Haikai & Haiku: Back to Beginnings Part 3 - Katauta, Mondōka, Sedōka, Tan'renga

Issue #7: The Origins of Haiku

So, last week we discussed the tanka (‘short poem’)—one of the most popular and enduring forms of Japanese poetry—and the week before, the chōka (‘long poem’) and hanka (‘reply poem’). This week we’ll be discussing numerous other ‘short’ forms popular since at least the 700s, including the kata’uta (‘fragment verse’), mondōka (‘dialogue verse’), sedōka (‘head-spinning verse’), and tan’renga (‘short-linked-verse’; a collaborative variation on the tanka). It is in tan’renga we see the archetypal 5-7-5 haiku begin to emerge as a distinct form, in the guise of the hokku (‘starting verse’).

NOTE: If you’re reading this on email—you’ll need to click through to read the whole post, as it got a bit long! Enjoy . . .

Kata'uta 片歌 (lit. 'half-verse', 'fragment-verse', 'incomplete-verse', etc.); the term ‘kata’ literally means incomplete, imperfect, and fragmentary, or 'one half of a pair'. In poetry, kata (i.e. 'pieces', 'parts') initially referred to both ‘halves’ of the tanka: the kami'ku (upper-verse, in 5-7) and shimo'ku (lower-verse, in 5-7-7). However, just as the 5-7-5-7-7 hanka uncoupled from the chōka to become tanka, the lower-verse of the tanka uncoupled to become the standalone kata'uta a ‘half-poem’ that was also a complete poem in its own right (typically in 5-7-7, but sometimes in other patterns, including 5-7-5). As Chamberlain writes; “Katauta must be understood as the designation of a poem of a certain number of lines, viz. 3, and was probably given by comparison with the greater length of poetical compositions in general.” (Chamberlain, 1882) “A few of the shorter poems [in the Kojiki and Nihongi] have the form 5-7-7.” (Waley, 1919)

There are ony a handful of recorded examples of standalone katauta, found scattered throughout the Kiki (c. 600s). This fragment, for example, was sung by a dying Prince Takeru (d. 114) as he thought of his family far away, composed in 5-7-7 (in two different translations);

 
       How sweet! Ah!
       From the direction of home
       clouds are rising and coming.

                  *      *      *

       Beautiful
       From the direction of my home
       Clouds rise and come.
 

—Prince Takeru (d. 114 CE; tr. Chamberlain, 1882; & Waley, 1919)¹

Knowing he would die before being able to see his family again, Prince Takeru's choice to use the kata'uta form is particularly poignant, leaving the verse quite literally 'unfinished', to be completed only in death. In this sense, katauta are always comprised of two-verses, rather than one: an “actual-verse” (in 5-7-7, or very occasionally 5-7-5, etc.) written by the poet, and a “virtual-verse,” to be added by the imagined recipient, or reader, of the poem.² Similarly, this fragment sung by the Princess and her family, after hearing of Prince Takeru's death—composed in 6-7-5, the pattern later used for haiku—is also incomplete in form, leaving the 7-7 couplet unsung, perhaps to be composed by the beach-plover, singing as it flies across the the seas, to meet the sunset;

  
        The dotterel of the beach
            goes not on the beach,
                but follows the seaside—
 

—Prince Takeru’s Family (tr. Chamberlain, 1882)³

Mondō'ka 問答歌 (lit. 'dialogue-poems') are verses composed in conversation with one another. In its narrowest sense, mondō'ka refers to pairs of poems – whether katauta, tanka, or chōka – in which the first poem acts as a “question” (more generally, a “call”), and the second-verse as an “answer” (more generally, a “response”). Take this pair of katauta, for instance, written by Prince Takeru and an elderly man tending the fires, explicitly in dialogue form, included in both the Kojiki and the Nihongi;

  
       Since passing
       Niibari and Tsukuba,
       how many nights has it been?

       Placed in a row
       of nights, it's been nine
       of days, it's been ten.
 

