Introduction to Bashō and his Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary
[In the following excerpt, Ueda situates Bashō and his use of haiku in their historical and literary contexts; he also surveys the critical response to Bashō's poetry from eightheenth-century Japanese commentators to contemporary Western critics.]
RENGA, HAIKAI, AND HOKKU
As is well known, the Japanese verse form called hokku or haiku consists of three phrases (often referred to as “lines” in English) of five, seven, and five syllables. Historically it evolved out of renga, a major form of Japanese poetry that flourished especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Renga, literally meaning “linked poetry,” was usually written by a team of poets under a set of prescribed rules. First the team leader, normally the honored guest at the gathering, would write a hokku (“opening verse”) in the 5-7-5 syllable pattern and including a word implying the season of the year. Next the host poet would write a wakiku (“accompanying verse”), using the 7-7 syllable form and extending or modifying the meaning of the preceding verse in some interesting way. This would be followed by the third poet's three-phrase, seventeen-syllable verse, then by the fourth poet's two-phrase, fourteen-syllable verse, and so forth, the two different syllabic forms always alternating with each other, until the poetic sequence reached its thirty-sixth, forty-fourth, fiftieth, or, as was most commonly the case, one hundredth verse. On certain special occasions, poets went on to compose a renga sequence of one thousand or even ten thousand verses.
In the sixteenth century, as more Japanese became literate and began participating in poetic activities, a variety of renga called haikai emerged and gradually gained popularity among all classes of people. Haikai, literally meaning “playful style,” was a lighthearted type of linked poetry that allowed more freedom of imagery and diction and a more relaxed aesthetic in general. The early haikai poets in particular aimed at eliciting laughter through the use of puns, witticisms, parody, slang terms, or vulgar subject matter. They produced no great literature, but they did help to democratize poetry. They also prepared the ground for the emergence of a major poet who, with his great innovative talent, would elevate haikai to a mature art form. Such a poet did indeed appear in the seventeenth century, namely Matsuo Bashō (1644-94).
While haikai was still establishing itself, hokku was steadily becoming more independent of the rest of the poetic sequence. The first renga anthology, compiled in the fourteenth century, had already separated hokku from other verses and collected them in a special section, but early renga poets always wrote them as “opening verses,” expecting wakiku to follow. As more renga anthologies appeared, and as poets had more opportunities to see hokku singled out in them, that expectation gradually lessened. Some hokku written in the late fifteenth century read almost like self-contained lyrics, expressing personal emotions the poets felt on specific occasions.
The popularity of haikai among the masses in the sixteenth century further accelerated the trend. Many amateur poets found it easier and more enjoyable to write hokku than any other verse in a haikai sequence. Hokku, being the opening verse, could be written without paying attention to the bothersome rules of linkage. The game of matching individual hokku in a contest, which became widespread in the seventeenth century, also helped hokku to be viewed as autonomous poems. Although Bashō once intimated that he had more confidence in composing haikai than hokku, the fact remains that he compiled a hokku contest book in his youth and went on to write a number of hokku with no wakiku to follow. Yosa Buson (1718-83) and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), two major poets in the post-Bashō era, poured their creative energy more into hokku than into haikai. It can be said that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the writing of independent hokku was just as popular as, and often more popular than, the composition of haikai.
It was natural, then, that in the late nineteenth century the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) should come to advocate distinguishing between the hokku as the opening verse of a haikai sequence and the hokku as an independent, self-contained poem. To make the distinction clear, Shiki gave the name haiku to the latter type of hokku. The new name became prevalent in subsequent years, and all autonomous poems written in seventeen syllables today are called haiku. This has created a problem, however. What should we call a 5-7-5 syllable verse that Bashō wrote to start a haikai sequence, but that we now read and appreciate as an independent poem? Until about ten years ago, it was more common to call it a haiku. In today's Japan, the situation seems to be the reverse. In this book, therefore, I have used the term “hokku” to designate all seventeen-syllable verses written before the end of the Edo period (1600-1868), regardless of whether they actually opened haikai sequences. The word “haiku,” as employed in this book, denotes an independent 5-7-5 syllable poem written in the modern period.
