Envoys

It has become the norm on troutswirl to switch gears, and so I’d like to do so once again and present a new installment of Envoys (a description of which is just below this note). I had wanted to present this series with more frequency, and hope to from now on, but because of some personal technology woes, I’ve had to do quite a bit of reverse engineering to put this, and other materials, together once again.

I hope you enjoy this 3rd installment of Envoys and look forward to reading your thoughts, opinions and interpretations of this poem.
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Envoys is a section that is devoted to looking at individual, non-English haiku from the 20th and 21st centuries. For an introduction to this section, see Envoys.

                                                                               • Envoy 1: part I, part 2, part 3
                                                                               • Envoy 2
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For Envoy 3 we turn to a haiku written by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Much revered in his homeland and all over the world, Machado was born on July 26, 1875, in the Palacio de las Dueñas near Seville, and grew up in the lush Spanish landscape of Andalusia which would become a major subject of his poetry. Machado began writing poetry with an interest in post-symbolism then

                cultivated the dynamic openness of social realism . . . beg(gining) with a fin-de-siècle
                contemplation of his sensory world, portraying it through memory and the impressions
                of his private world [dreams/imagination]. . . . The most typical feature of his personality
                is the antipathic, softly sorrowful tone that can be felt even when he describes real things
                or common themes of the time, for example abandoned gardens, old parks or fountains,
                places which he approaches via memory or dreams. . . . Machado’s later poems are a
                virtual anthropology of Spain’s common people, describing their collective psychology,
                mores, and historical destiny. He achieves this panorama through basic myths and
                recurrent, eternal patterns of group behavior. [Wikipedia]

A large number of English translations of his work exist, and nearly all of his three-line poems can be found on the Terebess website in Spanish. Looking at the numerous translations, some certainly fall under the umbrella of haiku and show the influence of 17th, 18th and 19th century Japanese haiku. Others, though, for example his “Moral Proverbs and Folk Songs,” enter a different area all their own. According to Robert Bly they are, “a genre Machado invented . . . deriv(ing) from four distinct models(—)the popular Spanish copla . . . the sayings of Pythagoras . . . the Japanese haiku, and the . . . wisdom quatrains of Moslem and Jewish literature” (Times Alone).

A few of his poems that most people would consider to be haiku were included and discussed by William J. Higginson and Penny Harter in The Haiku Handbook. One example being:

                              canta, canta, canta,                                    sings, sings, sings,
                        junto a su tomate,                                       next to his tomato,
                        el grillo en su jaula.                                    the cricket in its cage

This centers on how one might read into the word “his.” One might, in Issa fashion, anthropomorphize the cricket and see it as a separation between the two, the cricket singing (crying?) that he has been separated from something so tasty—or is, perhaps, extremely sad about not being able to cling to something of such a beautiful color; or, one can ponder, as I do, whether the he of “his” is instead a farmer, a magician, or, better yet, a small child who finds great joy in having both in close proximity. In either case, one certainly feels a sense of pathos, or a great emotional intensity: “canta, canta, canta,” the helplessness of being caught, and the vividness of a ripe, picked tomato, just as alive and helpless, having been plucked from its vine, as the cricket. If the tomato is green (unripe) instead of red then another reading could be contemplated too.

The haiku of Machado’s that I’ve chosen for this piece also has a touch of anthropomorphism, as I found out in the process of putting this installment together, that is dependent on how it is translated. While searching the haiku (or short, haikuesque poems) of his that have been translated into English, I was struck by the one presented in this installment for the imaginative language used in the first translation I saw of it (Willis Barnstone’s in Border of Dreams), and remained attached to those two central words, their imagery and meaning long after: “white hallelujahs.” This, admittedly, shows my own preoccupations and preferences when it comes to haiku, yet also reminded me of the imagery used by Bashō and drew me back to this example of his work:

                                  the sea darkens —                                  umi kurete
                                  faintly white                                               honokani shiroshi
                                  a wild duck’s call                                      kamo no koe

However, when I searched for other translations of “white hallelujahs,” I saw that others had made different word choices when translating it. It seemed like a good piece to see how others might approach it.

