On Haiku

As Hiroaki Sato explains in his delightful and informative book On Haiku, “the haiku is one of the few cases . . . where the doings of translators . . . have helped shape the view of the verse form in foreign countries.” Sato is referring here to the practice of writing haiku in English in three lines despite the fact that, in Japanese, haiku normally appear in a single line. When Lafcadio Hearn first translated Matsuo Bashō’s famous frog poem in 1898, he followed the Japanese format, rendering it “with no fuss” in a single line as: “Oldpond—frogs jumped in—sound of water.” But since then, most translators seem to have felt that, in order for a haiku even to register as a poem in English, it needed to take up more real estate on the page. By now, the three-line format has become so ingrained in English that most readers would be surprised to find it doesn’t work that way in Japanese. Sato has quite a lot to say about why he thinks haiku work better in a single line, although he cheerfully admits that this issue is his “hobby horse” and is not especially sanguine about changing anyone’s mind. But there is no doubt that the “doings of translators” have affected the way we read and write haiku in profound ways, and it is as one translator’s response to those “doings” that Sato’s book makes its most important contribution to the literature on haiku in English. What are these “translators’ doings?” I am thinking not only of the habit of translating haiku in three lines to make them seem more substantial, but also of a related habit of thinking of haiku according to what might be called the “lyrical” model: as poems that require no context other than “the occasion of [their] reading” to be fully appreciated. This way of thinking of haiku is largely responsible for the fact that haiku in English tend to appear on the page shorn of any context. Such an understanding of haiku as fundamentally lyric took hold in Japan in the late nineteenth century when Masaoka Shiki anointed the haiku as a genre able to stand on its own, independent from linked verse as a form of “literature” on par with Western lyric poetry. This notion of haiku has now spread around the globe. But it was far from the only way to think of haiku, even in Shiki’s time. Readers can be drawn to haiku for many reasons, many of which depend on context, such as the view they provide into the lives of the poets who wrote them, how they allude to earlier poems (what Haruo Shirane has called the “vertical axis”), how they evoke shared cultural associations attached to seasonal words, or as one of many links in a linked verse session involving many poets. All of this is to say that haiku are about much more than what Anglophone poets like to call the “haiku moment” when the solitary poet communes with nature to attain a state of heightened consciousness. A persistent focus on this “zenlike” moment as the essence of haiku is one of several more or less Orientalizing shibboleths common in English writing on his subject that Sato demolishes. For translators, to move beyond this fixation on “the haiku moment” means asking fundamental questions about what it really means to translate a haiku and how much context to provide. Zeroing in on the poems themselves has the result of privileging only those that can stand on their own. But many haiku need more context to come to life, and this does not make them worse poems. Indeed, with haiku in particular, it is not always clear where the poem stops, and the context begins. When the translator provides that context effectively, as Sato has done for the poems he translates and discusses in On Haiku, these tiny works can open portals into much wider worlds. At its best, Sato’s mix of commentary and translation reads not so much as explanation but as a kind of continuation of the poets’ work. I think my favorite of many chapters is one in which Sato takes us through all thirty-six links of a linked-verse session known as “The Sea Darkens” by Bashō and two other poets. The session includes a number of famous poems many readers will recognize but likely will have seen anthologized with no mention of the communal setting in which they were originally composed or how each successive link responds to the previous verse, only to pivot toward yet another meaning in combination with the verse that comes after it. Sato puts all this back, and the result is revelatory; his commentary is a little like what Roland Barthes does for Honoré de Balzac in S/Z. On Haiku includes chapters on the expected canonical figures in premodern haiku like Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa, but also earlier examples of classical linked verse, as well as a diverse group of modern and contemporary poets writing in both Japanese and English. It opens with basic definitions and a discussion of how haiku spread globally, beginning with translations by Hearn and W. G. Aston in the late nineteenth century, and picking up steam after the Second World War with R. H. Blyth’s hugely influential fourvolume work Haiku. As Sato notes, Blyth became even better known after J. D. Salinger made the haiku-writing protagonist in his 1959 short story “Seymour” a fan of Blyth, whom Seymour calls “a high-handed old poem himself.” The result is that “a sizable portion of American people who turned to haiku in the last three decades did so on account of Blyth via Salinger.”