It must be remembered, however, that Bashō himself did not distinguish between the two types of hokku as clearly as Shiki did. In Bashō's mind, a hokku was at once an autonomous poem and a verse that could begin a haikai sequence. As a matter of fact, there are instances where he wrote a hokku spontaneously in response to a specific scene or incident and then, at a later date, used it as the opening verse of a haikai sequence. Conveniently, the Japanese language has the all-inclusive word ku, which designates a haiku, a hokku (in both of its senses), or any haikai verse. Commentators on Bashō's work make frequent use of the word, thereby keeping the semantic ambiguity intact. Needless to say, the term has no English equivalent, for the word “poem” implies a self-contained piece of composition, while the term “verse” usually refers to a stanza or section of a poem. In this book, then, I have translated ku as “poem” when the commentator is clearly treating the hokku as an independent entity and using the term in that sense. In all other cases, I have employed the word “verse.” A “verse” in my usage, therefore, covers a wider area of meaning than it normally does in English, for at times it has to signify something halfway between a poem and a stanza. The notion may seem a little nebulous to those who are used to making a clear distinction between a part and a whole, but it is integral to the basic nature of hokku.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BASHō
The historical significance of Bashō is obvious. He demonstrated, to an extent never known before, the poetic potential of the seventeen-syllable form. Prior to his time, haikai had been more an urbane game or pastime than serious poetry, and hokku was part of it. With his keen literary sensitivity and superb command of the language, Bashō explored all the potential that had been dormant in the verse form. He was a daring explorer: he used slang terms, he borrowed from classical Chinese, he wrote hokku in eighteen, nineteen, or more syllables. Even more important, he endeavored to make hokku true to actual human experience, to what he saw, thought, and felt, with all sincerity and honesty. He never completely rejected the playfulness characteristic of haikai, but he demonstrated that hokku was capable of embodying, in its brief form, all the various sentiments and moods of human life. In brief, he created serious poetry out of what had largely been an entertaining game.
Bashō's significance as a poet, however, is more than historical, for what he poured into his poetry has universal and lasting appeal. Readers have tried to explain that appeal in different ways, but they tend to agree that Bashō's poetry, seen in its totality, reveals his lifelong effort to find a meaning in life. Born in a family just below the ruling class and failing early in his attempt to climb up to that class, he went through a period of youth ridden by self-doubts, anxiety, and even despair. Yet, living in a postmedieval age, he had too much confidence in human potential to turn to a self-abnegating religion. In his extensive search for a viable scheme of salvation, he probed deep into Taosim and Zen Buddhism. Eventually he found, or thought he found, what he sought in what he called fūga, an artist's way of life, a reclusive life devoted to a quest for eternal truth in nature. The sincerity with which he pursued fūga is deeply moving. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that he had lingering misgivings about its redemptive power. To his last days, he did not seem able to merge poetry with belief completely.
The inflow of European literature into Japan since the late nineteenth century has not diminished the appeal of Bashō's poetry. Rather, it has helped the Japanese to reappraise his writings from new perspectives. Romantics in early modern Japan, who tried to write in the manner of Wordsworth and Byron, conceived Bashō as a kind of Childe Harold, a solitary wanderer who would travel to many distant towns and evoke people and events of the past wherever he went. Symbolist poets following the footsteps of Baudelaire and Mallarmé thought of Bashō as their Japanese predecessor, a poet who probed into the mysteries of nature and gave them literary expression through subtle, evocative images. Autobiographical writers, who thought they were emulating European naturalist literature, valued Bashō's tireless efforts to be honest with himself, to improve himself as both man and poet, and to record his spiritual quest with the utmost candor.
