The Essence of Modern Haiku, Really?
The
following short review, from 1993, is probably previously unpublished. Ordering information dates from when this was written and may no longer be accurate. See also the new postscript, written more than two decades later, which sees
some aspects of the book in a different light.
The
Essence of Modern Haiku: 300 Poems by Seishi Yamaguchi, translated by
Takashi Kodaira and Alfred H. Marks. Mangajin, Inc., 1993, 330 pages, 6 by 9
inches, available in paperback, $19.95, or hardback, $24.95, at bookstores or
from the publisher, Mangajin, P.O. Box 7119, Marietta, Georgia, 30065-1119. Or
order with your credit card at 1-800-552-3206.
The publication of this book should be, I suppose, a significant haiku event.
Taken simply as text, however, The
Essence of Modern Haiku embodies many problems that threaten to choke the
life out of haiku. Each page presents one haiku, including the original
Japanese, a romaji rendering, the poem in English (in large type), the date of
composition (ranging from 1924 to 1978), a paragraph explaining the context,
background, or inspiration of the poem, an identification of the poem’s season
word and its category, an explanation of key Japanese vocabulary words and
their allusions or overtones, and, on some pages, what are called “other points
of interest.” While any one of these details may be interesting, and while they
provide a clear window into the world of Japanese haiku, they crowd the page,
crowd the haiku, and give the whole book an overbearing, spiritless feel.
What’s more, practically all of the poems (or rather, the English translations
by Takashi Kodaira and Alfred H. Marks) are so far removed from English and
American culture as to render them obscure. The explanations with each poem
help bridge the cultural gap, but I doubt that any but a few of the English
versions would ever be accepted by respected American haiku publications. The
poems written here are too different. If Seishi Yamaguchi represents what is
primarily being written in Japan today, then the difference between their haiku
and our haiku is great indeed. Although this book is expensive, I would
cautiously recommend that you read it to see, more clearly than I can explain
here, that difference.
—30 May 1993, Foster City, California
Postscript
I recently came across a quotation from The
Essence of Modern Haiku. This drove me to pluck the book from my shelves,
where I had left it for many years. In it I discovered a short errata sheet
from the publisher, and the preceding review note. I might have written my
short review for publication in Woodnotes,
but I’m not sure, and haven’t confirmed that it was ever published—I suspect
not. Having just read this note now, twenty-two years later, I acknowledge that
I would say different things about the book today. For one, much of the
apparatus that bothered me in 1993 now strikes me as perfectly fine for the study of this poet’s work—indeed, even
helpful and enlightening. This is not an art book, or a book just of poetry, but
a book of explication. To have such extensive glosses and helps with this many contemporary
poems translated from the Japanese is a rare treat. I also make no mention of
the front matter, which features three informative contributions. First is a
welcoming foreword by Sonō Uchida (whose book of haiku, A Simple Universe, I later published with my press, in 1995).
Second is the preface by Alfred H. Marks, which speaks to the challenges of
translation. And third, especially rewarding, is Takashi Kodaira’s informative
essay, “A Study on Yamaguchi Seishi” (name presented in the Japanese order,
surname first), which all on its own is well worth reading for the way it explores
Yamaguchi’s work and places it in the history of twentieth-century haiku. Also
included are a chronology and a simple map of Japan showing the locations of
181 stone monuments on which Yamaguchi’s haiku are engraved—one of which is at
the top of Mt. Fuji.
When I wrote that the text
“embodies many problems that threaten to choke the life out of haiku,” I was
referring to the translations and the apparatus. Although I’ve changed my mind
about most of the apparatus, the translations are still problematic. They are
nearly all 5-7-5 in structure, a format Marks defends. He says he needed to
follow this pattern because Yamaguchi’s poems were in that form and that if he
wanted to do free-form translations, he would have started with a free-form
poet such as Hekigotō, Santōka, or Hōsai. But Marks makes the same error that
generations of others have made in failing to recognize that English-language
syllables are not the same as the sounds (not syllables) counted in Japanese
haiku, and the fact that Japanese uses far fewer words than English to use up
its seventeen sounds. So no, Yamaguchi didn’t use the 5-7-5 syllable form at
all; rather, he used the 5-7-5 sound
form in Japanese. This is despite the fact that Marks says that “Japanese
syllables are not the same as those of English” (xi). So the chief problem with
all of the translations is that they are long and wordy, surely a distortion of
Yamaguchi’s original Japanese. A count of the words of any of the poems in this
collection shows this to be true—the English versions are always padded with more words than in the Japanese. As 5-7-5
translations go, they seldom suffer from awkward line breaks or an inverted
syntax that plague other translations to get them to “fit,” but they still come
across as plodding and wordful. Here’s an example:
These green bottle flies
on carrion here—where on earth
were they until now?
The words “these,” “here,” and perhaps “on earth” are not needed.
One aspect of the apparatus also
still bothers me. The notes from Yamaguchi himself about his poems include the
date of composition, which is useful, but too often a restatement in prose of
what the poem already says. For example, after “The wind carries it / through
the night, from north to south— / the Gion music,” we are told that this poem
was composed in 1958, and that “In Kyōto, I heard the music of the Gion
Festival. The wind from north to south carried the music through the city
streets” (148). Anyone who knows Japan would know that Gion is in Kyoto, so we
are told nothing worthwhile here, and this sort of redundancy happens over and
over again—although not without occasional details that provide a deeper
context. More useful are the translators’ notes about season words and
vocabulary, the latter of which might be of interest to someone seeking to
learn Japanese. But still the cumulative effect of all the apparatus is
deadening, creating that overbearing, spiritless feel I mentioned. Even if one
wants to study a poet, it shouldn’t
feel this burdensome.
It can be hard to define the
essence of haiku, let alone the essence of modern haiku. Seishi Yamaguchi
represents a pinnacle of haiku in twentieth-century Japan, to be sure. The Essence of Modern Haiku is one
window into the poet and his work, but it feels that his work is not
represented at its best in this collection. Nevertheless, with the Japanese,
the romaji, and at least the translations offered, one can study each poem and
consider making one’s own tighter versions.
—15, 29 November, 3 December 2015,
Sammamish, Washington
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