Cool Announcement: Robert Hass Interview and The Essential Haiku

RR: How and to what extent has haiku influenced your poetic thought and poetry?

 

RH: I don't think anybody can ever answer this question— either the how or the how much— very accurately. One would have to have a great deal of detachment about one's own work. How? The power of the image, the power of simplicity, the power of discrimination, the implicit idea that anything can contain everything, something about negotiating nothingness in the sense of not ultimately having a place to stand (or sit) in our observation of the world. How much? I don't know. A lot. At least it seems to me that my debt is great to the poets I've most studied, Basho, Buson, Issa.

 

RR: Haiku are generally taken to be a poetics of nature, and often take aspects of the natural world as a focus or topic; could you discuss the question of haiku and nature, poetry and nature, in light of recent revelations of global warming and as Bill McKibben put it, "the end of nature?"

 

RH: One of the arguments for the cultivation of haiku, I suppose, is that attention to nature has become a moral imperative. McKibben is good on this subject and the great text is still the essay, "The Land Ethic" in Aldo Leopold's Sand Country Almanac. That book, especially the essays "Thinking Like a Mountain" and "Good Oak" and "Song of the Gavilan" are also useful texts for thinking about how to naturalize an imagination of nature in North American poetry. In so much of poetry and thinking about poetry right now, there is a good deal of appropriate skepticism about the assumptions behind realism as a literary mode and therefore about the whole question of what we do when we think to represent nature. It might be useful to let this tradition— and the range of anti-realist practices from surrealism to language poetics— enter the practice of haiku, if only to take away the sort of easy wow! poem that tends to be the first stage of our attempts to appropriate the form. Allen Ginsberg's notion that the blues lyric is the American version of haiku might also be helpful in this connection. See his effort at what he called "American sentences."

 

-- "The Essential Hass: A Short Interview with Robert Hass," Roadrunner, 7:4, November 2007

 

 

. . . the spirit of haiku required that the language be kept plain. "’The function of Haik[u],’" Basho once said, "’is to rectify common speech.’" It also demanded accurate and original images, drawn mostly from common life . . .

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 . . . The practice was sufficiently codified and there was even a rule that the seasonal reference should always appear either in the first or third unit of the three phrase poem . . .

If the first level of a haiku is its location in nature, itse second is almost always some implicit Buddhist reflection on nature . . . At the core of Buddhist metaphysics are three ideas about natural things: that they are transient; that they are contingent; and that they suffer . . .

They [Basho’s, Busson’s, and Issa’s Haiku] have a quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely, and because of this they seem to elude being either traditional images of nature or ideas about it. The formal reason for this mysteriousness is that they don’t usually generalize their images . . . what was left was the irreducible mysteriousness of the images themselves. The French writer Roland Barthes speaks of this . . . as the haiku’s "breach of meaning" and is able to make a post-modern case for them as deconstructions and subverters of cultural certainties. This case can be made, but the silence of haiku, its wordlessness, also has its roots in Buddhist culture, especially in Zen . . .

Zen provided people training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing . . .

Perhaps the best way [to read Haiku] . . . after one has familiarized oneself with the symbolism of the seasons and the Japanese habit of mind, is to read them as plainly and literally as possible.

-- Robert Hass, "Introduction," The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, xii-xvi.

Selected haiku translated by Robert Hass

 

Even in Kyoto --

hearing the cuckoo's cry --

I long for Kyoto.

Basho

Escaped the ropes,

escaped the nets --

moon on the water.

Buson

I go

you stay;

two autumns.

Buson

Climb Mount Fuji,

O snail,

but slowly, slowly.

Issa

Don't kill that fly!

 Look--it's wringing its hands,

 wringing its feet.

Issa

Cool Announcement: Robert Hass on Haiku and Czeslaw Milosz

My Dear Fellow Poets/Readers:

In this Literature &Lunch event held by The Center for the Art of Translation,  HEAR Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass discuss his translations of Japanese haiku and Czeslaw Milosz. From Basho to Buson, Hass has created fresh, new translations of some of the most celebrated verses from Japan's centuries-old haiku tradition. Here he discusses his difficulties with learning Japanese, as well as the stories behind some of Japan's most intriguing poems. -- excerpted from The Center for the Art of Translation.

