The following essay first
appeared in A Hundred Gourds 4:1, December 2014.
The bulk of it was originally written from August to December of 2000, and then
revised and expanded in July 2002, May 2008, April 2012, and October 2014, with a few changes and additions since its original publication.
In addition, I delivered a somewhat shorter version of this essay when I was a
featured reader for the twentieth anniversary “Two Autumns” haiku reading in
San Francisco, held on 13 September 2009. See also the new postscript at the end. + +
In reading poems translated from Japan, it does not take long
before one comes across the following classic haiku, one that is often attributed to Buson, but is actually by Shiki:
行く我にとゞまる汝に秋二つ
for me going
for you staying—
two autumns
This poem is effective because of its memorable wording and for its
fresh notion of separation indicated by the supposedly different autumns. Yet,
though two people are separating, perhaps their autumns will be shared in
spirit. It is this oneness, despite separation, that gives the poem appeal and
resonance. R. H. Blyth says that “the whole of life is given here, our
meetings, our partings, the world of nature we each live in, different yet the
same” (page xxx (sic), Haiku volume
4).
The poem has had so
much appeal, in fact, that in 1990 Garry Gay named the annual reading series of
the Haiku Poets of Northern California after this poem. Every year HPNC
publishes an anthology of poems by the featured readers in the Two Autumns reading
series, and the first book was itself named Two
Autumns. HPNC’s press is also named Two Autumns Press after this first
book. Garry found the poem in Harold G. Henderson’s An Introduction to Haiku (Doubleday, 1958), and wrote to the
publisher to secure permission to use the poem for the group’s purposes (see
the PDF file), even
though he chose to revise Henderson’s version. As of 2014, HPNC has published more
than thirty books with its Two Autumns Press imprint, including more than two
dozen for the reading series, featuring a hundred poets since the series began,
including a retrospective twenty-fifth anniversary anthology in 2014, titled One Song. With its singular song of
haiku, Two Autumns is, I believe, the longest-running haiku poetry reading
series outside Japan.
What’s interesting,
however, is the error in this poem’s attribution. This error is presumably of
particular interest to the Haiku Poets of Northern California, given its emphasized
association with the “two autumns” poem, but also of interest to anyone who has
encountered the poem in numerous books of haiku translation over many decades. Henderson’s
book identifies the author as Buson, the second of Japan’s four great haiku
masters, who lived from 1716 to 1784. Yet Buson did not write the poem. While
the attribution error may be minor, it has been a persistent one, and the curious
situation of who really wrote the poem—and why incorrect attribution continues
to occur—emphasizes the vulnerability of English-language haiku poets who must
receive their information on Japanese haiku through translations. The
vulnerability in this case may be limited to a typo, or it may be more serious,
but the misattribution of the “two autumns” poem illustrates how readers and
translators of haiku might be more cautious in their acceptance of presumed
authority.
The “two autumns”
poem has appeared in English in a number of versions over the years. The preceding
rendition is what appears in the first Two Autumns book. Garry Gay adapted it from
the translation he found in Henderson’s An
Introduction to Haiku, which, he says, was why he sought Doubleday’s
permission to use the poem, which they granted. Henderson attributed the poem
to Buson and it also appeared in the first Two Autumns book attributed to
Buson. This poem also surfaces in Robert Hass’s prominent book, The Essential Haiku (Ecco, 1994). For
comparison, here are the versions by Henderson and Hass:
For me who
go, I go,
for you who stay— you stay;
two autumns. two autumns.
(Henderson, page 111) (Hass, page 81)
Hass’s book also
attributes the haiku to Buson. However, contrary to these attributions, in A History of Haiku, Volume Two (Hokuseido,
1964), R. H. Blyth attributes the poem to Shiki. Specifically, in Chapter 37, entitled
“Shiki: The Haiku Poet,” Blyth clearly suggests by the chapter’s context that
the poem is Shiki’s:
I going,
You remaining,—
Two autumns.
“This was written,” Blyth comments, “in the 2nd year of Meiji [1870;
this reference is incorrect, however, as will be explained], upon [the poet’s] parting
from Sōseki on the 19th of October, at Matsuyama, when leaving for Tōkyō. It is
a kind of existentialism” (page 97). The reference to Sōseki seems to definitively
place the poem in the time of Shiki, who lived from 1867 to 1902. Sōseki was
born in the same year as Shiki, and lived until 1916. Blyth’s reference is confusing,
though, because the Meiji era ran from 1868 to 1912; consequently, in the
second year of the Meiji period, Shiki and Sōseki would have both been
toddlers. As much of a master poet Shiki may have been, I rather suspect he was
not writing haiku at age two. We might conclude that Blyth’s anecdote is in
error and the poem is indeed by Buson, but I think the error here is just
limited to the reference to the year.