—Prince Takeru & Friend (c. 100 AD)⁴

Due to their nature as 'half-poems', in a perpetual state of incompletion, kata'uta easily adapted to being composed in tandem, known as sedōka. While mondō'ka undoubtably emerged from informal poetic games and tête-à-têtes, echoed in the use of poetry as dialogue within the narrative of the Kiki, it was also common for certain types of mondōka (in a slightly broader sense of the term) to be written by a single author. Take, for example, the following pair of katauta sung by Emperor Ōjin, composed in a ‘drunken’ pattern of 567+547;

 
       On the sacred booze
       brewed by Susukori:
       I've gotten drunk.

       This soothing booze
       this smiling booze:
       I've gotten drunk.
 

—Emperor Ō'jin (c. 270-310)⁵

By the time of the Man'yō'shū (c. 759 AD) a number of distinct formats for mondō had emerged, including katauta-pairs, for instance, which were classified as sedōka 旋頭歌 (lit. 'head-turning-poems'), and tanka-pairs, exhanged between lovers, classified as sōmonka 相聞歌 (lit. 'listening-together-poems'). While somōnka were typically anthologised in pairs, a sequence of 63 love-poems exchanged between wife and husband, Sano no Otogami no Wotome and Nakatomi no Yakamori, is also included in the Man'yō'shū, along with numerous other idiosyncratic poetic-formats, often determined by the circumstances of composition.

Some of the most well-known mondōka of the Man'yō'shū are those comprised of chōka-pairs, such as Hinkyū Mondō No Uta (A Poetic Dialogue on Poverty) by Yamanoue no Okura, written as an imagined dialogue between two commoners, detailing their respective experiences of poverty. The upper-verse, composed in 33-phrases, outlines the first-poet's plight, and ends with the question: “If I am struggling, how might someone who is even poorer than myself be coping?” The response, composed in 49-phrases, outlines the second-poet's experiences, effectively answering the question. Here are the opening 12 lines, translated to retain the specific rhythm of the parallel images;

 
       Mixed with wind
       a night of falling rain
       mixed with rain
       a night of falling snow
       there's no way
       of not being cold!
       I take some
       hard-salt and nibble on it
       sipping noisily
       at the watery dregs of sake
       coughing and sniffing
       stroking my thinning beard.
 

And here is a freer translation of the whole poem, by Aston (1877);

 
                          I.

       Night: mingled with the storm
              the rain is falling;
       Mingled with the rain
              the snow is falling.
       So cold am I, I know not what do do.
       I take up and suck coarse salt
       And sip a brew of sake dregs;
       I cough, I sneeze and sneeze,
              I cannot help it.
       I may stroke my beard, and think
              proudly to myself,
       Who is there like me?
       But so cold am I, I pull over me
              the hemp coverlet,
       And huddle upon me
              all the cloaks I have got.
       Yet even this chilly night
       Are there not others still poorer,
       Whose parents are starving
              of cold and hunger,
       Whose wife and children are begging
              their food with tears?

       At such a time, how do you
              pass your days?

                          II.

       Heaven and Earth are wide,
       But for me they have become narrow;
       The sun and moon are bright,
       But for me they yield no radiance.
       Is it so with all men, or with me alone?
       I am made in human shape like another,
       Yet on my shoulders I weak a cloak
              void of padding,
       Which hangs down in tatters like seaweed—
       A mere mass of rags.
       Within my hut, twisted out of shape,
       Straw is strewn on the bare floor of earth.
       Father and mother at my pillow,
       Wife and children at my feet,
       Gather round me weeping and wailing,
       With voices from the throat of the Nuye bird.
       For no smoke rises from the kitchen furnace,
       In the pot spiders have hung their webs,
       The very art of cooking is forgotten.
       For no smoke rises from the kitchen furnace,
       In the pot spiders have hung their webs . . .
       To crown all—cutting off the end,
              as the proverb has it,
       Of a thing that is too short already—
       Comes the head-man of the village with his rod,
       His summons penetrates to my sleeping-place.

       Such helpless misery is but
              the way of the world.
 

—Yamanoue no Okura (c. 660-733; tr. Aston, 1899)⁶

Okura’s mondō’chōka was appended with the following hanka;

 
       Though feeling
       the grief and shame
       of this world:
       I cannot fly away
       not being a bird.
 