With the increasing interest in hokku and haiku outside Japan, the appeal of Bashō's poetry is now international. Early in this century, Anglo-American poets associated with the imagist movement were attracted to the poetic language of Bashō and his followers for its objectivity and precision as well as for its ability to present what Ezra Pound called “an intellectual and emotional complex” in a fraction of time. Such language also caught the eye of Sergei M. Eisenstein, because it seemed to utilize the same technique of montage with which he was experimenting in his film work. He called hokku “montage phrases,” and the first example he cited was Bashō's famous poem on the crow. Many poets of the Beat Generation were drawn to Bashō's poetry, primarily because they thought hokku were literary expressions of Zen. That view is still held by some Western admirers of Bashō today, but, in general, images of Bashō in the West have grown much more diverse. Recent readers have detected in him something of an existential philosopher, a psychological realist, an alienated intellectual, and a religious mystic. There is no doubt that many more portraits of Bashō will be drawn by his readers in and outside Japan in the years to come.
Ultimately, the greatest charm of Bashō's poetry resides in the scope and depth with which it represents human experience. He contains multitudes, so that his readers can see in him whatever they want to see. And yet they often feel they have not seen the whole of what they wanted to see, since a Bashō poem refuses to simplify the experience it represents. Because of its brevity, a hokku tends to be ambiguous, but even more so when the author is Bashō, for he tried to present life with all its complexities, pointing his finger at its mystery and depth but avoiding the attempt to force an analytical intellect on it. While that may or may not be a sign of greatness, it has proved to be a steady source of attraction to readers for the last three hundred years.
CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON BASHō'S HOKKU
Not surprisingly, a great many readers have been moved to record their feelings about Bashō's hokku. The amount of such critical commentary accumulated over the years is more massive than that found for any other Japanese poet. It must be noted, however, that a long history of interpretive criticism had existed prior to Bashō's time. Man'yōshū (The collection of ten thousand leaves, 8th c.), the earliest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry, already includes explanatory notes following some of the poems. Early books on the art of poetry also contain author's comments on the wording and style of the poems cited. One such example is the commentary accompanying the poems quoted in the famous preface to Kokinshū (The collection of ancient and modern poems, 905), although neither its authorship nor its date of composition is known. Commentary became more pointed and evaluative when poetry contests gained popularity during the Heian period (794-1185). In such contests a waka, a thirty-one syllable poem that by then had become the dominant verse form, was matched with another waka on the same topic, whereupon a referee decided which poem was the winner. Naturally, the referee had to explain the reasons for his decision, and he often did so in writing (or else his oral explanations were recorded by someone else).
By the late Heian period, earlier anthologies such as Man'yōshū and Kokinshū had come to be regarded as literary classics worthy of scholarly attention. At the same time, a number of expressions appearing in those anthologies had become obsolete and incomprehensible. Thus scholars in the eleventh century, many of whom wrote poetry themselves, began to annotate archaic words and phrases for the benefit of less learned readers. They also studied earlier customs and manners in order to reveal the poems' social background. They were especially eager to seek out any specific work of Chinese or Japanese literature to which a given poem alluded, for that allowed them to display their erudition to the fullest extent. The practice of writing scholarly commentary was well established in the twelfth century, opening a path for many excellent books of waka annotations to appear in later centuries.
When renga replaced waka as the most viable poetic form in the fourteenth century, critical remarks on linked verses began to appear in books on the art of renga as well as in records of renga contests. The commentators' focus of attention initially tended to be on the manner in which two sequential verses were linked to each other, because that was where the central interest of renga poets lay. But, with the increasing independence of hokku, critics gradually began to pay more attention to the opening verse—especially after haikai became the mainstream of renga. Comments and discussions on hokku proliferated even further when hokku contests came to be held frequently in the seventeenth century.
Indeed, the earliest comments on Bashō's hokku that survive today are found in a hokku contest book compiled by Bashō himself. Entitled Kai Ōi (The seashell game, 1672), the book includes two samples of young Bashō's work in the 5-7-5 form, each followed by a critical comment he made as the contest referee. In his mature years, however, Bashō seldom wrote about his own poetry in a formal manner. He did make some casual remarks about it in the letters he sent to his friends and disciples. Also, he seems to have discussed his verses in conversations with his students, and a good number of the comments he made have been recorded in the students' writings. Of those, the ones by Mukai Kyorai (1651-1704) and Hattori Dohō (1657-1730) are the most reliable. Bashō's remarks cited in other disciples' books should be read with caution, because they may have been distorted by the author for one reason or another. These comments by Bashō and his students are valuable, as they often reveal something about the process by which a poem was created. Knowing the circumstances of composition is helpful, especially when the poem is only seventeen syllables long.
