My first book Spare Us Yet and other stories will be published on the 24th of June. Please pre-order a copy here. For Victorians the book will be launched at Dirty Three Wines, Inverloch at 3pm on August 2nd. More details to come soon.
We are on the threshold of winter here in South Gippsland. Our first cold day of the year, requiring us to light the fire, was May 7th, relatively late. Two weeks ago, we had two nights in a row dip below zero Celsius, unusual at any time but especially in May.
It seemed like the right time for Narrow Road to the Deep North by haiku master Basho (1644-1694) to jump off the shelf, as books sometimes do.
The Narrow Road is not a collection of haiku, but rather a hybrid form called haibun, where prose and poetry are mixed. My edition contains five haibun, all accounts of journeys Basho made: “The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton”, “A Visit to the Kashima Shrine”, “The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel”, “A Visit to Sarashina Village” and “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” itself.
The translator of my Penguin Classics edition, Nobuyuki Yuasa, translates haiku into four lines of English rather than the more familiar three, and avoids twisting his English into the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. He gives the following explanation:
I shall not, of course, try to defend my stanza, for it is an experiment, and just as any other experiment in literature, the result alone can justify or disqualify it. Let me, however, state here at least three reasons for my choice. First, the language of haiku, as I have already pointed out, is based on colloquialism, and in my opinion, the closest approximation of natural conversational rhythm can be achieved in English by a four-line stanza rather than a constrained three-line stanza. Second, even in the lifetime of Basho, hokku (the starting piece of a linked verse) was given a special place in the series and treated half-independently, and in my opinion, a three-line stanza does not carry adequate dignity and weight to compare with hokku. Finally, I had before me the task of translating a great number of poems mixed with prose, and I found it impossible to use three-line form consistently. In any case, this translation is primarily intended for lovers of poetry, and only secondarily for scholars whose minds should be broad enough to recognise the use in a translation like this.
If only more writers and translators were as attentive to the adequate dignity of their forms, but I digress…
The first poem in “The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel” is this:
From this day forth
I shall be called a wanderer,
Leaving on a journey
Thus among the early showers.
You will again sleep night after night
Nestled among the flowers of sasanqua (camellia).
I find myself increasingly attracted to this kind of simplicity. No doubt there are richer resonances of allusion, entendre and music in the original language but what shines forth in the translated poetry is a charming naivete. “I was here. I saw this. It was winter (or summer or spring or autumn).” No theory or self-consciousness, just existence.
With characteristic modesty, Basho says of one of his poems that its flaw is not containing a reference to the season in which it was written. Well, one wonders, who was responsible for that? Just put one in. But the strictness of the form will not allow for such easy deletions and insertions.
This is something even the most highly skilled practitioners of any art must contend with and that is the difference between the conception of the work in one’s mind against the reality of the work on paper, canvas, tape, whatever. Even when you know a work is not fully realised, changing it sometimes only makes it worse. It’s chastening to hear a universally acknowledged master like Basho confronting the same problem.
In a rather contemporary-sounding passage Basho also considers the source of his creative inspiration and finds it to be something like a shadow self or creative persona. At any rate it is something irreducible within himself.
In this mortal frame of mine…there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depths of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.
The detachment that Basho feels is necessary for poetry is obvious, as well as the sacrifices its pursuit necessitates. “It” is prevented from seeking security in a court because of its unquenchable love of poetry. This is a subtle recognition that to confine poetry, whether in court, or nowadays in a university (or any other institution) is in some way to cripple it. Thus, Basho lives by his poetry, which means going on the road as an itinerant. Living remarkably like a Franciscan monk, and frequently mistaken for a Buddhist monk, he travels for months and years at a time.
Haiku are most often immediate, documentary, commemorative and occasional. Basho gives us the impression that his are tossed off out of overwhelming emotion or on request of a friend or well-wisher. There is something deeply appealing in his merry vagabondage. He lives on his literary reputation and the people who put him up seem satisfied with a handful of short lines as payment.
Ultimately poetry can’t be domesticated and the true poet can’t be institutionalised, a fact which has obvious and dire consequences these days, given the necessities of living. To the degree he is institutionalised the poet’s gift will suffer, and this is obvious to any honest observer. The poet of today, if not “independently” wealthy, must choose between his work or starvation. Nearly all will make various and understandable compromises, but these nevertheless are the true options.
Basho’s choice of life on the trail would be considered ironclad proof of mental disorder these days, but in the Japan of his time it doesn’t seem that this was the case. He has many friends who help him along the way and he avoids all traces of self-pity, ascribing all of his suffering to his own foolishness. Traditional societies like seventeenth century Japan, which superficially appear much more restrictive than ours, seem to have a higher tolerance and even love for figures like Basho. More so than us in the contemporary West at any rate. This is not to our credit.
But then there is this astonishing passage from the beginning of “The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton”:
As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself, and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew. The child looked to me as fragile as the flowers of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had with me.
The ancient poet
who pitied monkeys for their cries
What would he say, if he saw
This child crying in the autumn wind?
How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive—by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind.
Elsewhere, Basho mentions off-hand that he is passing through a place on a steep mountain where people often leave their parents to die. A very different picture of Japan, shading into a nasty fatalism, emerges.
As an aside, Basho lived in a time when Japan’s brief flowering of Catholic faith had been almost fully snuffed out. It’s interesting to think about whether he had knowledge or opinions on the matter, but I’m not aware of any evidence for this.
Basho’s haiku, like all of the very best poems, end not on the page, but in the reader’s mind, minutes, days, or years after they are read. They achieve that essential lift off the page that only the most vivid and glancing verse can manage.
It’s now incumbent on me to mark this occasion with my own paltry attempts at haiku, a sequence I’ve called “Deep Autumn”
Deep autumn
deceptive sun
on the children’s jumpers
up the steps, down the slide.
Deep autumn
Antares below the full moon
The smoke from my chimney
allows the air to be seen.
Deep autumn
Low tide smell and bitter wind
a glimpse of waves
from the top of the cliff.
Deep autumn
is the basil too cold,
Are the cabbages
getting their sun?