Spring evening --
the wheel of a troop carrier
crushes a lizard
Konts: The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku Poetry
Dimitar Anakiev
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
春天夜晚 --
軍用卡車的輪子
輾死一隻蜥蜴
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
春天夜晚－－
军用卡车的轮子
辗死一只蜥蜴
Bio sketch
Dimitar Anakiev (aka Kamesan 亀さん, b. 1960 in Belgrade) poet, writer and filmmaker, began to write and publish poetry at the age of 13, and began writing haiku in 1985. He is the “father“ of many Balkan haiku projects such as Haiku Novine (Serbia) and Prijatelj and Apokalipsa haiku edition (Slovenia). He is a co-founder of World Haiku Association and co-editor of Knots: An Anthology of Southeatern European Haiku Poetry. His awards include the European Award: The Medal of Franz Kafka, The Museum of Haiku Literature Award, Haiku Society of America annual Merit Book Award and prizes from Mainichi Daily News, Daily Yomiuri (both Tokyo) and Azami (Osaka). He has also won several film awards, including the National Slovenian Award for best documentary film.
The film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning – an indicator for the exact reading – placed alongside the basic hieroglyph…From our point of view, [haiku] are montage phrases. Shot lists.
ReplyDelete-- Sergei Eisenstein
Cinematically speaking, this haiku consists of a list of two conflicting shots: the first one is an establishing shot that forms the temporal setting for the poem and sets a seasonal context that indicates a new start, a new beginning and new life; the second one is a medium close-up of the lizard crushed by a wheel zooming out to a wide shot of the troop carrier.
Below is an excerpt from my Haiku Reality essay, Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage:A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective, which can be accessed at http://www.scribd.com/doc/62372823/Haiku-as-Ideogrammatic-Montage-A-Linguistic-Cinematic-Perspective
ReplyDeleteEquipped with his inspired learning of the ideogrammatic nature of Chinese and Japanese written languages, Eisenstein adopts an organic view of the shot as a montage cell. 19 “Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage.” 20 For him, the individual ‘cells’ become a living cinematic whole through montage, the life principle giving meaning to raw shots. 21 Confronting Pudovkin’s view of montage as a linkage of shots, Eisenstein emphasizes that montage should be viewed as a collision of shots, a view “that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept,” 22 and that among all of these collisions, the weakest one, in terms of impact, is “degraded to an even movement of both [shots] in the same direction… which would correspond with Pudovkin’s view.” 23 According to Eisenstein, “linkage is merely a possible special case.” 24
Utilizing the fact that the human mind is highly capable of associating ideas or images in a way that the “senses overlap, subconsciously associating one with another to produce a unified effect,” 25 Eisenstein argues that film can communicate by a series of juxtaposed images that do not need a linear, narrative or consequential relationship between them. 26 In the mind of the viewer, shot A followed by shot B will create a new meaning C, one that is greater than the sum of its component parts, A and B. 27 For a cinema “seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts,” 28 the employment of montage as a collision of shots is a “means and method inevitable in any cinematographic exposition…the starting point for ‘intellectual cinema.’” 29
Furthermore, Eisenstein likens montage to haiku, “the most laconic form of poetry.” 30 He describes haiku as the “concentrated impressionist sketch,” 31 in which minute details are highlighted by using minimal language. In the following haiku written by Japanese haiku masters:
A lonely crow
On leafless bough,
One autumn eve.
-- Basho
What a resplendent moon!
It casts the shadow of pine boughs
Upon the mats.
-- Kikaku
An evening breeze blows.
The water ripples
Against the blue heron’s legs.
-- Buson
It is early dawn.
The castle is surrounded
By the cries of wild ducks
-- Kyoroku 32
Eisenstein thinks that haiku is “little more than hieroglyphs transposed into phrases,” 33 and that each of these haiku is made up of montage phrases or shot lists. 34 The “simple combination of two or three details of a material kind yields a perfectly finished representation of another kind – [the] psychological.” 35 For him, “haiku… act simultaneously as linguistic signifiers and denotative images of ‘natural’ things.” 36 Structurally and consequentially speaking, he considers haiku as an extension of the ideogrammatic structure characterizing the Chinese and Japanese writing systems. He believes that a Japanese haiku master’s juxtaposing two or three separate images to create a new meaning parallels his crashing two or three conflicting shots with each other to produce a new filmic essence. The juxtaposition of contrasting images in haiku (or the collision of conflicting shots in cinema) may single out, highlight, and purify a particular quality.
A TANKA FOR THIS BLOG
ReplyDeleteI enjoy reading
Chen-ou poetry and blog
because real
poet of today must be
outside any affiliation
- Dimitar Anakiev
Dimitar, I'm really honored. Many thanks.
ReplyDeleteOne more thing I would like to say about your haiku is that the symbolic meanings of "spring" and "lizard" add emotional weight and psychological depth to the poem.
Thanks for your support of my translation project.