A large amount of critical commentary on Bashō's hokku appeared in the next two centuries. Mostly written by haikai poets, it shows two main characteristics. First, it reflects a major effort by the commentators to seek out classical sources and allusions. Obviously they were aware of the earlier interpretive tradition that had been established by scholars on waka and renga; they also knew that Bashō was well read in Chinese and Japanese classics. Thus such commentators as Ishiko Sekisui (1738-1803), Shoshian San'u (18th c.), and Moro Nanimaru (1761-1837) searched far and wide to discover poems, passages, and phrases to which a given hokku by Bashō might have alluded. Although they sometimes went too far in this direction, their work is valuable in making us aware of hidden references and connotations in a hokku and enriching our appreciation of it. Second, those premodern commentators were prone to overpraise Bashō's poetry, consciously or subconsciously shutting their eyes to its flaws. To them, Bashō was a poet-sage whose work was beyond reproach. Indeed, partly because of their effort, the Shinto hierarchy deified him in 1793, and the imperial court granted a similar honor thirteen years later. To say something derogatory about his work became quite literally sacrilegious.
The situation changed radically toward the end of the nineteenth century, when Western literature flowed freely into Japan and dazzled the Japanese. In the new age, Bashō was no longer a divine poet but merely a major world poet, one who showed weakness as well as strength in his work. Thus, such critics as Masaoka Shiki and Naitō Meisetsu (1847-1926) began to publish candid, sometimes adverse remarks on Bashō's poetry; Shiki especially came to be well known for his attacks on Bashō. It should be remembered, however, that the attacks were based on Shiki's Western-inspired notion of poetry and had the effect of showing that Bashō's work was universal enough to be discussed in the context of world literature.
This recognition of Bashō's universality also led to his liberation from the small world of haikai and hokku, inviting a wide variety of readers to study his poetry and make comments on it. One notable result of this was the formation of a discussion group by leading Japanese intellectuals, such as Abe Jirō (1883-1959), Abe Yoshishige (1883-1966), and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), who took up Bashō's hokku one by one and scrutinized them at regular meetings held over a period of four and a half years. Novelists like Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927) and Murō Saisei (1889-1962) and free-verse poets like Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942) and Noguchi Yonejirō (1875-1947, known as Yone Noguchi outside Japan) also published essays showing their intuitive understanding of Bashō's hokku. Even those who were known primarily as haiku poets, such as Ogiwara Seisensui (1884-1976) and Katō Shūson (b. 1905), wrote comments on Bashō's hokku from a broad, humanistic viewpoint not restricted by the past haikai tradition.
In the meantime, the introduction of Western literary studies helped Bashō scholars to make rapid progress in textual and biographical criticism. Verses that had been mistakenly attributed to Bashō were carefully weeded out. Of the variant versions, the one that seemed to be Bashō's final draft was selected through a rigorous process of scholarly authentication. Scholars also aimed at maximum objectivity in determining dates and places of composition by scrutinizing the historical and biographical evidence that had survived. Their critical comments on Bashō's hokku help us to see the poems in terms of the situation in which they were written. A great many scholars made contributions in this area, most notable among them being Shida Gishū (1876-1947) and Ebara Taizō (1894-1948).
Japanese studies on Bashō's hokku reached a peak with the work of Yamamoto Kenkichi (1907-88), who was neither a poet nor a novelist nor a resident of academia. His brilliant book Bashō: sono kanshō to hihyō (Bashō: Appreciation and criticism of his work), which was published in three volumes in 1955-56, selected 147 representative hokku and attempted a detailed explication of each. Well versed in world literature, Yamamoto derived his basic methodology from the works of the New Critics in the West, basing his comments on scrupulous textual analysis. He did not reject historical and other methodologies; rather, he incorporated them into his approach. Ultimately, however, the strength of his commentary lies in his incisive intellect, keen literary sensibility, and rich knowledge of both Eastern and Western literature, all of which he applied to unraveling the complex mind of Bashō.
