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The Penguin Book of Haiku (2018), translated and edited by Adam L. Kern
The haiku is the postage stamp of literary forms. A small, square poem that frames a memorable image, it has now travelled far from its origins in Japan to become a global poetic tradition. For many schoolchildren, finger-counting the fixed syllables of the haiku’s three lines (five, seven, five) is their first encounter with the art of versification.
The meaning of a haiku, wrote Roland Barthes, “is only a flash, a slash of light”. Its snapshot quality makes it the perfect poetic meme, as exemplified by the many translations of a single haiku by the 17th-century master, Matsuo Bashō (the shortest perhaps being Dom Sylvester Houédard’s “frog / pond / plop”).
The Penguin Book of Haiku, Adam L Kern’s authoritative new anthology, does not omit Bashō’s splash (“old pond! / a frog plunges into / watersound”). But it also challenges the myth of the haiku as a monkish meditation on the natural world, and shows that it has historically encompassed the “silly, satirical, scatological and sensual”.
In a long but lucid introduction, Kern, a professor of Japanese literature, argues that there are really two traditions of haiku: the “witty linked verses” of haikai no renga, a literary game dating from the 15th century, in which poets playfully “cap” each other’s improvised verses; and a modern form, invented in the late 19th century by Masaoka Shiki, who argued that the carefully composed opening poem, or hokku, of such sequences was an isolated crystal of Zen-like insight.
Kern refutes this notion of the haiku as an essentially lonely poem by weaving it back into a folk tapestry of centuries of comic, bawdy and proverbial 17-syllable verses. Around 1,000 haiku are arranged here, by him, in a single chain of association which roller-coasters between high and low, as if Elizabethan love lyrics mingled with seaside postcards. Basho’s vanishing frog, for example, is followed by these anonymous lines on a man whose carefree hopping has ceased: “philandering ways — / laying off them deflates / his manliness”.
Kern acknowledges that his kitchen-sink approach risks “treason” in the eyes of traditionalists, who see the standalone haiku as a symbol of the Japanese “genius” for miniaturisation (it is suggested that the Hello Kitty cartoon character is composed of 17 lines in homage to the form). He also foregoes, with his taste for anachronistic frat-boy slang (“bunghole”, “poontang”), the lyrical delicacy of previous anthologies, such as Lucien Stryk’s classic The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry (1977).
What we get instead is a cultural history of Japan up to the end of the 19th century condensed into verse (“paperweights / on the store’s comic books — / spring breeze”). Kern enriches his selection with pages of scholarly notes, pointing out wordplay, jokey echoes and other subtleties lost in translation.
When, for instance, the Buddhist priest Kobayashi Issa writes “show benevolence / and they’ll crap all over you! / baby sparrows”, Kern suggests that the word “benevolence” conjures up a stone buddha as the birds’ target. Or when, in 1891, an anonymous poet exclaims “even walls have mouths! / prospering imperial reign / of the telephone”, it helps to know that there is a Japanese proverb behind this response to the arrival of western modernity: “The walls have ears, the doors have mouths.”
Kern’s selection does not cover the 20th century, when the traditional linked sequence began to be eclipsed by the more readily exportable slash-of-light lyric that would influence modernist poets such as Ezra Pound. A hundred years later, however, this feast of an anthology reminds us that poets excelled at social media long before the “floating world” of the internet.