The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The HAIKU, as you may already know, is a three-line poem of Japanese origin whose lines are composed of five, seven and five syllables. There is much debate as to whether there is any purpose to be served in English-language versions of the form. Those who understand Japanese are strong in their insistence that haikus in our tongue are less than a pale shadow of the home-grown original. English, as a stress-timed language, cannot hope to reproduce the effects of syllable-timed Japanese. I define these terms (rather vaguely) in the section on Syllabic Verse in Chapter One.

Just so that you are aware, there is a great deal more to the haiku than mere syllable count. For one thing, it is considered de rigueur to include the season of the year, if not as crassly as mine does, then at least by some other reference to weather or atmosphere, what is known as a kigo word. A reverence for life and the natural world is another apparent sine qua non of the form, the aim being to provide a kind of aural, imagistic snapshot (a shasei or ‘sketch of nature’). The senses should be engaged and verbs be kept to a minimum, if not expunged entirely. The general tenor and thrust of the form (believe me, I am no expert) seems to be for the poet (haijin) to await a ‘haiku moment’, an epiphany or imaginative inspiration of some kind. The haiku is a distillation of such a moment. In their native land haikus are written in one line, which renders the idea of a 5–7–5 syllable count all the more questionable. They also contain many puns (kakekotoba), this not being considered a groan-worthy practice in Japanese. A caesura, or kireji, should be felt at the end of either the first or second ‘line’.

Haiku descends from haikai no renga, a (playful) linked verse development of a shorter form called waka. The haikai’s first stanza was called a hokku and when poets like Masaoka Shiki developed their new, stand-alone form in the nineteenth century, they yoked together the words haikai and hokku to make haiku. We now tend to backdate the term and call the short poems of seventeenth-century masters such as Matsuo Basho haikus, although they ought really to be called hokkus. Clear?

A haiku which does not include a kigo word and is more about human than physical nature is called a SENRYU which, confusingly, means ‘river willow’.

Those who have studied the form properly and write them in English are now very unlikely to stick to the 5–7–5 framework. The Japanese on (sound unit) is very different from our syllable and most original examples contain far fewer words than their English equivalents. For some the whole enterprise is a doomed and fatuous mismatch, as misguided as eating the Sunday roast with chopsticks and calling it sushi. Nonetheless non-Japanese speakers of some renown have tried them. They seemed to have been especially appealing to the American beat poets, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Kerouac, as well as to Spanish-language poets like Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. Here are a couple of Borges examples (it is possible that haikus in Spanish, which like Japanese is syllabically timed, work better than in English)–my literal translations do not obey the syllabic imperatives.La vasta nocheno es ahora otra cosaque una fragancia.(The enormous night

is now nothing more

than a fragrance.)Callan las cuerdas.La música sabíalo que yo siento.(The strings are silent.The music knewWhat I was feeling.)

Borges also experimented with another waka-descended Japanese form, the TANKA (also known as yamato uta). I shall refrain from entering into the nuances of the form, which appear to be complex and unsettled–certainly as far as their use in English goes. The general view appears to be that they are five-line poems with a syllable count of 5,7,5,7,7. In Spanish, in the hands of Borges, they look like this:La ajena copa,La espada que fue espadaEn otra mano,La luna de la calle,Dime, ¿acaso no bastan?(Another’s cup,The sword which was a swordIn another’s hand,The moon in the street,Say to me, ‘Perhaps they are not enough.’)

The form has recently grown in popularity, thanks in large part to the publication American Tanka and a proliferation of tanka sites on the Internet.

GHAZALThe lines in GHAZAL always need to run, IN PAIRS.They come, like mother-daughter, father-son, IN PAIRSI’ll change the subject, as this ancient form requiresIt offers hours of simple, harmless fun, IN PAIRS.Apparently a Persian form, from far-off daysIt needs composing just as I have done, IN PAIRSAnd when I think the poem’s finished and completeI STEPHEN FRY, pronounce my work is un-IMPAIRED.