The juxtaposition in the Machado piece below is admittedly weak, if there is really one at all, but the creative language, the simile and anthropomorphic qualities—at least how I read it and entered it in the Barnstone version—open up areas that have historical and spiritual depth. In many ways, “white hallelujahs” takes us into the themes that Machado often drew upon in his life’s work: his landscape and environment, the dream-like, realism, and the history of his country.

I am curious to know what readers think though. Is this Machado piece a haiku? A weak haiku? Is there not a strong enough juxtaposition to create enough space for discovery (something that, in my opinion, many modern English-language haiku often lack, though it is not always essential in haiku composition)?

The poem below is one of fifteen pieces, number IV (4), under the title “Songs”/“Canciones,” only a few of which are written in three lines or could really be considered haiku. And so we can see it as a song—a song not only about spring and the brambles/briars, but also about rebirth, regeneration, with cultural and religious overtones. As mentioned before though, the language can be seen (depending on the translation) as rather surreal and fantastical through the combination of strong imagery, color and sound. In addition, the brambles/briars are portrayed as being alive, capable of speaking and feeling, containing a kind of spirit and godliness of their own, their voices reaching into and up through the sunlight. This is what I was initially drawn to and continue to return to—how it resonates for me and echos. Also, in this modern era, I cannot disassociate it from Leonard Cohen’s song, “Hallelujah.”

Before I present the Machado poem in its original language and the manifestations I’ve been able to accumulate through the kindness and time of others, I would like to leave you with something that startled me when I read it. It is Machado’s last poem, found scribbled on a piece of paper in his coat pocket on February 22nd, 1939:

Many thanks again to everyone who was able to make this Envoy happen.

                                                La primavera ha venido.
                                                ¡Aleluyas blancas
                                                de los zarzales floridos!


Spring has come.

White hallelujahs

from the flowering brambles.

— translated by Willis Barnstone (Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, 2003)

                                                                                                  The spring has arrived.
                                                                                                Snow-white hallelujahs
                                                                                                from the flowering blackberry bushes!

                                                                                                — translated by Robert Bly (Times Alone, 1983)

                                                         Spring has arrived;
                                                         the white hallelujas
                                                         of brambles in bloom!

I imagine that it has been a particularly long and hard winter, so it is not the beginning of spring according to the calendar, but later, so spring has finally arrived, later than it normally does. Machado’s use of the word “hallelujas” is brilliant! It is the “perfect” word in communicating the powerful emotion of the occasion. It has great energy, the energy of “spirit”, but without religious connotations. Its power is somewhat comparable to the cutting-word ya in Japanese haiku. It is an expression of joy, to rejoice, free of sentimentality. After the hardships, austerity, sacrifices and darkness of winter; come the light, warmth, energy, abundance and spurt of growth in these flowers of spring, promising nourishment and fulfillment of fruit and contentment and possibly even the merriment derived from glasses of blackberry wine. However, I digress; it is the present moment that is important here, which includes a promising future to look forward to: hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!

                                                    Spring has come.
                                                White hallelujahs
                                                from the brambles in flower!


                                                — translated by Ivan Granger

                                      Spring is here.
                                      The white celebration
                                      of flowering briers!


   I’ve used punctuation I would not ordinarily use (oh the horrors of    the overused exclamation mark) in order to stay true to the original.

   An alternative would be:


                                      spring is here —
                                      the white celebration
                                      of flowering briers



The first version does, however, have the advantage of a naive excitement which the second one lacks.

As to the actual translation:

1. The first line would translate literally: “spring has arrived,” but the Spanish “ha venido” is more immediate and I think “spring is here” captures the moment more effectively.