—Yamanoue no Okura (c. 660-733; tr. Whyte)⁷

Sedō'ka (旋頭歌, lit. 'head-spinning verse'): “Consisting of 6 phrases of 5-7-7—5-7-7 (i.e. a pair of 'closing stanzas', or kata’uta). The 'pause' in sedōka is after the 3rd line. It is a characteristic of this metre that the last line usually contains a repetition of some word or phrase.” (Aston, 1877) Essentially, the sedōka is a pair of katauta. While sedōka tended to be mondō in the Kiki, by the time of the Man’yoshū they had become a standalone poetic form, typically composed by a single poet. Like chōka, by the time of the Kokinshū (c. 920)—first Imperial anthology—sedōka had all but disappeared. Here are a few examples;

  
       Cut not the bamboo grass
       at the foot of the little elm tree
       by the pond side—

       If nothing else is left to me,
       I would bare my loneliness looking
       upon it as a memento of you.
 

—Uncredited (tr. Aston, 1877)

  
       If the thunder rolls for a while
       And the sky is clouded, bringing rain,
       Then you will stay beside me?

       Even when no thunder sounds
       And no rain falls, if you but ask me,
       Then I will stay beside you.
 

—Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 650-710; tr. Keene, et al.)⁸

 
       When spring comes,
       from every tree tip
       the flowers will unfold,

       But those fallen leaves
       of autumn, the children,
       will never come again.
 

—Ryōkan (1758-1831; tr. Watson, 1977)⁹

Tan'ren'ga 短連歌 (lit. short-linked-poems) are another kind of mondō, typically composed by two poets informally, in social settings. In tan'renga the first poet composes the upper-half of a tanka (i.e. kami'ku) in 5-7-5, and the second responds with the lower-half (i.e. shimo'ku) in 7-7, together producing a complete tanka poem, in the pattern 575-77. The Manyōshū includes just one example, in which the upper-half was written by an anonymous nun, and the lower-half by Ōtomo no Yakamochi (c. 718-785), who was one of the ‘Man'yō no Go-taika’ (lit. the 5 great poets of the Man’yo’shū);

 
       Saho River
       the waters are dammed,
       paddies planted—

       The first harvest of rice
       should be kept for oneself.
 

—Ōtomo no Yakamochi & friend (c. mid-700s CE)¹⁰

No tan’renga were included in first two Imperial anthologies following the Man’yoshū, though a small selection is included in the third, Shūi Waka'shū (‘Gleanings Poetry Anthology’, c. 1005 CE). However, the lack of tan’renga in anthologies doesn't necessarily speak to its popularity as a social pass-time. Tan’renga were likely popular as a practice throughout Japanese society, but seldom recorded, due to their spontaneous composition, emphasising their fleeting and transitory nature.

Here is another example, composed by Sadaijin Yorinaga (1120-1156) and Minamoto no Yorimasa (1016-1180). In Heike Monogatari (i.e. ‘The Tale of Heike’), after Yorimasa had slain the monstrous Nyue bird with an enchanted arrow, the Emperor awarded him a famous sword, known as Shishio (i.e. ‘Lion King’), to be presented to him by Sadaijin; “As Sadaijin proceeded to come half-way down the steps of the Palace [during the ceremony]… the voice of a cuckoo that chanced to fly overhead echoed two or three times, whereupon Sadaijin exclaimed:—

  
       時鳥 || 名緒茂雲井仁 || 安久留歌奈
       hototogisu | na o mo kumoi ni | aguru ka na
       cuckoo | name < too cloud-place <to | raised | !?
 

“Yorimasa, sticking out his right knee and spreading out his left sleeve, looked up at the crescent moon in the sky and replied:—

 
       弓張月之 || 以璃荷麻加勢天
       yumihari tsuki no | iru ni makasete
       crescent | moon | 's sink | <to | entrusted
 

Making a completed tanka. This verse has numerous puns, which are obviously difficult to translate into English. Roughly speaking, a ‘descriptive’ translation would read something like;

 
       Cuckoo
       its name raised too,
       above clouds!

       Entrusted to the sinking
       crescent moon.
 

