In an article titled, “Make Haibun
New through the Chinese Poetic Past: Basho’s Transformation of Haikai Prose”
Chen ou Liu suggested, “In my view, maybe it is time for anyone who is
interested in writing haibun to re-think Basho's poetic ideal of ‘the
unchanging and the ever-changing’ situated in one's own socio-historic-cultural
contexts, and to make haibun anew through the poetic past of one's own literary
legacy and shared ones from the rest of the world.”1
Here is a point to ponder over. Though
short verses were available aplenty in many literary societies the creative
genre called haibun was perhaps rare; it was a Japanese speciality, a gift from
Matsuo Basho (1644-94). Even haiku is known world over as a Japanese genre of
short verse. Poets writing haiku and related poems usually relate to the
original creations adapted to their respective tongues adhering to the Japanese
style and content, to the extent possible. It may not be based on one’s own
literary tradition. Regarding the use of past in poems Haruo Shirane wrote, "Basho believed that the poet had to work along both axes. To work only
in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting. To work just in the
past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental
nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world. Haikai was, by
definition, anti- traditional, anti-classical, anti-establishment, but that did
not mean that it rejected the past. Rather, it depended upon the past and on
earlier texts and associations for its richness.”2 So past and
present both are to be utilised which includes culture of countries but in such
creations the Japanese creative force has to be utilised even in the modern
context.
Basho was the key figure who elevated
haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form. He had
developed a set of related poetic ideals widely utilised by his disciples,
fellow poets, and successive followers since the mid-1680s. It
looked to the past for inspiration and authority and yet rejected it. It
parodied the classical (and Chinese) tradition even as they sought to become
part of it. It paid homage to the 'ancients' and yet stressed newness. The
haikai Basho created was marked by its freshness though it was not delinked
from the Japanese and Chinese past.
It was after his return from a journey to Oku that Basho became more
focused on developing a different style of prose which was infused with a
haikai spirit. Around 1690, in a letter to Kyorai, he named this new haikai
prose haibun which was characterized by the "prominent inclusion of haikai
words (haigon), particularly a combination of vernacular Japanese (zokugo) and
Chinese words (kango)."3
Though Basho re-established and refined a mixed genre of verse and prose
called haibun (haikai prose), leaning on the Chinese past, as exemplified
in The Narrow Road to the Interior, it has been opined that haibun
had been developed before Basho and written in the form of short essays, such
as Kigin's Mountain Well (1648). But its prose style resembled
that of classical prose. So though akin to it, it was not considered as
haibun proper. After the publication of the first anthology of the new haibun,
entitled Prose Collection of Japan, Basho was recognized as the first
creator of such a model.
Basho's haibun are allusive, figurative and are infused with parallel
phrases and contrastive words; all of them are used to enhance literary effects
and add aesthetic-historical depth to the poems. To have direct
experience of his haibun and haiku two quotes are given below from Matsuo
Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi in English
translation:4
“The months and days are the wayfarers of
the centuries and as yet another year comes round, it, too, turns traveler.
Sailors whose lives float away as they labor or boats, horsemen who encounter
old age as they draw the horse around once more by the bit, they also spend
their days in travel and make their home in wayfaring . . . . As the sky of the
new year filled with the haze of spring, I thought of going beyond the
Shirakawa Barrier, and so possessed was I by some peripatetic urge that I
thought I had an invitation from the god of travelers himself and so became
unable to settle down to anything. I mended my underpants, re-corded my rain
hat, and took three bits of moxa cautery. I could not put from my mind how
lovely the moon must be at Matsushima. I disposed of my property and moved to
Sampu’s villa.
My
old grasshut
Lived in now by another generation
Is decked out with dolls”
(Translated
by Earl Miner from “The Narrow Road Through the Provinces”, in Japanese Poetic
Diaries, 1969)
And
“The
passing days and months are eternal travellers in time. The years that come and
go are travellers too. Life itself is a journey; and as for those who spend
their days upon the waters in ships and those who grow old leading horses,
their very home is the open road. . . .
I
sold my home and moved into Samp├╗’s guest house, but before I left my cottage I
composed a verse and inscribed it on a poem strip which I hung upon a pillar:
This
rude hermit cell
Will be different now, knowing Dolls’
Festival
as well”
(Translated
by Dorothy Britton (A Haiku Journey “Bash├┤’s Narrow Road to a Far Province”,
1980)
Example from another travel book by Basho
is here:
“In his
introduction to Narrow Road (18), Hiroaki
Sato translates a passage from Basho’s
Knapsack Notebook, the Oi
no Kobumi:
“Heels torn, I am
the same as Saigyo, and I think of him at the Tenryu ferry. Renting a horse, I
conjure up in my mind the sage who became furious. In the beautiful spectacles
of the mountains, field, ocean and coast, I see the achievement of the
creation. Or I follow the trails left by those who, completely unattached,
pursued the Way, or I try to fathom the truth expressed by those with poetic
sensibility.”5
Basho understood his journeys through a
genre he developed from old travel genres. He refurbished it
through his understanding of haiku. In his study of Basho, Makoto Ueda noted
the artistic quality of Basho’s prose and opined that Basho’s haibun could be
called haiku prose, written in the spirit of haiku. David L Barnhill called
them prose poems. But Jamie
Edgecombe aptly thought that the complex structure of haiku should keep the poem from
being dissolved in the haiku prose.6 So it may be said that the haikuesque
prose remains with the haiku making the whole a comprehensive poetry.