2. “Aleluyas blancas” could be taken in several directions. The first tempation is to use the cognate “hallelujah” and translate this as “white hallelujahs” or “white joy” or “white rejoicing.” However, aleluyas are also connected with Eastertide in a myriad of ways. Since this poem is part of a larger sequence set in March, it seems quite probable that the “aleluyas” could be connected to this religious holiday (alelujas are, according to the sources I’ve consulted small Easter cakes, as well as small prints thrown on Easter eve). Therefore I have translated the second line as “the white celebration” because the word “celebration” connotes festivity and/or a holy day.

3. The third line is “de los zarzales floridos!” Zarzales are bramble or brier patches and they are flowering. But are they blackberries (brambles) or European heath (briers)? If we accept the Easter connection, then “of flowering briers” would seem to be the best translation The briers connect to the crown of thorns which tortured Christ on Good Friday, but could be seen as flowering on Easter Sunday as Christ rose from the dead.

If one chooses to ignore the possible religious connections, the translation still works as a simple celebration of the arrival of spring and the transformation of the seemingly dead and dry into vibrant life.

Spring is here entire,
Snowy hallelujahs
of the flowering briar!

— translated by A. S. Kline

                                                The spring has come.

                                                White hallelujahs

                                                of the flowery bramble patches!


Antonio Machado’s haiku is a simple, direct poem expressing joy at the coming of spring, when even the thorn bushes blossom. Machado’s use of the emphatic interjection “Hallelujah” lends to his praise a sense of his own surprise and delight with their unexpected beauty. There is a faint aphoristic, proverbial flavor here as well, a characteristic of much of Machado’s work. The poem is a good example of allusion at work in haiku. All of the imagery resonates with the Christian gospels, the resurrected Christ (the first line), the crown of thorns that is the bramble bush put to human use, the joyous shout of “Hallelujah!” with its ancient, liturgical connections and values. The casualness of the language, its simple unfolding, puts the symbolism there but without a heavy hand, sermonizing, or somberness. The imagery of blossom and bramble bush at the arrival of spring is utterly natural and so is our pleasure. Here for all to see is the lowly (and sometimes unloved) bramble, taking full part in the season, before our eyes making a material actuality of metaphysical renewal and resurrection. The use of plural grammatical forms accentuates the universality and sweeping scope of the scene. Machado’s poem delivers much the same message as Robert Browning’s “God’s in His heaven / And all’s right with the world,” but Machado’s method is assertive not of the argument but of the thing itself: simple, essential, and direct. 

                                                    Spring is here.
                                                White cries of hallelujah
                                                from the flowering brambles!


                                                — translated by Alan S. Trueblood (Selected Poems, 1988)

                                                La primavera ha venido.
                                                ¡Aleluyas blancas
                                                de los zarzales floridos!

Envoys is a section that is devoted to looking at individual, non-English haiku from the 20th and 21st centuries. For an introduction to this section, see Envoys.

• Envoy 1 (part I)
• Envoy 1 (part 2)
• Envoy 1 (part 3)
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Envoy 2

by Scott Metz

I became aware of the haiku of Tomas Tranströmer through the recent publication of The Great Enigma: 45 Haiku translated by Graham High and Gunvor Edwards, published and printed by RAM Publications (12 Eliot Vale, Blackheath, SE3 0UW, England). It is an elegant collection, carefully and lovingly translated. “The Great Enigma” is, in fact, a long poem, containing eleven parts made up of forty-five haiku and was published in its original Swedish as a single volume of poetry. This is what High and Edwards translated and, interestingly enough, is the name used for his entire oeuvre of work, spanning 50 years: The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (New Directions, 2003). Besides “The Great Enigma,” this collected work also contains twenty-two additional haiku.

Tomas Tranströmer was born in 1931 in Stockholm, Sweden. He attended the University of Stockholm, where he studied psychology and poetry. To quote Poetry.org, he is “one of Sweden’s most important poets . . . has sold thousands of volumes in his native country, and his work has been translated into more than fifty languages. . . . His work has gradually shifted from the traditional and ambitious nature poetry written in his early twenties toward a darker, personal and open verse. His work barrels into the void, striving to understand and grapple with the unknowable, searching for transcendence. . . . [He] is a (also a) respected psychologist, and has worked at a juvenile prison, and with the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts.”