However, ‘kumoi’ also means ‘heavens’, ‘iru’ can mean both ‘sink’ and ‘shoot’, and the name used for the crescent moon here literally means shaped like a bow. Hence, it can be read as meaning that it is to the drawn ‘bow’ of the heavenly moon that Yorimasa’s arrow was entrusted, i.e. poetically: “I drew my bow, and allowed the moon in the heavens to guide it,” or more philosophically: “The arrow followed a course determined by the same heavenly forces which govern the moon’s rising and falling.” Very colloquially, the poem could be read as something like;

 
       Cuckoo,
       soaring to the heavens
       its name too!

       The bowed moon,
       a trusty shot.
 

—Sadaijin & Yorimasa (c. 1100s; tr. Whyte)¹¹

Later, Matsuo Bashō would use this tanka as the basis for the following hokku;

 
須磨の海士の矢先に鳴くか郭公
suma no ama no | yasaki ni naku ka | hototogisu
Suma 's fisherman 's | arrow <of-because cry ? | cuckoo

       was it an arrow
       from Suma's fishermen?
       cuckoo's cry
 

—Bashō (1644-1694; tr. Whyte)¹²

Another example, from Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055-1129) in his treatise on poetics, Zuinō (‘Elemental Poetics’; tr. by Sato, 1983); “When Tamemasa was governor of Kawachi, one morning it snowed. Because he had nothing special to do, he closed the sliding paper doors and took to drinking sake. When Minamoto no Shigeyuki (d. 1000)—a noted poet—came by Tamemasa was overjoyed and offered him sake. When everyone was drunk, Shigeyuki pushed open the doors, looked out, and asked, “Which mountain is that?” Tamemasa replied: “That is the famous Mt. Stallion,”¹³ prompting Shigeyuki to compose the following verse—

  
       yuki fureba | ashige ni miyuru | Ikomayama
       snow fall-when | piebald <as appears | Ikoma mountain
  

“Tamemasa made several attempts to cap the verse, but however he tried, he could not.” One of his retainers, a lowly samurai by the name of Kōbunta, “coughed loudly for attention and came forward. His intention was so obvious Shigeyuki said; ‘Kōbunta appears able to cap it’. But Tamemasa said, ‘It’s ludicrous. He’s so rude!’ and pushed him back… Still, Tamemasa couldn’t come up with a cap, so disappointed said; ‘Well, in that case, spit it out, how did you cap it?’ Kōbunta for some time looked resentful and would not say anything, but at Shigeyuki’s repeated insistence, he finally replied, capping the tanka:—

 
       when snow falls,
       Mt. Stallion appears
       piebald—

       when will summer
       bring chestnuts?
 

—Shigeyuki & Kōbunta (tr. Sato, 1983)¹⁴

Toshiyori concludes the story; “Tamemasa clucked his tongue, taken aback. But Shigeyuki stood up and danced. He was so overwhelmed he took off his clothes and gave them to Kōbunta as a reward. Truly, the way he gave his clothes and walked away in dignity was, I’m told, quite marvellous.” (Sato, 1983)

Whew, okay, that’s it for this week. This one required a lot of extra research at the end, as the second-to-last tan’renga was both difficult to translate, and to find information on. I am an amateur translator, and often need a lot of help. When attempting to translate a difficult poem like this, that means tracking down as many other translations and discussions of the poem already published by academics, as well as other poems which use the same, or similar phrases and expressions, to get a good handle on the various ways in which it can be read in English. Then I use various Japanese dictionaries to flesh this out a little more, and start to put together a translation.

You may well ask, well, if there are already multiple translations available, why translate the poems again? My hope is to produce versions of the poems that not only remain faithful in meaning/imagery to the original, but which example the structural elements of the poem, and the common poetic techniques used across examples, particularly in terms of the kigure in tanka (i.e. ‘punctive pause’), and the kireji in haiku (i.e. ‘join/cut word’). That is, they are intended as teaching tools for English-language poets, when thinking about their own approaches to structure and form. The placement of the ‘pause’ in tanka and haikai is something I have found to be universally inconsistent across English translations, even in those translators I love (and there are many!). Of course, the exact placement of ‘pauses’ doesn’t matter to the casual reader, and I can see why it wouldn’t be the focus for most translators. But for a poet wishing to develop their own craft, it can, in my experience, be extremely illuminating.

