Haiku Thursdays: Ajō & Kana (p. 1758)

Notes for an Unfinished Miscellany #1: Kana, Syllables, & Lines

Ajō [?] (p. 1758)

In 1758, Ajō collaborated with Buson and Kikei on a 100-link renga to commemorate Kikei taking the tonsure; published later the same year in a haikai anthology. Ajō wrote the hokku for the renga;

[すいせんのあつきはようのふくろかな]
suisen no / atsuki wa | yō no / fukuro kana
daffodil 's / depth <as-for sunlight 's / bag|sack (. . . )


daffodil's depth: a sack for sunlight


wrapped
deep in the daffodil . . . 
sunlight 

Ajō’s verse is a good example of a haiku with a multi-layered structure. In English, there are two common approaches to haiku. On the one hand, as a 3 line poem, with 5 English syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 in the third (sometimes called ‘formal haiku’); on the other, as a 3 line poem with a short first line, a longer second line, and a shorter third line, or something in that ballpark (roughly speaking, ‘free haiku’). Both are entirely valid approaches. Both also stress the use of 3 lines, regardless of formality.

Japanese haiku, on the other hand, are written in 1 line, not 3. At the same time, poetry in Japan has been composed in patterns of 5 and 7 for at least 1500 years, if not longer, so the rhythm of 5-7-5 can be felt in the haiku, without needing to be visually indicated. This also allows for the superimposition of other patterns on top of this, sometimes in synch with the 5-7-5 rhythm, sometimes falling between the established beats. Ajō’s verse, for instance, can be re-lineated in English in 3 main ways: 1) As a single line, as in my first translation, following the basic grammar; 2) In three lines, as in my second translation, following the customary rhythm, and kireji; 3) Finally, syntactically Ajō’s verse is made up of two phrases “deep of the daffodil” and “sack of/for sunlight” joined by the particle ‘wa’, indicating that the “daffodil’s depth” is the active subject of the phrase: the “bag” of sunlight. It also has the effect of producing a light syntactical pause, which can be expressed by a couplet phrasing;

 
           as for the daffodil’s depths,
           sunlight's bag
 

Again, all three approaches, in one, two, or three lines, are equally valid, both as strategies for translation, and as approaches to English-language haiku. In other news, I thought I had written a bunch of daffodil haiku over the years, but it turns out I haven’t written any. Just a single tanka, from back in 2009;

 
           two week old
           daffodils
           wilting in the vase—
           her cousin
           goes to trial
 

Hi everyone, so I ended up needing a bit of a longer break than expected. However, I am happy to announce that I am back, with a range of new features that I will be rolling out in the next few weeks. The first of them is ‘Haiku Thursdays’ . . .

Every Thursday I will be bringing you an entry from my unpublished, and very unfinished, encyclopaedia of pre-1900s Japanese haiku poets and poems. After beginning to write English-language haiku some years ago, I got particularly interested in its history, both Japanese and English, and translation. While there was a lot of really good information on pre-1900s Japanese poetry and poets available in English, anything outside the “big four” (Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Shiki) was fairly scattered, and often difficult to locate. The “Haiku’paedia” was my attempt to bring as much of this information as I could into one place, along with re-translations of the haiku. A foolhardy idea, no doubt. Perhaps one day I will finish it, but for now, these fragments will have to do.

The term “haiku” was not in common use prior to the 1900s, but the form of poetry it referred to, i.e. a verse containing 17 kana, in the rhythm 5-7-5, with one kigo (i.e. a ‘seasonal-word’) and one kireji (i.e. a ‘joining-word’), had been popular throughout Japan for almost four centuries, known as the ‘standalone hokku’.

Hokku were originally the opening verses for collaborative, improvised, linked poems, ranging from the very short to the very long. The shortest was the tan’renga, comprising of a single hokku, in 5-7-5, and a single reply, in 7-7 (i.e. a tanka). In honour of the collaborative heritage of the form, leave a couplet (‘formal’ or ‘free’) as a comment, in reply to this Thursday’s hokku.

I have been writing and studying haiku for almost 20 years now, and have a fairly decent knowledge of its histories and workings, for a Westerner, so please feel welcome to ask any haiku-related questions in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them. Next week we’ll be discussing kireji.