Last weekend Naviar Records ran a webinar about haiku
I arrived late due to the early morning start and felt as though I was catching up.
Fay offered interesting perspectives, bridging cultural divides as a Japanese woman who lives in America.
I like to think that if I'd been more awake I would've asked about the challenges in translating haiku.
Shifting meaning between languages when constrained by the short form of this style of writing must present many problems and I expect she would have adopted different solutions over the course of her career.
Some of her advice addressed how foreign writers approach haiku and my notes captured:
- Avoid making the last line a statement.
- Almost no one uses “I” in haiku and some Japanese translators omit it.
- Some editors view the use of “I” as senryu.
- Haiku editors are looking for a surprise, particularly the cutting word.
One comment overheard from the audience was that writing "I" would be a waste of four characters in Japanese in writing watashi wa, which led me to ponder how brushstrokes would be a creative constraint.
Another commentator asked if the shift away from the individual reflected that "Japanese are a 'we' culture, whereas Europeans are a 'me' culture" and it left me wondering about the character of haiku in the 21st Century.
I expect that Zen Buddhism and Shinto played significant roles in shaping Japanese culture, whereas Christianity gives Europeans a different outlook.
As a form of verse haiku has adapted much better than some European traditions, but then again, I don't look for Japanese playwrights working in iambic pentameter or poets writing sonnets in languages other than English. (Although, maybe I should. This could be an interesting development!)
Anyway, it led me to ask how the Japanese view the interest of foreigners in their art, which led webinar host Marco to quip in the chat that it was probably like how Italians viewed international pizza. (I resisted the urge to shock him with my recipes!)
I also had a comment to ask how the seasonal reference might be understood, given that different parts of the world have different experiences of seasons.
Fay had shown examples where the seasonal reference in Japanese haiku was subtle imagery like winter vegetables, as well as the better known images of the autumn moon or spring-time blossoms.
I observed that I'd recently encountered an idea that Japanese recognised micro-seasons in the form of 72 five-day periods over a year, which led Fay to recognise that was from one book and that Japanese generally viewed four seasons like the west.
She acknowledged that seasonal references might require additional context and was encouraging, saying that if a writer presents a scene that is interesting, a haiku judge will be moved to research.
It was this process of describing how nature affects the poet that Fay described as a third characteristic of haiku, after the cutting-word and seasonal reference.
Her observations provided insights into the culture that informs haiku.
