Talk Literature: Re: haiku

Well, I'm not much of a fan of poetry anyway. I certainly do not have a traditionalist's investment in maintaining the older forms. Probably my favorite poem of all time is Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which certainly does not follow an established form. (It rhymes a lot, but not consistently and not in a regular pattern.)

Nevertheless, if you write a villanelle, there is a very strict form. I suppose currently the most famous villanelle is Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Similarly, a sonnet must have fourteen lines. Usually, that's either Petrarchan, with an octave and a sestet, or Shakespearean, with three quatrains and a couplet.

Translating poetry of strict form into foreign languages, especially distant languages with no common roots such as English to Japanese, presents an issue for the translator. Do you attempt to maintain the form, thereby probably losing some of the content and possibly torturing the language? Or do you adapt it to a more natural and native form, thereby maintaining content but violating the structural integrity of the poem such that the reader does not really have a clue to the original experience?

Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in terza rima. It is apparently relatively easy in Italian. All those rhymes work well in a language in which so many words end in vowels. And for heaven's sake don't even try the eleven-syllable line in English. Italian is a highly polysyllabic language. Some translations attempt to maintain the complicated (in English) a-b-a b-c-b c-d-c rhyming scheme (Sayers). Others keep some of the feel of the original by maintaining the tercets, but relax the rhyme. Ciardi's is a-b-a c-d-c e-f-e, which only requires one rhyme per tercet and does not hook the tercets together. Others, deciding that content is far more important in Dante go to quatrains, iambic pentameter, blank verse, or even prose.

No major translation of Homer into English has ever tried dactylic hexameter. It's extremely distant from the rhythms of standard English.

All of which is to say that I certainly understand that adapting a foreign poetry form into English may require adjustment. I know very little about Japanese, except it is polysyllabic, as opposed to the monosyllabic Chinese languages. It may well be that a shorter line in English corresponds most closely to the famous compression of the haiku in Japanese. It's just that several of the haiku that you quoted first appeared to have no regular structure whatsoever. Just three short lines, often rather prose-like. That's not a haiku to me. I could certainly with 3-5-3, if that's closer to the compression in Japanese, but some regularity should be present, in my opinion, or it's just cheating.

Now, as to your challenge, I'm inclined to think that you're a romantic sort of fellow, so I going to guess that you wrote the first one. As to which one is actually a sentence from a novel, well, several of them could easily be prose if set that way, and no one would notice the syllable scheme. Numbers 3,4, 5, and 8 could probably be in a novel and no one would notice. I'm going to go with 4, the lightning flash, but I'm probably wrong. :^)

--Previous Message--
:
: The problem is that English and Japanese are
: extremely different languages. According to
: what I read about haiku, it might take about
: twenty lines to get all of a sonnet into
: Japanese. There are people who still write
: English haiku in 5-7-5 format, but since at
: least the time of Kerouac, many people have
: argued that one can say much more in twelve
: English syllables than in twelve Japanese
: syllables. Also, Japanese haiku have no
: punctuation, and one of the syllables is
: like writing stop or dash in English. People
: have tried different things to adapt haiku
: to English. Some have suggested lines of
: 2-3-2 rhythmic feet. I have usually tried
: for a 3-5-3 stress count, counting two
: unstressed syllables as one stressed; that
: allows rather a lot of freedom. I am
: reluctant to abandon any form, but most of
: the haiku I like seem to. Even in classic
: Japanese haiku, the form is not absolutely
: rigid. Apparently, Japanese naturally breaks
: into that rhythm most of the time, but there
: are lines in Basho of nine and even eleven
: syllables. And one of the books I've been
: reading points out an instance of a Basho
: haiku lacking the traditional seasonal word.
:
: Some nice 5-7-5 ku:
:
: the white of her neck
: as she lifts her hair for me
: to undo her dress
:
: In atomic rain
: buddha goes on smiling at
: the last butterfly
:
: In that empty house
: with broken windows rattling,
: a door slams and slams.
:
: In that lightening flash -
: through the night rain - I saw
: ... whatever it was.
:
: the blind musician
: extending an old tin cup
: collects a snowflake
:
: one cow far from the
: others in a roadside field -
: winter afternoon
:
: growing in the heart
: of the hot, arid desert
: one red wildflower
:
: Instead of the girls
: one waits to see, nothing but
: solitary sparrows.
:
: One of these is mine and one of them is
: actually a sentence from a novel. Which
: ones?
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