I have never written a sedōka before. As there they are relatively rare, historically, and even rarer in translation, they are seldom written in English (one exception being last year’s Songbird Journal, which has a number of wonderful examples). A formal sedōka, as we have said, has 6 phrases, in the pattern 5-7-7—5-7-7, and an informal sedōka would roughly follow some kind of short-long pattern, to echo the rhythms found in the originals. I myself, am more of an informal poet, metrically speaking, so I will finish this off with my very first attempt at an impromptu ‘free’ sedōka, written fresh today;

 
                Sedōka
                   by Dick Whyte

       clouds
       and the red sun too,
       rivergathered

       listen!
       hear the water babbling
       to the wind


                       xoxo
                         dw

1. Kojiki, Vol. 2, Sect. 89, Poem 32; Chamberlain, p266.

2. While katauta ocassionally appear in patterns close to 5-7-5, they are typically 5-7-7. Later, Earl Miner would confuse this matter, and claim katauta were a form of 5-7-5 verse; “Katauta scan 5-7-7, not 5-7-5. They are found among the ancient chronicles and were among the... forms [of song] taught by the Gagakuryō (i.e. 'Music Bureau') in the Nara period (710-784), which is not the same as saying that katauta were 'most important for use in gagaku and its dance'. Gagaku as it has come down to us is an orchestral form. Takebe Ayatari (1719-74), a kokugaku and haikai author, attempted to revive katauta in the 18th century, treating both 5-7-5 and 5-7-7... as examples of the form. But in its authentic ancient usage the katauta is 'one side' of a sedōka [i.e. in 5-7-7].” (Edwin Cranston, review of Miner, Odagiri, & Morrell, 'The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature', in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, June 1993)

3. Kojiki, Vol. 2, Sect. 90, Poem 37; Chamberlain, p269. Lament for Prince Yamato Takeru, by the 'Empress' (i.e. Takeru's wife, or mistress) and family, possibly Ototachibana'hime no Mikoto.

4. Kojiki, Vol. 2, Sect. 86, Poem 26 & Nihongi, Book 7; Chamberlain, Kojiki, p259; Aston, Nihongi, p207; Yasuda, TJH, p110-111; Sato, 100F, p10. It is said in the Nihongi that while travelling, Prince Takeru posed the first-verse to his courtiers, none of whom knew how to answer. A commoner quietly tending to the fires then sang this reply, impressing Prince Takeru, who rewarded him richly.

5. Kojiki, Vol. 2, Sect. 111, Poem 49; Chamberlain, p307.

6. In Aston's translation each ‘line’ is equivalent to an entire 5-7 pair, until the last stanza, which represents the final 7 syllable phrase. The “head-man's summons” is a call to “forced labour.” (Aston, 1899) The Nyue bird was a mythological creature. In the Tale of Heike (before 1330) it was said to have “the head of a monkey, the limbs of a tiger, the body of a tanuki (a kind of Japanese racoon-dog), and the front half of a snake for a tail,” while in Genpei Jōsuiki it has “the back of a tiger, the limbs of a tanuki, the tail of a fox, the head of a cat, and the torso of a chicken.” Sometimes compared to the Greek khimaira (i.e. ‘chimera’), a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature, said to have been from Lycia in Anatolia (in present day Turkey).

7. Manyōshū, Book 5. Nippon, M, p205-7; Keene, AJL, p46-8; Carter, TJP, p46-8; Sato & Watson, FC8, p44-5; Vovin, M5, p132.

8. Tr. by the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai group, in 1000 Poems from the Man’yoshū (1940), with a forward by translator Donald Keene.

9. Tr. Burton Watson, Ryōkan: Zen-Monk Poet of Japan (1977); “A master calligrapher, a writer of unusual and highly personal poetry in Japanese and Chinese, an eccentric holed up in a tiny mountain hut, a lanky, beak-nosed cleric begging for food or playing crazy games with the village children—these are some of the images summoned up by the name Ryōkan, a monk of the Soto branch of the Zen sect who lived in Japan in the late-1700s and early-1800s.” (p1) Ryōkan was also one of the few poets to compose sedōka in later ages.