Hass recites and comments on the following haiku:

This road --

no one goes down it,

autumn evening.

Harvest moon --

walking around the pond

all night long.

Fleas, lice,

a horse peeing

near my pillow.

Basho

Coolness --

the sound of the bell

as it leaves the bell.

That snail --
one long horn, one short,
what's on his mind?

Buson

The man pulling radishes

pointed my way

with a radish.

A bath when you're born,

a bath when you die,

how stupid.

Issa

Hass also discusses and reads from his translations of his close personal friend, the Nobel-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz.  See The Age of Czeslaw Milosz (well-made and informative trailer).

Chen-ou


Note:  Czeslaw Milosz once made a poetic commentary on Issa's haiku; it was written in the form of a free verse, titled "Reading the Japanese Poet Issa (1762–1826)."  This poem is the last one in The Separate Notebooks, and it contains within it three haiku by Issa. For more information, see Poetic Musings: Czesław Miłosz's Reading the Japanese Poet Issa (1762–1826)


Updated, September 21

Excerpted from Sounding Lines:The Art of Translating Poetry by Seamus Heaney and Robert Hass

Audience Comment: Are you saying “don’t Lowellize”? Is that what you’re saying?

In the versions of haiku that I did—another language that I don’t know— I made a point of making sure that I understood the word-for-word meaning of each poem I was dealing with and I made some choices to play loosely with things because I was raiding. I didn’t publish them for years, and when I did I called them versions of Basho, Buson and Issa.—though I tried to read as much scholarship as I could and in some cases be as literal as I could. But sometimes it wasn’t what I wanted, what I saw and was trying to bring over. I wasn’t trying to do scholarly translations.

Robert Lowell published this book called Imitations in which he would basically start with a well-known European poem and kind of take off on it. Stay in it, wander away from it, come back, as Ben Johnson did. Nabokov was outraged with one of Lowell’s translations and said, “How would you feel if someone took your phrase ‘leathery love’ and translated it into Russian as ‘the great football of passion’?” [laughter] ...

.....

Robert Hass: I was working on a little haiku by Basho that occurs in one of his travel journals, and, in the translations I had seen, I had not been particularly attracted to the poem. It went something like “Ah the Rose of Sharon at the road’s edge eaten by horse.” And I thought, “Oh this is one of those the-crude-horse-eats-the-beautiful-Rose-of-Sharon, woe for the passing of things” poems. I looked at the word-for-word translation of the Japanese and it was very swift and there was something there. He’s not a moralizing poet. One day I decided to go over to the botanical library and look up Rose of Sharon. And it turned out it was a wild hibiscus. And then I went out of the Japanese section into the California section to see if there were any wild hibiscus in California, and there is one, and its early folk name was “flower-of-an-hour,” because it blooms very briefly and closes as soon as it is not in sunlight. So I came back, went to sleep, woke up and looked again and did a completely literal translation adding one word that wasn’t there: “As for the hibiscus by the roadside my horse ate it.” I saw what the poem was about. The “my horse” was possible because it was in a travel journal—you know he is on horseback. He doesn’t say it in the poem. But sometimes, just for what you want, for what I want—which is “am I getting closer to Basho’s mind, is this a fantasy that I am?”—you take chances. There is a famous story about Ezra Pound’s Cathay and this poem “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” He got a gloss on it from an American in Japan named Ernest Fenollosa, who got it from a Japanese scholar who had translated the original poem by Li Po into Japanese. Fenollosa then translated his Japanese into English for Pound. And Pound made “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” And when Pound was writing that poem, he intuitively, changing the poem to get it right for himself as a poem, corrected several mistakes made by the guy translating it from Chinese into Japanese. It gives youdangerous faith in intuition, that the poem will somehow tell you what it’s about.

Seamus Heaney: That’s terrific. Say the one, my favorite, the one about the farmer with the radishes.

Robert Hass: Oh yes. Sometimes you think “oh I get this because...” This poem I thought I got because it is like something out of Dickens. It’s by Issa and it goes: “The man pulling radishes pointed my way with a radish.” Those long skinny daikon radishes. But it is about someone mulling over, a walker mulling over an experience afterwards. That is really the center of the poem, past tense. It’s about how everything is subsumed to its element. “The man pulling radishes pointed my way with a radish.”