A more trusted source
on when the poem was written, and by whom, is If Someone Asks . . . Masaoka Shiki’s Life and Haiku, a book of
Shiki’s haiku from the Matsuyama Municipal Shiki-Kinen Museum published in 2001.
This book, published in Shiki’s hometown, says that Shiki wrote the poem at age
28, which would have been around 1895. Here is this book’s version:
me leaving
you staying
two autumns
Another translation
from Matsuyama, which I believe to be by Kimiyo Tanaka, is also available
online at the Matsuyama University website,
where the poem appears as follows, attributed to Shiki:
I am going
you’re staying
two autumns for us
In his book Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems (Columbia
University Press, 1998), Burton Watson also attributes the poem to Shiki, with
the accompanying explanation that matches the anecdotal information Blyth provided:
Taking leave of Sōseki (the novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916),
who at this time was a middle school teacher in Matsuyama. Shiki was leaving
Matsuyama for Tokyo).
For me, who go,
for you who stay behind—
two autumns
(page 44)
What is to be made of the various contradictions in attributions? We
may still wonder who really wrote the poem. Because Blyth’s and Watson’s
translations are so assertively linked to a specific person who lived during
Shiki’s life, how could the poem have been written in Buson’s time a hundred
years earlier? Who really wrote this haiku, and when?
Perhaps the romaji
versions of the poems might reveal that the two poets merely wrote similar
poems (a phenomenon I’ve referred to as déjà-ku). In comparing the romaji,
however, the poems are not just similar but identical (except for
capitalization), and nowhere is there any discussion about the amazing
coincidence of two poets independently writing identical poems. Occam’s razor
would have us believe that this is simply an attribution error. Hass’s book
does not include the romaji, but Henderson’s, Blyth’s, Watson’s, and the Shiki
Museum’s books do, and their being identical suggests, with other evidence,
that the attribution to Buson is simply incorrect:
Yuku ware ni todomaru nare ni aki futatsu Henderson
Yuku ware ni todomaru
nare ni aki futatsu Blyth
yuku ware ni / todomaru nare ni / aki futatsu Watson
yuku ware ni todomaru nare ni aki futatsu Shiki
Musuem
Even for those who do not read Japanese, it is easy to see that,
where provided, the Japanese characters are identical, too. If the poem is
Shiki’s, how did Henderson come to attribute the poem to Buson? Henderson died
in 1974, so perhaps we will never know the answer to that question. In his writings about haiku Hass quotes liberally from R. H. Blyth, but also apparently used Henderson’s book as a source and merely repeated the error, which also occurs in his essay “Listening and Making,” from Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (New York: Ecco Press, 1984, 109–111). In May of
2010, I wrote to Professor Hass about this issue, and this is what he wrote in
response:
Thanks, Michael, for
your note. I’m aware of the problem. I did my work on haiku over a stretch of
years, so I don’t remember exactly how I came to perpetuate this confusion. I
think I must have come across the poem in Henderson and had its provenance
confirmed by Blythe [sic]—when he was attributing the poem to Buson. I haven’t
got definitive textual confirmation from a Shiki or a Buson scholar, but I am
pretty sure the poem is Shiki’s. So I intend—regretfully, it is such an
extraordinary poem—to cut it from The
Essential Haiku in the next printing when there is one.
Hope you are thriving!
Bob
However, there is
more to the mystery. R. H. Blyth not only attributes the poem to Shiki, as
already mentioned, but also
attributes the poem to Buson, as alluded to by Hass. In the fourth volume of Haiku (1952), it appears as follows,
including Blyth’s introductory sentence (page xxx (sic)):
The following five verses are by Buson, showing the humanity of
the artist-poet, much greater than usually supposed:
Yuku ware
ni todomaru nare ni aki futatsu
I go;
thou stayest:
Two autumns.
Notice that the romaji is identical as on page 97 of Blyth’s A History of Haiku, Volume Two, but that
the translation differs. What, indeed, are we to make of this?
When I asked William
Higginson for his opinion on this puzzle, he said that because a translator as
esteemed as Burton Watson had so assertively connected the poem to a
contemporary anecdote and explanation, he considered the matter to be at
rest—that the poem must indeed be Shiki’s. Janine Beichman’s biography of the
poet, Masaoka Shiki (Kodansha
International, 1982), does not mention the “two autumns” poem. When Donald
Keene’s biography, The Winter Sun Shines
In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki (Columbia University Press), was published in
2013, I wondered if it might address the issue, or quote the poem, but
unfortunately it does not. However, the friendship between Shiki and Sōseki is
made abundantly clear. Surely the matching anecdotal explanations given by
Blyth and Watson carry enough weight to lend credence to Higginson’s
conclusion. Indeed, when I contacted representatives of the Shiki Museum in
Matsuyama about this poem, they expressed indignation that anyone would
misattribute Shiki’s poem in English. Their book of Shiki’s best and most
appealing poems features just 115 out of more than 23,600 haiku that Shiki
wrote, so their indignation at the misattribution of so prominent a poem is
understandable.
