Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Twenty years ago, Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz brought out a curious essay-cum-anthology titled Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei—nineteen different English translations of a poem by a Chinese poet of the eighth century C.E., . Setting aside all their arguments about which of these “ways of Wei” is to be preferred, what is quite obvious is that they represent nineteen different ways of writing poetry in English, nineteen “styles” of fairly recognizable kinds (Eliot-ish, Ashbery-ish, free verse–ish, and so forth). Ten years later, Hiroaki Sato brought out One Hundred Frogs, a compilation of actually rather more than a hundred already published English versions of a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō:

Furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

I

The old pond
A frog jumped in,
Kerplunk!

II

pond
frog
plop!

III

A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps …
Apart, unstirred by sound or motion … till
Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps.

If “style” is the term that names the principal means of distinguishing the differences among these three versions of Bashō’s haiku, then it means something that is not an individual property of, say, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, John Masefield, and Ogden Nash but a collective property of poetry written in that style—in Ginsberg-ish, Masefield-ish, and Nash-ish, so to speak (one of them was written by Ginsberg, in fact). Style in this sense is eminently imitable, and not just for comic effect. Students of musical composition develop their skills by writing in the manner of Mozart or Bach, and writers also practice at writing like Flaubert, [160] or writing like Proust.[161] The following pieces are not by William Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, or J. D. Salinger—but it does not take much more than vague memories of school to know which among them is Eliot-ish, Salinger-ish, and Lake Poet–ish, respectively:

There is a river clear and fair
’Tis neither broad nor narrow
It winds a little here and there—
It winds about like any hare;
And then it holds as straight a course
As, on the turnpike road, a horse,
Or, through the air an arrow

and

Sunday is the dullest day, treating
Laughter as a profane sound, mixing
Worship and despair, killing
New thought with dead forms.
Weekdays give us hope, tempering
Work with reviving play, promising
A future life within this one

and

Boy, when I saw old Eve I thought I was going to flip. I mean it isn’t that Eve is good-looking or anything like that, it’s just that she’s different. I don’t know what the hell it is exactly—but you always know when she’s around. All of a sudden I knew there was something wrong with old Eve the minute I saw her. She looked nervous as hell. I kinda felt sorry for her—even though she’s got one of my goddam ribs, so I went over to talk to old Eve.

“You look very, very nice, Adam,” she said to me in a funny way, like she was ashamed of something. “Why don’t you join me in some apple?”