Here is a favorite of mine from those twenty-two:

The power lines stretched
across the kingdom of frost
north of all music.

(translation by Robin Fulton)

For this installment of Envoys, though, I have chosen one of the forty-five in “The Great Enigma” and present to you five different translations of it, as well as some commentary following them:
 

De bruna löven
är lika dyrbara som
Dödahavsrullar.

These brown withered leaves
are as invaluable as
the Dead Sea Scrolls             
-translation by Graham High & Gunvor Edwards

The darkening leaves
in autumn are as precious
as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
-translation by Robin Fulton
(The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2003)

Brown leaves —
as precious as the
Dead Sea Scrolls

-translation by Anatoly Kudryavitsky

the brown leaves
as precious as
the dead sea scrolls
-translated by Jörgen Johansson

Dead Sea Rolls
the brown leaves
are as precious
-translated by Marcus Larsson

This haiku, like all of Tranströmer’s haiku poems (and like nearly all non-haiku poets who have taken forays into haiku composition) is written in the ancient 5-7-5 -on/-ji/mora format (for extensive information and research on this subject please see Richard Gilbert’s “Stalking the Wild Onji”), a “rule” often broken by the likes of Bashō and those proceeding him, though forever demolished by numerous early and mid-20th century Japanese haiku poets. Though haiku in Japanese have almost solely and traditionally been written in one (vertical) line (the language itself indicating breaks/pauses/cuts, allowing the reader further engagement with the poem), Tranströmer breaks his into three — in this case the traditional way in which Japanese haiku have been translated into English and, apparently, Swedish as well. Though he sticks to this format, he utilizes many “non-traditional” techniques — or at least techniques that have never quite been the norm — within it, such as surrealism, overt simile and metaphor, symbolism, the mystical, and the mythopoeic.

In the haiku above, and for all the haiku he has written, Trantrömer strays from western norms by placing a period at the end, giving the poem a kind of finality. Haiku naturally contain a cut at their beginning and end — punctuation or not — cutting it out of reality — “from the literal place/environment/atmosphere (“ba”) of existence” (Hasegawa Kai/Richard Gilbert, “Haiku Cosmos 2”). And so, a period at the end seems a bit heavy and unnecessary. This example, however, contains no cut, break or pause within it (though many of his other haiku do), but is, instead, a strong simile, comparing brown leaves to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Where does this comparison take us?

As I see it, this haiku is both an ode to the sacredness of nature, sacredness itself really, as well as a meditation on time, fragility, and mortality. It’s aura is dark, earthy, and autumnal.

In a painterly way, the poem works in shades of brown — the browns of the leaves (either still hanging on their branches, in the air, or on the ground) only to become food or part of something else, and the browns and beige of the ancient texts written on parchment and papyrus — not unlike, just to illustrate a popular example (and allude to a period of haiku Tranströmer is more than likely very familiar with), some of Buson’s most striking and colorful pieces.

Why the Dead Sea Scrolls though? Why that specific text and its actual naming?

The Dead Sea Scrolls (Dödahavsrullar) gives the haiku depth, background, and stretches the readers mind across time, from the present moment of a world broadcasting brown leaves, back almost a thousand years to a period when sacred texts were being written, copied and modified, beliefs were becoming solidified and suppressed, and cultures and languages were intermingling in potent ways.

The haiku does not necessarily render these sacred texts meaningless, but instead elevates and heightens nature and what we can learn from it, making it sacred, while at the same time noting its fleetingness and brittle nature. Tranströmer could have possibly utilized anything around him but instead chose de bruna löven (the brown leaves) because of the way they play off of and with the image and look of the scrolls. They almost mirror each other in looks, feel and composition.

