A winter hokku by Kiūkoku:
The horse
Chomping and chomping straw;
A snowy night.
The loud chomping noises only emphasize the stillness of the night of snow, so we can say this is a hokku with harmony of contrast — two very different things put together that nonetheless come out as harmonious instead of discordant.
Best wishes to everyone on this New Year’s Eve for a far better and happier coming year than the last has been.
David
Here is my rather loose translation of a winter hokku by Yasui:
In all the whiteness,
Not one thing moves;
The frosty night.
Perhaps it reminds you of another winter hokku by Chiy0-ni:
In field and mountain,
Nothing moves;
The snowy morning.
In two days comes the Midwinter Solstice and the shortest day of the year and the longest night. Then the days will slowly begin to grow longer. and the new cycle will begin.
David
There is already snow in the high mountains.
Here is another objective “daoku” verse from A Year of Japanese Epigrams, this time by Rimei — in my translation:
Snow falling
On the pines where they sleep —
The crows.
Ne-dokoro no matsu ni yuki furu karasu kana
Sleep-place pine on snow falling crows kana
Largely visual, this hokku evokes an interesting contrast in the mind between the whiteness of the gently-falling snow and the black crows.
David
Here is a winter hokku by Kyūkoku. I have altered Blyth’s translation of the last line, but have kept his rendering of the first two lines, which one could hardly better:
Crunch, Crunch —
The horse munching straw;
A snowy evening.
That is hardly something one would find in English poetry, but English poetry is not hokku, and approaches things from a very different perspective.
In hokku, we look for an event to happen in our minds when we read a verse — and not in the “thinking” part of our minds, but rather in the sensing. That is why I so often emphasize sensation in hokku — the experiencing of things through tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, or smelling.
In Kyūkoku’s hokku, we are first given the loud crunching sounds of a horse munching straw. They are made all the more effective by Blyth’s use of the words “crunch” — “crunch” — “munching” — which make us actually hear the horse chewing (and see how much more effective “crunch” and “munching” are than “chewing” here). That accounts for why this verse is actually better in English than in Japanese.
Kyūkoku began with the sounds, then moved to the horse itself, and then opened up the wider setting — a snowy evening. There is also the striking contrast between the loudness of the horse and the softness of the snowy evening.
By placing the horse crunching straw against the snowy evening, he has not only given us the season, but he has also introduced the sensations of cold and silence. That gives a sense of stillness, in which the munching of the horse becomes even more magnified. So in this hokku we have sound and sight, and in the cold we have the sense of touch. All in all, this is a very simple hokku with lots of sensation.
Someone who sees this verse and recognizes its merits is likely to be able to understand the reasons for the aesthetics of hokku and appreciate them. If all one sees is a chewing horse and some snow, then the outlook is not promising.
David
A loosely translated winter hokku by Yasui:
In the whiteness
Not one thing moves;
The frosty night.
It calls to mind two other winter hokku we have already seen; this one by Chiyo-ni —
In field and hill
Not one thing moves;
The snowy morning.
And this by Bashō:
Winter bleakness;
In a one-color world
The sound of the wind.
David
Here is a winter verse by Rimei, which I re-translated from an old book of Japanese hokku printed by the Oxford University Press in 1911:
Snow falling
On the pines where they sleep —
The crows.
David
(Early Spring)
There and back,
The only footprints are mine;
The snowy road.
Because Objective Hokku is a very selfless kind of verse, we generally avoid the words “I,” “me,” and “mine,” except in cases where they are necessary for clarity. That does not mean, however, that we do not use them at all. We use them, but we use them objectively. That means we speak of the self just as we would of a fox or a wild goose, or a river — without adding our own opinions and comments and interpretations.
Now oddly enough, when we do that, it removes the writer from the verse. The “self” in the verse — the experiencer — then becomes the reader. So when you read the hokku above, it is you seeing that the only footprints on the snowy road are yours, in spite of the fact that I wrote it this morning on my way back from walking through the snow to the grocery store. And because that is the way of Objective Hokku, I am happy to disappear entirely from the verse so that it may become your experience.
That is how the self appears in hokku. We might call it the “selfless” self.
HOKKU 