#za rambles

So obviously I’ve been reading about haiku today and, while I am certainly no expert, I just wanted to write down a thought I had in response to that reading.

I feel like the three line convention in English is a bad idea. I think it’d be better to teach them as single line poems, often(but not necessarily) including three interrelated, or inter-commentary, images.

What do I mean by that? Here’s Basho’s old saw about the frog(s?):

furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

That is how someone in Japan, reading it in romanji(which wouldn’t be the common way obvsl), would read this. And this is how one would write an English translation(using William J. Higginson’s Translation[and FAR larger&more interesting discussion] of the haiku):

old pond... a frog leaps in water’s sound

To me this feels too formal and too separate. The line breaks imply a meaning and profundity to the separation itself that doesn’t seem to be there in the original. If you wrote this as a bare line in English

old pond... a frog leaps in, water’s sound

that seems allot more naturalistic, and conveys the unity of the scene, without sacrificing the separateness of each image: old pond/a leaping frog/the sound of water. Which, as someone entirely not qualified in any way to translate Japanese writing, is probably how I’d have done it, something like:

an old pond; a leaping frog, the sound of water.

the big problem with this approach, obvsl, is you lose the playful ambiguity of whether the frog is leaping into the water or the sound of the water :p Also English’s reliance on articles adds a certain rhyme, rhythm, and causality/inevitability to it that isn’t necessarily there in Japanese. If I wanted to convey that playfulness(at the expense of literalness and the specific ambiguity), get rid of the subtle near rhyme&article-formality&inevitability, and in consequence make the image more vibrant, I might do something like

an old pond; frog leaps, plop

which would have the added benefit of conveying something similar(if more obvious) to the water-soundness of oto(again: the onomatopoeianess of oto isn’t my reading of it, I am totally ignorant of Japanese, all credit for that insight to Higginson).

The important question, tho, is whether this single line approach would get the feeling of haiku across more effectively. I can’t answer that universally as it’s a subjective question, but I can say that, for me, it makes haiku seem far less “mystical”, far more immediate, and focuses the mind more powerfully on the image itself rather than what hidden meaning it might possibly be trying to convey as-metaphor, which English speakers are hyperprimed to look for in poetry. And, added benefit, it kills the idea so common in teaching haiku to English-speakers that the most important thing in haiku is the 5-7-5 syllable structure, which isn’t even a thing in Japanese(it’s not syllables, it’s sounds, and even classical haiku don’t follow it strictly. And there are other issues with it I’m not qualified to speak to. Morae would be the nearest English equivalent, but even that is, I feel, Off)

we don’t show up to work to be applauded, or to be hailed as heroes. we are people doing jobs. we never once showed up to work as willing sacrifices in the fight against covid; that was pushed on us by the government in form of platitudes and inadequate PPE, and the fact that we have rent to pay and need to put food on the table. we’re “heroes”, but a former colleague of mine had to make £16 stretch to feed her for two weeks. a current colleague had to borrow £5 from her elderly mother to park her car - because we have to pay to park at the place where we work. I’ve just had a paycheck delayed and now I’m terrified that I’m going to miss my council tax payment.

how is this fair? I’m tired constantly and so are my colleagues. I haven’t felt properly healthy since February 2020. no amount of workplace wellbeing drives are going to pay my rent. I want a raise. I need a raise. being friends with Boris Johnson gets you billions of pounds. saving his life gets your pay docked.