Why not a different text then? In part, the answer might be alliteration. Looking at the word, “Dödahavsrullar” we find the “d” sound elsewhere: “De” and “dyrbara.” In addition, there is also the “ll” sound in “löven” and “lika,” as well as the “a” sound — found twice in “Dödahavsrullar” — in “bruna,” “lika” and “dyrbara.”

More importantly though is the fact that these sacred texts were found, were discovered, after almost a thousand years inside of caves. This sense of discovery, of something coming to light again, links directly to seeing nature (outside us, but a part of us) anew and coming to a new appreciation and realization of the common and oftentimes forgotten or overlooked. Thus, seeing it as sacred — an invaluable feature that Japanese haiku and culture has emphasized, given us (or reminded us of), through Shintōism. Also, though the haiku is in many ways about the documents’/scrolls’ actual features and the way they compare to brown leaves, the words themselves carry tremendous weight. Look at them as individual words linked together: död/dead, hav/sea, rullar/scrolls. Heavy words indeed, like spiderwebs with endless connections, most especially in regards to mortality and movement, and the curves, waves, effects and trajectories of both. Symbolism and change abound. The leaves and the scrolls then blend into one another, becoming a scroll of one and the same fabric, interwoven — the ancient and the familiar, the new, yet fading, forever entwined. Equal.

To have picked another document would have greatly lessened the poem.

It is certainly possible for the haiku to be a kind of moment, keenly perceived by the poet after a museum exhibition of the scrolls, or looking through reproductions in a book or magazine or something like that, and then having walked out among brown leaves. And there it was. And there it was able to be. It is also possible, however, for it to be a haiku more in tune with the poet’s inner feelings, mood, imagination and/or psyche, playing then with, and making use of, language and all its intricacies and echoes.
 

De bruna löven
år lika dyrbara som
Dödahavsrullar.
Tomas Tranströmer
 

rubberstamp by Lancillotto Bellini

Envoys is a section that is devoted to looking at individual, non-English haiku from the 20th and 21st centuries. For an introduction to this section, see Envoys.

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                                                                           morning again       
                                                                           bankers take their places
                                                                           beneath firefly squid

From what I know about bankers and office spaces in Japan, the squid became, in my mind’s eye, the fluorescent lights. It seems to me there is a good deal of space in this for interpretation of meaning into English, based on the Japanese (mainly the last 2 lines). I’m not sure I would be inclined along the lines of ‘fluorescing like . . .’ as I think the subject — bankers — didn’t strike me as something that would need that kind of description.

                                                                 bankers’ faces        
                                                                 in early morning light —
                                                                 blue glow of squids

Even in Japanese, this haiku is wordy. Since the word “fluorescence” is a “big” word for an English-language haiku, I used “early morning light” and “blue glow” to recreate the juxtaposition in a light manner. My son, living in Japan, notes that it may be a blue light because of the blue light of squids in Toyama Prefecture.

Like Hiroaki Sato I do prefer the one line haiku translations. I think it helps create the sense of movement and ambiguity that is often in the originals. I’m not too concerned about syllable count as long as it is not over 17-ish syllables. The argument about the amount of information carried by an English syllable and a Japanese one does not seem convincing to me. You can pack a great deal information into each Japanese syllable if you choose to do so.

I chose ‘squid’ over cuttlefish, because the topic is ‘bank workers’ and ‘squid’ has ‘quid’ hidden in it.

I chose the word ‘shed’ because it can also mean deflect and the bank workers passively deflect the fluorescent light in their work places.

I chose to stress the ‘early’ morning as I think the intention of poem is to stress the length of time the bank workers work, beginning as they do just after dawn. This puts them in an oppositional relationship to fireflies (蛍) which come out at twilight. (There are two magical, glowing creatures hidden in this haiku – both creatures of the dark, making their own glamorous light.)

Bank workers might be said to live in the ‘darkness’ of the money economy, which prevents them from getting out into the normal pleasures of the weather etc. There in the bank from morning to night, they handle money and make more money: Money, which in its weird and slightly sinister way, lights up our lives and our eyes. Money which, due to its association with gold, glows in yet another way in the ‘darker’ recesses of our minds. A great haiku for the financial crisis!