I believe we can safely
conclude that Blyth’s original attribution of the poem to Buson is simply in
error (although how he did that is still a mystery), and that Henderson and
Hass repeated the same error, seemingly using the erroneous Blyth attribution
as a source rather than the original Japanese. But I still remain curious how
Blyth could have made the error in the first place. In 2005, I invited R. H. Blyth’s
daughter Harumi M. Blyth to speak at the Haiku North America conference in Port
Townsend, Washington. I asked her if she might shed some light on this mystery,
but she said she knew nothing about it, or her father’s translation process, and
also suggested that the bulk of her father’s papers were not preserved. Blyth
wrote much of his work on haiku while interned in a relocation camp for
foreigners in Japan during World War II, so his access to original source
material was limited (for more on this context, read Robert Aitken’s brief
memoir, “Remembering Blyth Sensei,” in Tricycle,
Spring 1998, also available online, with photos and the title of “Remembering R. H. Blyth”).
However, given the accuracy and breadth of the remainder of Blyth’s books, his misattribution
of the Shiki poem seems uncharacteristic—greatly in the minority. Yet this
misattribution has proliferated not only in books but now on numerous websites
as well.
Harold Henderson’s initial
repetition of this error strongly suggests that Henderson specifically consulted
Blyth’s first translation of this poem (published in 1952) when he wrote his Introduction to Haiku (published in 1958).
Henderson’s earlier book on haiku, The Bamboo
Broom (Houghton Mifflin, 1934), does not contain the “two autumns” poem, so
Henderson’s first translation of this poem would appear to be from 1958. It
seems reasonable to assume that either Henderson perpetuated Blyth’s original
error or that both Henderson and Blyth consulted the same original but erroneous
source—an über-source that I can find no evidence for. Blyth’s A History of Haiku (1964) is more recent
than the four-volume Haiku set
(1949–1952), so readers can view Blyth’s most recent book to be more reliable,
and that Blyth took this later publication as an opportunity to correct
himself.
The discovery of this
attribution error and the contradiction even in Blyth’s hallowed writings illustrates
the fallibility of translators and their publishers, though of course readers
should be forgiving—although we may wonder how many other attribution errors might be lurking in Blyth’s translations. Because the poem is clearly Shiki’s, what this discovery
means to the Haiku Poets of Northern California is simply a small correction to
the history of the organization and its long-running reading series.
What this discovery
means to other readers of haiku translations, however, is a caution to be ever
vigilant and wary—and to question even the most reliable translators. There seem
to be a variety of problems to be wary of. For example, Keisuke Nishimoto’s Haiku Picturebook for Children (Heian
International, 1998) incorrectly attributes an Issa poem to Matsumoto Takashi
(I have written about this at “Two Books for Children”;
the original Japanese version of this book does not have the error). Two other
translators I know of who have perpetuated the error of attributing the “two
autumns” poem to Buson are Hiag Akmakjian in his book Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf: The Art of Haiku (Capra Press, 1979)
and Naomi Wakan in her book Haiku: One
Breath Poetry (Pacific Rim Publishers, 1993). Though they provide their own
versions of the poem, one wonders whether they translated from an authoritative
original Japanese source or if they might have just reworked a previous
translation, such as Blyth’s or Henderson’s—and now seem to be caught out in such
a practice by the repetition of the attribution error (this reminds me of
cartographers who deliberately add “errors” to their maps, sometimes called
“trap streets,” to prove if they’ve been copied). One assumes, naturally, that
a true translation would be made from the original text, but perhaps we should
never make that assumption. At least Robert Hass admits in his book that he
consulted other translations to make most of his “versions.”
Here, too, is another
version, much earlier this time, from Harold Stewart’s A Net of Fireflies (Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle, 1960, page 84),
complete with Stewart’s ponderous title and inimitable rhyme, also attributing
the poem to Buson (at the time of this book’s publication, please note, Blyth’s book attributing the poem correctly to Shiki had not yet been published):
since it
must be so . . .
You must remain, I must depart,
Two autumns falling in the heart.
In a brief “Research
Note” in Frogpond 35:1, Winter 2012,
Charles Trumbull says that this poem was attributed to Buson in two editions of
X. J. Kennedy’s college textbook, An Introduction
to Poetry (1995, seventh edition, page 73, citing Henderson as the
translator; and 1998, ninth edition, page 100, citing Hass as the translator).
