Haiku Is Here

Up the barley rows, stitching, stitching them together, a butterfly goes.

-Sora (1648-1710)

In the U.S., poetry reading is left mostly to poets -and there are not many poets around. Magazines devoted exclusively to verse are frail, poverty-stricken, ephemeral publishing ventures, subject to sudden collapse; Poetry, largest (5,500 subscribers) of about ten U.S. poetry magazines, must beg constantly to stay alive. In book circles, the sale of 5,000 copies of a volume of poetry is considered unusually brisk. Yet by last week An Introduction to Haiku, a book on one form of Japanese poetry released two months ago by Doubleday, had sold 9,500 copies and was still going strong.

This publishing success would not impress the Japanese. Each month 680 poetry magazines with a combined circulation of 240,000 are printed in Japan. Toyo Keizai, a sort of Japanese Wall Street Journal, runs a haiku assortment every week. Hototogisu (Cuckoo), a haiku magazine founded in 1897, claims a substantial though private monthly circulation of 20,000. Japan's 500,000 practicing poets can win prize money from most of the metropolitan newspapers and from the Emperor himself. They write in all the classic forms, but the simple 17-syllable haiku, usually arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern of three lines, is the runaway favorite. Harold G. Henderson, author of An Introduction to Haiku, estimates that 1,000,000 haiku are printed every year. Trains of Reverie. By Western standards, the haiku is far-out poetry. It does not rhyme. The strange nuances -even the punctuation has significance -usually get trampled in translation. The haiku does not even seem to say much; its fragile content defies explanation; its meaning must be found, not only in the haiku's simple imagery, but in the trains of reverie evoked in the reader. Even to the Japanese, this is not always an easy task. A haiku composed by the master, Matsuo Basho (1644-94), has puzzled his disciples for 273 years:

Furu-ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

Author Henderson's literal translation -"Old pond:/ frog jumpin/ water-sound" -mirrors the surface picture beneath which lies Poet Basho's elusive hidden meaning.

A verse form so old that its origin vanishes in the mists of antiquity, the haiku is distinctly Japanese, like the no drama, where crossed planks do for a shogun's litter. No occasion passes, among haiku composers, without hundreds of commemorative haiku, frequently written on the spot. A thief, about to be hanged for his crime, couched his last words in the haiku form: "As for the end -/ that I'll hear in the next world./ cuckoo, my friend." For the lower-brows there are even earthy haiku, called senryu in honor of their creator, who died more than a century ago; senryu fanciers publish 30 magazines of their own.

Unimpaired Spirit. Henderson's book not only introduces haiku in the clear accompanying text, but is the first really successful attempt at haiku translation. Through it, haiku may well become a fad on U.S. campuses. A professor of Japanese at Columbia University before his retirement four years ago, Henderson inherited from his father a love of Japanese art and literature, nourished by several long visits to the country. Existing haiku translations dismayed him. Most of his 375 translations rhyme, on the very reasonable premise that Japanese haiku might rhyme too but for the limitations of a language in which all words end in n or a vowel.

Above all, Henderson's patient translations (one took him 25 years) capture, unimpaired, the evanescent haiku spirit, which has enchanted Japan for untold centuries:

There a beggar goes!

Heaven and earth he's wearing for his summer clothes.

-Kikaku (1661-1707)

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