The clerks in the bank
fluorescent from the early morning
like so many squid

On second thought, I wonder if this might be better:

The clerks in the bank
fluoresce from early morning
like so many squid


-David Burleigh

                                                                           From early morning
                                                                           These bankers have been working
                                                                           Like the shining squids.


My reading: The haiku depicts the bankers working under the florescent lights like the squids swimming in the deep water.

Envoys is a section that is devoted to looking at individual, non-English haiku from the 20th and 21st centuries. For an introduction to this section, see Envoys.

This hyper-syllabic haiku is found in the section “Kobe (from September 1953 to February 1958)” of Kaneko Tōta Kushū, published in 1961. During the period specified, Kaneko Tōta, born in 1919, worked in the Kobe branch of the Bank of Japan (Japan’s counterpart to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board), his employer from 1943, when he was graduated from the Faculty of Economics of the Imperial University of Tokyo, to his mandatory retirement in 1974—except for a few years. Japan was in the midst of war when he was employed. As patriotic as the next fellow, he quit the central bank to join the Navy where he was assigned to its accounting school. Commissioned first lieutenant, he was shipped to Truk Island, Micronesia. Luckily he wasn’t killed. After working as a POW laborer to build a U.S. airbase on another island, he was sent back to Japan. Luckily, too, he was reemployed by the same bank.

Though the Japanese original doesn’t seem to come with a reading (ruby), there is some possibility that 銀行員 reads not ginkōin but kōin, a common term among bank employees, especially when they refer to themselves. Assuming that it is the reading here, the syllabic breakdown of this piece should be 5-9-6, rather than 7-9-6. From the viewpoint of meaning (Kaneko loves to analyze the formal aspect of a haiku in two ways: syllabic and meaning breakdowns), this will come out as 14-6.

As a common idiom, asa kara 朝から means “the first thing in the morning,” though it also means “from morning on.” Whether you take the idiomatic meaning or not will affect the emphasis of what follows.
Keikō-su 蛍光す, “be fluorescent” or “emit fluorescence,” most likely refers to the fluorescent lamps keikōtō 蛍光灯 that were newly introduced in Japan at the time. The noun keikō 蛍光, “fluorescence,” is not normally used in this verb formation. Whoever came up with the word, which means “firefly-light,” for the fluorescent lamp was brilliant: it alludes to the legendary Chinese tale about two men whose families were too poor to buy oil for lamps. So one of them used the moonlight reflected on the snow to read in winter, and the other fireflies collected in a gauze bag to read in summer. (Episode 50 in Burton Watson, tr., Meng Chi’iu, Kodansha, 1979.) The legend is incorporated into the first stanza of the Japanese lyrics for Auld Lang Syne, a song sung at every high-school commencement in Japan.

This being a translation exercise, keikō-su, can of course be translated as “glow,” “gleam,” what have you.

The last phrase 烏賊のごとく sounds a bit tacked on or inverted. Kaneko could easily have said 烏賊のごと (meaning the same thing) to make a 5-syllable unit, but obviously wanted to make the phrase sound “heavy” or emphatic.

(Or, to reproduce the sense of inversion of ika no gotoku)

(Or, to stress asa yori as an idiom and because Kaneko uses 蛍光 as a psuedo-verb)

Possibilities are many.

bank tellers
from morning on like fluorescent
squid

-translated by David G. Lanoue

Bankers in the morning
fluorescent like squid

-translated by Ban’ya Natsuishi & Eric Selland (World Haiku Association)

bank employees
fluorescing like so many squid
first thing in the morning

-translated by Dhugal Lindsay (Modern Haiku 31:1 [winter-spring 2000])

Bank clerks in the morning
fluorescent
like squid

-translated by the Modern Haiku Association staff (Japanese Haiku 2001)