MORNING WIND

The old book A Year of Japanese Epigrams attributes this autumn hokku to Bashō — though I have not been able to find it in collections of his verses.  In modern hokku terms it would be a daoku, that is, an objective hokku, but whether it was so originally, I cannot say.  Remember that sometimes old hokku were written with a double meaning.  I prefer to take it as objective, which makes it in my view a far better verse than a subjective interpretation would offer:

Morning wind;
Only one wild goose
In the white clouds.

Or we could revise it somewhat to improve the flow:

Morning wind;
Among the white clouds —
A lone wild goose.

Asa          kaze   ya  tada shira kumo  ni     kari          hitotsu
Morning wind   ya  only white clouds at wild-goose one

It gives us a feeling of solitude that one senses in many autumn hokku, when, as Nature begins to turn inward, so do humans.

It often seems to me as I translate, that when writing hokku, English generally gives us far more options for word choices and shades of meaning than the traditional Japanese “hokku” vocabulary.  Is that just a limited perception or reality?  It would be interesting to hear a  learned Japanese view on this.

 

David

 

 

 

 

THINGS TO COME

The news says that where I live — as of now — we have the worst air quality on the planet. That is due to the massive wildfires on the West Coast of the United States.

Whether literally or metaphorically, depending on place, our planet is on fire. The present devastating forest fires burning here in the Pacific Northwest are extraordinary — nothing I have ever seen in my lifetime. And we can look to the complete lack of government climate action as a heavy contributor to that.

I had hoped the heavy wildfire smoke blanketing my area of the city would be gone when I woke this morning, but it is as thick as ever outside, and visibility is very low — the smoke equivalent of a fog. I smell it indoors, but there is nothing I can do about it. By the time I get an air purifier delivered, the matter of smoke here will likely have resolved for the time being, as we are to have a weather change Sunday or Monday (it is now Friday) that may help to keep the smoke at bay.

I just read that the fire is creeping closer to the city suburbs, but I think it is still comparatively distant, and there is not thick forest all around the city as there is where the fires are burning now. So I suspect our major problem here will be the dense and harmful smoke. And of course there are many homeless people out in it.

As for now, it is just something we have to endure. Large numbers of people in the rural areas have already been burnt out or ordered to evacuate.

As someone said, if warnings such as these massive fires were to be compared to the canary in a coal mine, we would be knee-deep in dead canaries now.  And we are only at the beginning of the coming world-wide climate and environmental troubles.

This is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of planetary survival. We absolutely must remove from office government leaders who will not seriously deal with climate change.  And in the United States, we can begin in the upcoming election.

David

FOR THE ELECTION, 2020

On reading this poem by Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819-1881), one cannot help but be struck by the great contrast with the present American administration.  It could have been written specifically for the dismal situation in which we now find ourselves in the United States.  It reminds us of values and ideals many Americans seem to have forgotten or to have discarded in favor of base emotions, crass tribalism, and personal gain.  For “God” we can easily substitute a plea to the national conscience, and to “men” we must of course add “women”:

GOD, GIVE US MEN

God, give us men!
A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office can not buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty, and in private thinking;
For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions and their little deeds,
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,
Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps.

Read the daily news, and you will see endless examples of wrong ruling the land and justice sleeping.  A great deal, not only for the United States but for the planet, is at stake in the upcoming election.  One can only hope that those who voted in the disastrous administration we have had these last four years will come to their senses and return to the highest ideals held forth by the best and brightest souls this country has produced over the years.  Then perhaps the country can begin to climb out of the dark slough into which it has fallen.

 

David

 

LISTENING TO THE WIND

As I often say, some old Japanese hokku were needlessly vague — something we want to avoid when writing new hokku.  There is, for example, this verse by Sora:

yomosugara akikaze kiku ya ura no yama
よ も すがら 秋  風    聞くや  裏    の    山
All night autumn wind hear ya behind ‘s mountain

As it is written in Japanese, one would read it as:

All night long
Listening to the wind;
The mountain behind.

