Japanese poetry

Lesson 7. The target skill is that of analyzing imagery in terms of the associations created.

1. Brainstorming. An association, by definition, is a connection in the mind between ideas, sensations, memories, etc. An association may connect two ideas, or bring about a number of ideas, either in a linear sequence (each causing the next one) or in a kind of «bunch» (one idea bringing about many others). Apart from arrangement, we can discuss the mechanisms that give rise to associations.

What mechanisms can you enumerate? Try to provide examples of the way any two ideas are connected. For instance, what is the connection between the following lines: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (Shakespeare)? Or: “Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека, бессмысленный и тусклый свет …” (А.Блок)?

2. Tanka is the most prevalent verse form in traditional Japanese literature. Each short poem consists of five lines of 5,7,5,7 and 7 syllables. The enduring popularity of the tanka form resulted partly from the limiting characteristics of the Japanese language, which made it difficult to maintain a high level of intensity throughout a long poem, and from the Japanese preferences for simplicity, suggestion, and irregularity. These are reflected in the brevity of the Tanka form, in the evocativeness of the poems, and the uneven number of lines and syllables per line. Most tanka include at least one caesura, or pause, often indicated by punctuation in English translations. Tanka often tell a brief story or express a single thought or insight. Tanka poets generally exhibit restraint relying on clear, powerful imagery to evoke an emotional response rather than using abstract words to directly express their feelings. At the same time, Tanka poets often suggest or hint at the existence of a higher reality.

How do the above-mentioned characteristics of tanka reveal themselves in the poems below?

At the great sky Was it that I went to sleep

I gaze all my life: Thinking of him,

For the rushing wind, That he came in my dreams?

Though it howls as it goes, Had I known it a dream,

Can never be seen. I shouldn’t have wakened. (9-12 centuries A.D.)

3.Haiku (or hokku, originally the opening verse of a longer poem), three-line verses of 5-7-5 syllables, present spare yet clear images that stimulate thought and evoke emotion. When the hokku became detached from linked verse, it also cast off the room the tanka provided for drawing a moral (though not all tanka moralize) and what was left was the irreducible mysteriousness of the images themselves. Because of the brevity of the haiku form, the image cannot be presented in detail, so haiku employ the power of suggestion to produce a detailed picture in the reader’s mind.

The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it. By establishing the season the haiku calls to mind all the details and ideas that readers associate with the time of the year.

Offer a few seasonal words to your group-mates, so that they can suggest a chain of associations each word causes.

4. If the first level of haiku is its location in nature, its second is almost always some implicit Buddhist reflection on nature. One of the striking differences between Christian and Buddhist thought is that in the Christian sense of things, nature is fallen, and in the Buddhist sense it isn’t. Another is that, because there is no creator-being in Buddhist cosmology, there is no higher plane of meaning to which nature refers. At the core of Buddhist metaphysics are three ideas about natural things: that they are transient; that they are contingent; and that they suffer. Though the melancholy of autumn is as traditional an experience in European poetry as it is Japanese, it is not fundamentally assimilated into the European system of thought. English poets had a word for these feelings, they called them “moods.” When Wordsworth or Keats writes about being “in pensive or wayward mood,” you know that they are doing one of the jobs of the artist, trying to assimilate psychological states for which the official culture didn’t have a language. Basho’s Japan did. The old Japanese phrase that sums up the transience of things, “swirling petals, falling leaves,” was a religious thought.

Japanese literary criticism states that three masters in the haiku tradition, Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa, represent three types of the poet – Basho the ascetic and seeker, Buson the artist, Issa the humanist – and their differences are clear at a glance when you read them.

Here is a fall poem that has Basho’s poignant calm and spiritual restlessness:

Deep autumn –

my neighbor,

how does he live, I wonder?

And this winter poem was Buson’s painterly mix of precision and strangeness:

Tethered horse;

snow