There are some hokku that do not seem quite right but nonetheless have value for what they are.
There is, for example, this spring verse by Buson:
Osoki hi no tsumorite tōki mukashi kana
Long day ‘s accumulating far past kana
The long days
Accumulate;
The distant past.
The point of the verse is this:
In spring one notices the lengthening of days, which seem all the longer now that the short days of winter are past. As these spring days follow one another, each longer than the preceding, one begins to feel the length of the passing of time. It makes the past, the “old days,” seem ever more distant.
The primary feeling of this hokku is a recognition of the relentless passage of time, which continually carries us away from the past and onward into the unknown future. Did you notice that the second line — just one word in English — is visually shorter than the three words of the first line? Yet if we say it in our minds it sounds very long, and adds to the sense of time passing slowly.
Blyth, rightly, I think, thought the poem in its literal form a bit too much for Westerners unfamiliar with hokku to grasp, so he elaborated it in his version, to bring out the sense of time slowly passing, yet the past constantly receding from us:
Slow days passing, accumulating, —
How distant they are,
The things of the past!
His use of “passing, accumulating” emphasizes the feeling of the slowness of the day that one gets with the lengthening of days in spring, and it increases the sense of time accumulating like dust in an attic, burying the past ever deeper. He also lengthens in words the mention of the past (“How distant they are, / The things of the past!), where Buson has merely “The distant past.” That lengthening also gives us the feeling inherent in the verse that the past — even the recent past — is gradually moving farther and farther away.
This is not hokku at its best, and if it were not for the sense of the length of the spring days, this hokku would be too “thoughty” for a verse form that excels in sensation and tends to avoid too much “thinking.”
Shiki, paradoxically, has a more concrete, if obvious, verse:
Sunahama ni ashiato nagaki haruhi kana
Sandy-beach on footsteps long spring-day kana
On the sandy beach,
A long line of footsteps;
The spring day.
The length of the spring day is reflected in the length of the line of footsteps that parallel the surf and extend beyond the range of sight. I have chosen to use “long” to modify the footsteps, which is a more subtle way of expressing the length of the spring day for those familiar with hokku.
Blyth, however, chose to use “long” to modify the spring day in his version, making the point of the verse more obvious to Westerners, but less subtle:
On the sandy beach,
Footprints:
Long is the spring day.
In both, however, the emphasis is on the feeling of the feeling of the slowness of time one gets as the days of spring lengthen.
If you wonder why Blyth sometimes tends to make his hokku translations more detailed than they are in the originals, it is because his purpose in writing was to introduce Westerners not only to hokku (which, unfortunately, he called “haiku” in his day), but also to the very different (from Western verse) aesthetic sense behind hokku.
Sadly, Westerners usually just read the verses in Blyth’s books and seem to have ignored or glossed over his important explanations of the aesthetics behind them. That failure contributed to the confusion that arose in the so-called “haiku movement,” which began in the West in the 1960s — a confusion and disarray that continues to this day, because the Western haiku movement never learned the aesthetic principles necessary for continuing the practice of hokku in the modern world. That is why “haiku” today is generally something quite unlike hokku, even though often superficially similar in outward appearance.
David
HOKKU 