Haiku, Japan, and the misunderstood
A few weeks ago Mr Louis Josephson, a Juilliard composer, sent me an email asking for permission to use my translation for the haiku To Kill an Ant for a performance he was writing. I am more than happy to support the arts, so of course I said yes.
Flash forward a few weeks and he sent me a video of the performance. Watch it below. Mine is the second haiku in the performance.
It still seems like autumn outside, but by the traditional Japanese reckoning we are into winter now. This in mind, a verse Bashō wrote about 343 years ago comes to mind.
by myself
chewing dried salmon
—Bashō
Dried salmon was an ordinary food, far from the luxury of the rich. Bashō is setting himself as a man of the common people, a place he was most comfortable. However, at the same time, he is also setting himself apart from the common people. Let’s look at how.
In a headnote to this haiku he tells us:
富家喰肌肉丈夫喫菜根. 予乏し
Fuka wa kiniku o kurai, jofu wa saikon o kissu. Yo wa toboshi.
Wealthy people eat fine meat, and ambitious young men eat roots. I am just poor. (or “I lack both”)
The reference to “roots” is a nod to a classic Chinese philosophical text called Saikontan (菜根譚, Caigentan in Chinese) which was very popular in Japan during the Edo era. Written by Kōjisei (Hong Yingming in Chinese), it is a book of aphorisms from Confucianism, Taoism, and Chan (Zen) Buddhism. It is still fairly popular to this day—I’ve seen it compared in popularity in Japan to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in the West.
One line from the book tells us that “A man who can get by on roots can achieve anything” (人常咬得菜根, 則百事可做). One can easily guess how people who aspired to great things might take this line literally and adopt the practice of chewing vegetable roots as a way to get there.
Bashō is having a bit of fun poking at both sides. He is denying both riches and ambition. He has no desire for either and prefers to be a poor poet; just as a monk sets all ambition and desire aside in their pursuit of the Buddha, Bashō does the same in is pursuit of poetic purity.
Snow is a kigo (season word) for late winter, roughly 1/6 – 2/3 on our current calendar, but the main kigo here is dried salmon which is a kigo for all winter. Back in the day, salmon would have their guts removed and then be hung to dry under the eaves of buildings and would be eaten all winter.
Licensed under Creative Commons by Yosi Oka
From Tokyo Weekender. This is really a wonderful introduction to a person and art form that I previously had no awareness of.
Tanaka is a photographer of mitate, an art form that requires the admirer to look beyond the final composition to discover visual puns and other layers of meaning hidden in plain view. It’s a role he’s done better than anyone else for over a decade. The mitate he photographs are his tiny worlds, for which he references miniature — the small representation of something — and diorama, which refers to 3D depictions of scenes or environments.
Here is the Wikipedia entry on mitate.
He does these miniature scenes every day on his website, Miniature Calendar, taking around four hours to craft the images. He also has an Instagram account. Both are well worth following.
We often give ourselves small rewards after an accomplishment — both as a way to mark the moment and motivate ourselves for the future. Shiki did the same, and captured it perfectly in this haiku.
三千の俳句を閲し柿二つ
sanzen no haiku o kemishi kaki futatsu[1]
having reviewed
three thousand haiku—
two persimmons
—Shiki[2]
This is a haiku for autumn, which we are well past according to the traditional Japanese reckoning of the seasons that haiku follows, but I found myself thinking of this haiku the other day when giving myself a reward for work well done, so I decided to post about it.
Shiki edited haiku for a newspaper at one point. It was here that he would make a name for himself with his criticism of Bashō and pieces on the poem form itself. His articles on haiku became so influential that he was responsible for renaming the short verse from their previous name hokku to haiku and transforming them into a completely independent form instead of the first verse of a renga.
Here he is with a promised reward for a job well done. Shiki loved persimmons, making it a good reward indeed. I suppose for most of us today that reward might be chocolate instead.
The kigo (season word) here is kaki, “persimmon”. It is a kigo for late autumn, which is around Oct 8th to Nov 7th.
The verb is in the past tense, but many translators choose to use the present simple or the present continuous. There is a bit of added tension if we make that change, as we might wonder if he actually finished reviewing all the haiku before he ate his reward. Borrowing that idea, I might also render this as:
three thousand
haiku to look through—
two persimmons
I’m not sure I like that as much, but it is an option. As the great Robin Gill says, having multiple translations can help us see the haiku from all angles which can help us understand it better.