Basho says, “Learn about pines from the
pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.”7
“The is-ness of a thing is not to be
gained through attention to the thing alone. Indeed, is-ness is not the same as
the ‘thingness’ of a ‘thing’”, opined Jamie Edgecombe in his “Basho’s
Journey: A Rumination” as referred above.8
“In his essay, Basho’s Poetic
Spaces, Barnhill quotes from the
poet’s Knapsack Notebook:
“Saigyo’s waka, Sogi’s renga, Sesshu’s
painting, Rikyu’s tea ceremony – one thread runs through the artistic Ways. And
this artistic spirit is to follow zoka, to be a companion to the turning of the
four seasons. Nothing one sees is not a flower, nothing one imagines is not the
moon. If what is seen is not a flower, one is like a barbarian; if what is
imagined is not a flower, one is like a beast. Depart from the barbarian, break
away from the beast, follow zoka, return to zoka.”9
Basho journeys or voyages run into the
multiple fields of past and present, of persons bygone and existing. He follows
their becoming as he exists; he physically journeys across time-space while simultaneously
journeying into his existence and the nature of these journey-voyages become a
creative process. He follows and returns to zoka, the creative heart of the real. He inhabits travel. Travel becomes a symbol of time
and space. In the two haibun referred from Oku
no Hosomichi we find that the selling of his hut and
its impact is present in both the haiku referred. The works are repetitive and
imaginative to some extent. He is concerned about the poetic sensibility and
artistic quality, travel being at the height of things in his life. Basho pays
little attention to the present, past occupying a greater portion but the past
is not mere memory. It is nostalgic, it is mystic. Past contains the future in
it as in “Doll’s Festival” or in the mere mention of the dolls. Learning about
the pine and bamboo from pine and bamboo refers to the idea of becoming one
with them by concentration. The idea of catching the is-ness, thing-ness and
I-ness lie in the spiritual sphere to be found in ancient Chinese and Indian
sources, specially
in
Taoism, Buddhism and Vedic ideas. Here I refer to one of The Mother’s (A
spiritual personality; co-founder of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Pondicherry, India)
diary entry to know the process of
her identification with the plants and flowers; her spiritual journey into the
thing-ness of the flowers. Let’s look at her diary entry of 7 April 1917: “A
deep concentration seized on me, and I perceived that I was identifying myself
with a single cherry-blossom, then through it with all cherry-blossoms,
and as I descended deeper in the consciousness, following a stream of bluish
force, I became suddenly the cherry tree itself, stretching towards the sky
like so many arms its innumerable branches laden with their sacrifice of
flowers.”10
Basho the main architect of haiku expanded
his poetic self into haibun as he was a real poet-philosopher, an explorer of
consciousness; far above writing few lines of light bodied haiku with technical
fitness.
In contrast to the above, if we refer to
the submission guidelines of modern haiku and some haibun magazines or e-zines
we shall have different notions about the poetic genres depending on the ideas
of their editors and others governing them. As large numbers of haiku and even
haibun have been written, they seem to search for the new and exotic varieties
of poems to avoid boredom, to be tuned according to their choices which are
often idiosyncratic. Asking for changes in others’ poems is never a norm usual with
the mainstream poetry magazines. One may reject poems or take them but demanding
changes regularly in poetic creations are beyond expectations, beyond the usual.
In spite of all fastidiousness when the issue is published one may easily find
similar kinds of works strewn throughout the pages of the magazines which often
ends with a touch of personl memory or a piece of story at the end of the
haibun. A tiny story linked with memory is the most popular example of such
works. Short Stories have their own science. Mini stories following the Short
Story pattern could be created as a genre but they already exist. Haiku,
dangling at the end of the prose in a haibun as the end product, not related to
the prose many times, are often noticed. Here I refer to some comments by
critics which are very relevant.