That, however, fails in English to adequately make the link between the wind and the mountain/mountains (remember that in Japanese there is no written plural)

I would prefer this understanding, in daoku form:

All night long,
Listening to the wind
On the mountains behind.

That way we we know that the writer is listening all the night to the wind blowing through the trees on the mountains behind where he is lodging.

Historically, Sora was apparently kept awake by an illness when he wrote this, but a hokku should not be linked firmly to its original circumstances if it is to become our experience as well — as a hokku should.  There are many reasons for being awake all the night, with only the sound of the wind on the hills.

David

 

WHY THIS, NOT THAT?

English is an interesting and useful language, but I am glad I grew up speaking it instead of having to learn it as a second language.  That is because it is filled with countless idiomatic usages and traditional ways of saying things.

What does this have to do with hokku?  It relates to how we use articles (“the,” “a,” “an”) — particularly in first lines.

Look at these examples of possible first lines:

Autumn moon;

Cold rain;

Morning light;

Evening star;

Hot stone;

Cool water;

An English speaker automatically feels that the following require “the”:

The autumn moon;
The evening star;
The hot stone;

However these can be either with or without “the”:

Cold rain/The cold rain;
Morning light/The morning light;
Cool water/The cool water;

Trying to come up with a fixed rule to fit all possibilities would be devilishly difficult, because it is often just a matter of traditional usage and common speech — in short, what sounds right to one brought up speaking English.  For those learning the language, it is a constant effort to determine what is normal in each particular case.

This is often an initial difficulty for those coming to hokku from long exposure to modern haiku, which tends to frequently avoid the use of articles, thinking that there is a virtue in making a verse as grammatically minimal as possible.

That mistaken notion is partly derived from seeing literal translations of Japanese hokku; Japanese does not have articles or plurals.  But English is quite unlike Japanese, and to try to mix English words and Japanese grammar just comes out as odd.  This trend toward excessive minimalism in modern haiku is also partly the influence of the experimentalism in English-language poetry of the first half of the 20th century, which sometimes found even eliminating punctuation desirable.

Of course if we carried this idea of minimalization by elimination of articles to its logical conclusion, we would be writing hokku, such as the verse I posted yesterday, in a form like this:

Autumn moon;
On floor
Pine shadow.

Instead of like this:

The autumn moon;
On the floor —
The shadow of the pine.

In short, we would be writing in pidgin English.  And of course many in modern haiku would even eliminate the capitalization and punctuation.  But in contemporary hokku, we do not go for the peculiar.  We use ordinary English in ordinary ways.

When people come to hokku from modern haiku, they are often so accustomed to the partial (or even complete at times) elimination of articles and punctuation that seeing a hokku written in normal English seems initially peculiar to them, because they have been mistakenly conditioned to think that writing a verse requires some kind of special, abbreviated language.  But in hokku, we just write of ordinary things in ordinary English.

It is true that in hokku we keep to the principles of poverty and simplicity — that is, eliminating all that is unnecessary so as to make a stronger verse.  That does not, however, extend to the deliberate distortion of common English usage to fit a preconceived and mistaken notion that by doing so, a verse is somehow made better.

 

David

PINE SHADOW

Here is my loose translation of an autumn hokku by Kikaku, in daoku form.

The autumn moon;
Across the floor —
The shadow of the pine.

Literally, in Japanese it is:

Meigetsu ya tatami no ue ni matsu no kage
   名   月    や     畳     の 上  に   松     の     影
Bright moon ya tatami ‘s on at pine ‘s shadow

The meigetsu is the bright or autumn moon — the harvest moon.
Tatami is the woven grass floor covering used in old Japan.

We could make it a big more rustic and rural Western:

The autumn moon.
Across the wooden floor —
The shadow of the pine.

It has a better flow to it, and a wooden floor is certainly more natural than linoleum.

We could also change it a bit more, without going too far from the original:

Autumn moonlight;
A pine shadow
Across the floor.

As you can see, I am not just translating old hokku to be translating them, but want to show you how to write hokku in English — in this case a daoku, or objective hokku.  If hokku is not to die out, there must be those who value it and continue to write it.

David