Insightful commentary on Bashō's hokku, made by such scholars as Imoto Nōichi (b. 1913) and Ogata Tsutomu (b. 1920), continued to appear after Yamamoto's monumental work. Yamamoto himself published a new book on Bashō's hokku in 1974, this time choosing a far greater number of poems for study but considerably shortening his comment on each. In general, however, Bashō's hokku do not seem to have attracted as much critical attention in the last several decades. Some scholars even assert that the peak period of Bashō criticism has passed, as far as his hokku are concerned. Current scholarship pays more attention to his works in other genres, which, with the exception of travel journals, had not received due attention before. Also, the huge accumulated mass of past commentary on Bashō's hokku is enough to intimidate any scholar. Probably those who have the greatest potential to contribute at present are non-Japanese readers of Bashō's hokku, who have been reared in a radically different cultural tradition. In order for their comments to be valuable, however, they need to be thoroughly familiar with the Japanese language and culture, and they should be capable both of synthesizing the past Japanese commentary and of adding to that synthesis their own insights. The task would not be easy, but I believe it can be done.
TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
Bashō's hokku, together with those of other Japanese poets, began to appear in English translation around the end of the nineteenth century. It seems that the earliest translator to publish Bashō's hokku was Lafcadio Hearn, who, in his book Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), introduced the famous poem about a frog jumping into the old pond (Hearn saw more than one frog in this poem, however). He also included hokku by Bashō in subsequent books, such as Shadowings (1900) and Kwaidan (1904). W. G. Aston's A History of Japanese Literature (1899) contained eight Bashō hokku in translation, together with a brief biographical sketch and an interesting—but unauthenticated—anecdote about the traveling poet. Basil Hall Chamberlain, who thought of hokku poems as nothing more than “a litter of bricks, half-bricks in fact” in comparison with Tennyson's great Palaces of Art, nevertheless went on to translate some thirty hokku by Bashō. His long essay entitled “Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram” (1902), which included those translations, was the first in-depth treatment of hokku to appear in English and, if one can discount his Victorian literary taste, is still worth reading for its many perceptive comments.
Already in those early days the style of translation varied considerably with the translator. Consider, for example, the treatment of Bashō's well-known hokku on sémi (cicada), a relatively simple poem as far as its meaning is concerned.
Never an intimation in all those voices of sémi
How quickly the hush will come—how speedily all
must die.(1)
The cry of the cicada
Gives no sign
That presently it will die.(2)
Nothing in the cicada's voice
Gives token of a speedy death.(3)
Evidently the three translators understood Bashō's meaning in the same way, but the result was three different poems!
In the years that followed, as more people tried their hands at translating hokku, stylistic variations proliferated still further. On the whole, each translator's style seems to have been determined by two main factors: his conception of the basic nature of hokku and his choice of English poetic models. To use the same Bashō hokku for illustration, Harold G. Henderson, who saw the essence of hokku in its rigid, condensed, tension-filled form, rendered it as
So soon to die,
and no sign of it is showing—
locust cry.(4)
while Frank Livingstone Huntley, who recognized in this hokku what he called “an arc of Zen,” came up with
Busy cicadas chirp and cry
On brilliant August days,
Zzurr, zzurr—
In this ignorant haze
They think they'll never die.(5)
In the final analysis, translation is a form of literary criticism as well as artistic creation, and no matter how hard the translator may try to become transparent, some presence inevitably shows through.
Notes
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Lafcadio Hearn, Shadowings (Boston: Little, Brown, 1900), p. 100.
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W. G. Aston, A History of Japanese Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), p. 295.
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Basil Hall Chamberlain, “Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 30 (1902). Reprinted in Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry (London: John Murray, 1910), p. 220.
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Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 43. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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Frank Livingstone Huntley, “Zen and the Imagist Poets of Japan,” Comparative Literature 4 (1952): 175. Reprinted by permission of Mr. Huntley and Comparative Literature.
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