“We note that the vast majority of Western
haibun end with the haiku – the contemporary desire for selflessness, for
abandonment of the ego, has been structurally arrived at within a given
context. The textual journey is over. But such an act of closure may deny
haibun a sense of resonance and layers of depth. The “haiku prose” demanded by
haibun is deeply metaxic and the only difference between it and the haiku
itself is the architecture of the haiku, which formalizes the tension between
the particular and the universal.”11
In his “Haibun: Some concerns” in the June
2015 issue of “Haibun Today” Ken Jones has made some in-depth study of the
earlier issues of the journal:
“It was exasperation on reading the March
2015 issue of Haibun Today that impelled this paper-
“I refer to the current haibun norm of a
long single paragraph or more, where a solitary haiku dangles insecurely from
the end of the prose. And where the reader is required to do some hard thinking
as to how it might connect with what has gone before, because of its obscurity
or because it’s (sic) meaning is too far removed to jump the gap, or both.
Often it feels as if the writer felt the requirement for an end-stop haiku and
pulled out something vaguely relevant from her ditty box as an afterthought . .
. .
“A great wasteland of unremarkable prose
with only an apology for a haiku dangling from the end makes the heart sink . .
. .
“A reference to the American journal Modern Haiku issue at time of writing showed all
but one of the eleven haibun were end-stopped only. The comparable figures for
the UK journal Blithe Spirit were half the twelve
haibun end-stopped.”12
Some
examples from the issue referred to are cited below for a better understanding
of the subject.13
1. “At the Marketplace” begins with a quotation of four lines from a
poem by Patric Kavanagh which introduces a melancholic tune of April by a bird.
Then it runs like this
“In early April, days before Easter and Passover, the local supermarket
sets up displays of pansies for sale outside their doors, close to the parking
lot. The flowers are a joy; in shades of lavender, Velvety purple, and soft
yellow, they are an emblem of spring’s return, rebirth and the revival of our
spirits after the long, harsh winter.
easing
the egg
Into
the dye . . .
The
waxing of the moon
“Sadly though, the pansies are wilting. On the tiered shelves under the
store’s overhang, they are bone dry, dying. Someone forgot to tell someone else
to water them. A busy store manager has already declared them a loss, ‘ready
for the trash bins,’ not worth keeping and doomed.
Holy
Week
another
day
closer
to Coventry”
Here the story moves round religious ritual and local culture about the
Easter festival in April. Return of the spring from harsh winter is a good
subject though well known but the whole thing happens at the community market
place.
2. “Songbird”, another haibun begins with a haiku: “A
wren announcing /the scheme of one small space /with his rollicking song.” And
then the prose begins, “I’ve always thought it kind of funny how some unlooked
for little thing like that can call up a memory, intact and vivid as the day it
happened.”
Calling up memory and telling stories; most of the haibun
and tanka prose here make up with stories of writer’s personal life. “The
Sutra” is good because of its reminiscent story but it is the same technique.
Story is the mainstay in “Kathy’s Mum”; here haiku has link with
the very short prose but is not quite related to Nature. Nature is used to tell
a small story. I don’t think that stories only make good haibun.
Among these haibun a tanka prose the one titled “Presence”
keeps to the promise of a good haibun. The tanka and the prose
are so natural with the surroundings, drenched in beauteous Nature, that it
seems there could be nothing else. The prose is poetry fitting with the tanka;
added with haiku it could be haibun, though there is some subtle difference, as
the experts would claim.
Though change with time is always the norm
for any type of literary work, such things have to be in tune with the basic
ideas behind the creation of a genre. Here Basho and some of his distinguished
contemporary poets remain the ideals, still now. High poetic and creative zeal
is the requirement for creation of haibun. For both haibun and haiku the ideal
background should be pastoral. Beauty of Nature is an additional qualification
in them. No quizzical trick or idiosyncratic insistence is the ideal to be
imitated. The poetry should be natural expression coming out of the being of the
poet; original and evocative, following the traits of the genre.
A comparative study of the latest volume
of such journals as mentioned, shows that through the changes incorporated into
such poetic works the poets have shifted from the original base of such poems
as Basho had initiated, followed by the poets close to his time and thereafter.
Notes
and References
1 Haibun Today; Volume 6, Number 1,
March 2012
2 Haruo Shirane.
"Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths",
Modern
Haiku, XXXI:1 (winter-spring 2000). (
http://bit.ly/CckuN)
3 Shirane as above
6
Jamie Edgecombe as above.
7
Hass, Robert (ed) (1994): The Essential Haiku, The Ecco press, New Jersey. p.233
8
Jamie Edgecombe, as above
9
Quoted in Jamie Edgecombe (quotes the Knapsack
Notebook) from:
AC Barnhill, David L (2005): Basho's Journey: The Literary Prose Of
Matsuo Basho, State University of New York Press, NYC. Basho’s Poetic Spaces (33)
10 Prayers
and Meditations. The Mother. Collected Works. Centenary
Edition. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Ashram. V-1. p.359
11
Jamie Edgecombe, as above
13 “Haibun Today” as referred
above.
