidentally, the understanding of R. H. Blyth, who translated it as a vocative:

     With what voice,
And what song would you sing, spider,
     In this autumn breeze?

Blyth adds that this verse “is prophetic of the poetry of Issa,” though in Issa we find it rather overdone, which leads to the “talk to the animals” syndrome so common among novice writers, who imitate Issa’s heavy use of the vocative. 

 Is my translation right and the others wrong?  Is what I wrote really what Bashô intended?  I think the virtual nonsense in the Barnhill and Reichhold translations of this hokku invalidates them immediately, but as to whether my interpretation is what Bashô intended or not, I can only say that given the words of the verse, it is the meaning he should have intended, a unified and harmonious expression of the season presented as a question hokku.

David