10. Manyōshū, Poem 1635; Sato, 100F, p6.

11. I found this to be a particularly complex poem to translate, filled with puns and double-meanings. Pfoundes translation (1881) is the most elegant I have read, but it suffers from a slight mis-reading of the original Japanese: “The cuckoo / up to the clouds / how does it soar? / The waning moon / sets not at will.” This misunderstanding was not necessarily Pfoundes fault either. The Tale of Heike was written in ‘wakan konkō shō’, an extremely difficult ‘literary’ form of Japanese, blending both old Japanese and classical Chinese, mastered only by select Japanese monks. While Pfoundes translation has problems, it makes for a beautiful tanka in its own right. Sadler (1918) translates it more faithfully, but much less elegantly: “How does the cuckoo too wish to make a name in the heaven / Then let the bow-shaped moon let fly a shaft at the bird.”

Much later Helen Craig McCullough (1988) would translate it beautifully; “The cuckoo’s name soars, / its cadences resounding / in the realm of the clouds, / It was merely drawn forth / by the sinking crescent moon.” Unpacking its complexities, McCullough notes: “It is a convention of classical Japanese literature that the cuckoo sings in the dark of a summer night. ‘Cuckoo’ and ‘realm of the clouds’ are metaphors for Yorimasa and the imperial palace. ‘Na o agu’, the dictionary form of the phrase translated as ‘name soars’, can mean both ‘declare one's identity’ (used here of the cuckoo’s song ) and ‘be famous’. Puns on ‘yumi’ (‘bow’; in combination with ‘hari’, ‘drawn bow’, a name for the crescent moon) and ‘iru’ (‘sink’; but also ‘shoot’) yield another meaning for Yorimasa's lines: ‘I merely hoped for the best and let fly’.” (p162) Thus, the opening verse can be interpreted as meaning: “Like the cuckoo, your name will be raised to the heavens,” to which Yorimasa humbly replies; “Ah, I simply drew my bow, / and hoped for the best,” or “the arrow shot itself,” etc.

This is something that can be important to note when reading translations, as often Western interpreters will not only translate the given words of the poem, but sometimes the symbolic (unsaid) layers as well (as in Sadler’s version). While this may increase clarity for casual readers (and avoids placing the burden of ‘meaning’ on footnotes) it can also lead to misunderstandings for poets wishing to get a better understanding of the formal elements. Given that “suggestion” is one of the primary techniques of Japanese poetics, when a translator includes the symbolic meaning in the translation of the poem, the verse is collapsed into having a single, definite meaning, and may end up losing its suggestive force.

12. Today there are a vast amount of amateur translations of Bashō’s works online, often made without much understanding of the original Japanese. For instance, take this contemporary translation, which has a fairly high ranking on Google at the moment: “At Suma’s seaside / shoot an arrow, / at the cry of a cuckoo.” While not a bad haiku in its own right, it misses the point of the poem, mistranslates “fishermen” as “seaside,” and entirely ignores the question-mark at the end of the second-phrase (i.e. the all important kireji). Even those by so-called ‘professionals’ can be problematic. For anyone reading Bashō for the first time, I wouldn’t recommend Jane Reichhold’s translations, for instance, not because they are ‘bad’ as poetry—they are often really good—but because Reichhold’s work takes a lot of liberties with the Japanese, and is often unusually inaccurate, as in her translation of the same haiku: “Suma’s fisherman’s / arrowheads ahead of the cry / cuckoo” (which frankly, barely makes sense, compared to the original). For anyone wishing to read Bashō’s work afresh, I highly recommend David Landis Barnhill’s translations as a starting point, as they are accurate, academically robust, and often poetically astute: “Is it crying from an arrow / from the fishers of Suma? / Cuckoo.” (Barnhill, Bashō’s Journey, 2005)

13. Most of this story is translated into English by contemporary scholar Hiroaki Sato, in One Hundred Frogs (1983), p4.

14. I had never heard the word ‘piebald’ before translating this poem; it refers to a horse who’s coat is spotted with two colours, typically black/brown and white.

Haiku Thursdays

Notes for an unfinished miscellany on haiku in English, including poems, translations, histories, theories, et al. Explore the archive . . .