Chen-ou
Thank you Chen-ou, for additional explanation of my poem. Yes, theoretically above poem has two "kigo" ("spring evening" and "lizard" /summer/) but "spring evening" is older, so "lizard" can exceed its "local function" (i-e. "kigo") and become an universal symbol. The "lizard" is in that way the "key-word" of the poem, its subject (topic) within broader theme of war. In my poem lizard is symbolizing innocent victims of war. Perhaps I identified myself with this lizard. This poem is written in the very front line, in 1992, in Croatia, in that time part of Yugoslavia. I was serving at that time as a military medical doctor in Federal Army. This poem is internationally known, the most cited of all my poems... I also appreciate your mentioning Russian formalist film-makers. One of them, Leon Kuleshov, is famous for explaining the basic principles of juxtaposition by changing places of images (film takes) within the superposed pair of images (takes). Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, in his book Sculpturing in Time, also mentioned haiku within his theory of film-making but he was watching at the haiku from different, more spiritual viewpoint. Tarkovski pointed that haiku as well as art of film has ability of catching the time...
ReplyDeleteHi! Dimitar:
ReplyDeleteI think there is a karmic link between the two of us: Andrei Tarkovsky is one of my favorite directors (by the way, the "ou" in my name literally means "Europe)"
Here are three "haikku/haiku-related excerpts from Sculpting in Time:
PP. 66-7:
Here I feel one more point needs clarification. If time appears in cinema in the form of fact, the fact is given in the form of simple, direct observation. The basic element of cinema, running through it to its tiniest cells, is observation.
We all know the traditional genre of ancient Japanese poetry, the haikku. Eisenstein quoted some examples:
Coldly shining moon;
Near the ancient monastery
A wolf is howling.
Silent in the field
A butterfly was flying
Then it fell asleep.
Eisenstein saw in these three line verses the model for how the
combination of three separate elements creates something different in kind from any of them. Since this principle was already there in haikku, however, it is clearly not exclusive to cinema.
What attracts me in haikku is its observation of life—pure,
subtle, one with its subject; a kind of distillation.
As it passes by
The full moon barely touches
Fishhooks in the waves.
The dew has fallen,
On all the spikes of blackthorn
There hang little drops.
This is pure observation. Its aptness and precision will make anyone, however crude his receptivity, feel the power of poetry and recognise—forgive the banality—the living image which the author has caught.
And although I am very chary of making comparisons with other art forms, this particular example from poetry seems to me close to the truth of cinema, with the difference that prose and poetry use words by definition, while a film is born of direct observation of life; that, in my view, is the key to poetry in cinema. For the cinema image is essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time.
... to be continued
pp. 106-7:
ReplyDeleteThe image as a precise observation of life takes us straight back to Japanese poetry.
What captivates me here is the refusal even to hint at the kind of final image meaning that can be gradually deciphered like a charade. Haikku cultivates its images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves, and at the same time express so much that it is not possible to catch their final meaning. The more closely the image corresponds to its function, the more impossible it is to constrict it within a clear intellectual formula. The reader of haikku has to be absorbed into it as into nature, to plunge in, lose himself in its depth, as in the cosmos where there is no bottom and no top.
Look at these haikku by Basho:
The old pond was still
A frog jumped in the water
And a splash was heard.
Or:
Reeds cut for thatching
The stumps now stand forgotten
Sprinkled with soft snow.
Or again:
Why this lethargy?
They could hardly wake me up.
Spring rain pattering.
How simply and accurately life is observed. What discipline of mind and nobility of imagination. The lines are beautiful, because the moment, plucked out and fixed, is one, and falls into infinity.
The Japanese poets knew how to express their visions of reality in three lines of observation. They did not simply observe it, but with supernal calm sought its ageless meaning. And the more precise the observation, the nearer it comes to being unique, and so to being an image. As Dostoievsky said, with remarkable insight, 'Life is more fantastic than any fiction.'
In cinema it is all the more the case that observation is the first principle of the image, which always has been inseparable from the photographic record. The film image is made incarnate, visible and four dimensional. But by no means every film shot can aspire to being an image of the world; as often as not it merely describes some specific aspect. Naturalistically recorded facts are in themselves utterly inadequate to the creation of the cinematic image. The image in cinema is based on the ability to present as an observation one's own perception of an object.
... to be continued
pp. 111-2:
ReplyDeleteThe artistic image is unique and singular, whereas the phenomena of life may well be entirely banal. Again, haikku:
No, not to my house.
That one, pattering umbrella
Went to my neighbour.
In itself, a passer-by with an umbrella whom you have seen at some time in your life means nothing new; he is just one of the people hurrying along and keeping himself dry in the rain. But within the terms of the artistic image we have been considering, a moment of life, one and unique for the author, is recorded in a form that is perfect and simple. The three lines are sufficient to make us feel his mood: his loneliness, the grey, rainy weather outside the window, and the vain expectation that someone might by a miracle call into his solitary, god-forsaken dwelling. Situation and mood, meticulously recorded, achieve an amazingly wide, far-ranging expression.
Dimitar, many thanks for telling the back story about your beautifully-crafted haiku and your thoughtful comment on haiku writing from a cinematic perspective.
Your thoughtful reply has made my day. Many thanks.
Chen-ou