The attribution error
is perpetuated in other ways, too, not even counting many online
misattributions. In Lonnie Hull Dupont’s publication, The Haiku Box (Journey Editions/Tuttle, 2001), she quotes Hass’s
translation, attributing the poem to Buson. Kenny Tanemura, in a haibun published in the Spring 2015 “Japanese Forms” issue of Rattle, perpetuates the error in talking at length about “Buson’s” “two autumns” poem. Thus the ripples spread out. Similarly,
a search of the Internet reveals numerous repetitions of the Buson attribution
error, seemingly all by Westerners. One wonders where they got their information—or
maybe it’s obvious that they consulted Hass, Henderson, or Blyth. At her AHA Poetry website,
Jane Reichhold actually attributes the same poem to Bashō, but that is probably
an unrelated lapse in scholarship, yet I’ve seen this particular error perpetuated
elsewhere online, too, usually citing Reichhold as the translator, but
believing the poem to be Bashō’s. I suppose someone might as well attribute the
poem to Issa, too, so that all the great haiku masters might be credited. In
contrast, Japanese sources I’ve explored on the Internet have uniformly attributed
the poem to Shiki, and do not make the same attribution error that seems to have
begun with Blyth.
The problem goes
beyond the attribution of the Shiki poem. For example, David Lanoue has written
in Modern Haiku (Volume XXXI, Number
2, Summer 2000) about Sam Hamill’s repetition of translation errors from
Nobuyuki Yuasa, calling into question the method that Hamill asserts to have used:
working from the original Japanese texts. Apparently, though, Hamill did not use
original Japanese texts—at least not all the time. Little harm may come from many
attribution or translation errors themselves, but the ease with which such errors
are perpetuated in haiku should give us pause regarding other information we
receive in English about haiku. English-language haiku poets are indeed in a
vulnerable position in that we receive our perceptions of Japanese haiku
largely through translators. If the translators are in error, we can too easily
perpetuate the error, for we have few other sources of information—and sometimes
no other sources at all. It is therefore not just the translators who should be
vigilant with haiku, but readers also.
Works Cited
Hiag Akmakjian. Snow Falling
from a Bamboo Leaf: The Art of Haiku. Santa Barbara, California: Capra
Press, 1979.
Janine Beichman. Masaoka
Shiki. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982.
R. H. Blyth. Haiku. 4
volumes. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949–1952.
———. A History of Haiku.
2 volumes. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1964.
Lonnie Hull Dupont. The
Haiku Box. Boston: Journey Editions/Tuttle, 2001.
Tim Green, ed. Rattle 21:1 (#47), Spring 2015.
Robert Hass. The Essential
Haiku. Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco, 1994.
———. Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. New York: Ecco, 1984.
Harold G. Henderson. An
Introduction to Haiku. New York: Doubleday, 1958.
———. The Bamboo Broom.
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
Donald Keene. The Winter Sun
Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki. New York: Columbia University Press,
2013.
X. J. Kennedy. An Introduction
to Poetry. New York: Longman, 7th edition, 1995; 9th edition, 1998.
David Lanoue. “Translating Translations: A Disturbing Trend,” in Modern Haiku XXXI:2, Summer 2000, pp.
53–58.
Matsuyama Municipal Shiki-Kinen Musuem. If Someone Asks . . . Masaoka Shiki’s Life and Haiku. Matsuyama,
Japan: Matsuyama Municipal Shiki-Kinen Musuem, 2001.
Keisuke Nishimoto. Haiku
Picturebook for Children. Torrance, California: Heian International, 1998.
Harold Stewart. A Net of
Fireflies. Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle, 1960.
John Thompson, ed. Two
Autumns. San Francisco: Two Autumns Press, 1990. [poems by Pat Donegan,
Eugenie Waldteufel, Michael Dylan Welch, and Paul O. Williams]
Naomi Wakan. Haiku: One
Breath Poetry. Victoria, British Columbia: Pacific Rim Publishers, 1993.
Burton Watson. Masaoka
Shiki: Selected Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Postscript
In 2018, Natalie Goldberg published
her memoir, Let the Whole Thundering
World Come Home (Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Publication). In it, she too
becomes a victim of the misunderstanding that Buson wrote Shiki’s “two autumns”
poem. In Part 2 of the book, “This Was My Life,” she describes her struggle against a
rare form of cancer, receiving treatment infusions twice daily. In that
context, she thinks of the “two autumns” poem, reciting it to students who she
has a Skype workshop with—because she can’t be there in person. She quotes Robert Hass’s translation of the poem, saying “Buson, a lesser-known haiku writer, leaped into my mind, and I recited” (41): 