Periplum

I first met Tito Andres Ramos during the 2005-2006 school year when he was an exchange student from Santa Cruz, Bolivia studying at School of the Arts, in Rochester NY where I taught creative writing. Already proficient in English, Tito signed up for my senior poetry class. It was the unit on haiku that really caught Tito’s attention.

In his own words Tito says:

“It was at School of the Arts that my haiku journey began. Once introduced to haiku I felt like I just had to write. I felt creativity inside of me and haiku was the way I could let it out. Once I started writing haiku I couldn’t stop.

For me, haiku is a way of seeing things; it is little sparkles of life in the small and daily things that we often miss. Haiku are small drops of love from God. Haiku is life itself; it is the tiny beat in daily things.

These days haiku is like a little room of peace in my busy day. When I go there it feels just right.”

Tito returned to Santa Cruz, Bolivia in the summer of 2006. Today, at twenty-one years of age he is studying business management and works for a marketing company. Please take a moment to enjoy this selection of haiku written by Tito. Tito composes his haiku in English and then translates into Spanish.

birthday rain
little drops zigzag
down my window

lluvia de cumpleanos
pequenas goats
zigzaggueando en la ventana

open grave
the mud sticks
to my boots

hojas muertas
bajo la nieve
luna de invierno

winter night
a blurry moon
illuminates the clouds

noche de invierno
la luna
ilumina las nubes

fallen leaves
a warm afternoon
in old Hiroshima

hojas caidas
una calida tarde
en la vieja Hiroshima

summer sunset
my sand castle
crumbling

atardecer de verano
mi castillo de arena
despedazandose

a wave
erases my footprints
summer sunset

una ola
borra mis huellas
atardecer de verano

sunny winter day
my packed suitcase
under the bed

dia soleado de invierno
mi maleta empacada
bojo mi cama

cold morning
her wedding ring
forgotten on my table

manana fria
su anillo de bodas
olvidado en mi mesa

rainy morning
the first light
covered by clouds

manana lluviosa
la prima luz
cubierto por nubes

cold morning
her body heat
on my empty bed

manana fria
su calor corporal
en mi cama vacia

winter moon
two pair of footprints
toward the sea

noche de invierno
dos pares de huellas
se dirijen al mar

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
• Periplum: Introduction
• Periplum #1: Keiji Minato
• Periplum #2: Petar Tchouhov
• Periplum #3: Masahiro Koike
• Periplum #4: Fay Aoyagi
• Periplum #5: Jean-Pierre Colleu
• Periplum #6: Casimiro de Brito
• Periplum #7: Saša Važić
• Periplum #8: Ami Tanaka
• Periplum #9: Chie Aiko
• Periplum #10: Slavko Sedlar
• Periplum #11: Umberto Senegal

Umberto Senegal, founder and president of the Colombian Haiku Association, has been writing and publishing haiku in Spanish since the 1980s. His books of haiku and short poetry include Pundarika: poesía zen (Pundarika: Zen Poems); Ventanas al nirvana (Windows to Nirvana) and Dejé las flores en el sueño (I Left the Flowers in a Dream). He is regarded as one of the foremost authorities on haiku in the Spanish-speaking Americas. Juan Manuel Cuartas Restrepo calls Umberto Senegal a “master . . . in every sense of the word, the prolific and brilliant author of hundreds of haiku” (my translation;10). Because of his prominence in Latin American haiku, he was invited in 1993 to edit a bilingual Portugese-Spanish anthology of haiku with the twin titles, Antologia do haicai Latino-Americano and Antología del haikú latinoamericano. For years, an unpublished text by Senegal, Anotaciones sobre el haikú (Notes on Haiku), has circulated among South American scholars, leaving its imprint on books such as the aforementioned Juan Manuel Cuartas Restrepo’s Los siete poetas del haikú (The Seven Haiku Poets) and Rodrigo Escobar’s and Javier Tafur’s Para el corazón que no duda: breve antología de haikú japonés (For the Heart That Has No Doubts: A Brief Anthology of Japanese Haiku). In recent years Senegal has taken up short fiction. He writes “atomic stories” consisting of no more than twenty words, exluding the titles—a collection of which is gathered in Cuentos atómicos (Atomic Stories)—and he writes paragraph-length microfictions, many of which appear in his book Relatos para un enano (Stories for a Dwarf). Even though he now considers tiny fiction his area of specialization, he still writes haiku of the highest quality.

I first encountered Senegal’s work in 1993 when I reviewed Pundarika for Modern Haiku. Recently, seventeen years later, Charlie Trumbull asked me to write an update on Senegal’s haiku for that same journal. With the help of Xavier University librarian Nancy N. Hampton, I gathered and read Senegal’s books in print. However, we soon discovered a gap: he has no book of haiku published after 1994. I found a postal address in one of his recent fiction books and wrote to him. My snail-mail appeal took nearly a month to reach his hands, but when it finally did, he wrote me an e-mail reply which included a generous selection of unpublished haiku from the years 2000 to 2009. Many of these, he says, he plans to bring out in future books with the titles Universo de rocío (Dewdrop Universe) and La caída de las hojas (Fall of the Leaves). I picked fifteen of these previously unpublished haiku to share and translate in my Modern Haiku essay. Of those fifteen, I would like to present three, here, with comments. To see all of them, you’ll need to pick up a copy of the Autumn 2010 issue of Modern Haiku.

The first example reads, in Spanish:

Todas las puertas
con viejos candados
me devolveré.

Here’s my translation:

all the doors
with their ancient padlocks
will be mine

Senegal’s language is clean and direct, yet, hidden behind this plainness of statement—like his future inheritance behind locked doors—lurks a dense, musty emotion. There is a heaviness to family and to legacy, and there are also secrets, ancient secrets, awaiting in the cobwebs behind padlocked doors. There is so much here to deal with, so much of the past, hidden! I suspect that the poet would prefer to light a match to it, when the time comes, but he will not do so. His last line, “will be mine” (me devolveré), sounds a note of resignation. Behind every door lie artifacts of ancestors: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and many, many others. Every door, when its rusty old padlock is finally opened, will grant access to rooms filled with memories, hopes and regrets: the heavy baggage of family. The poet will stand in them, their sole inheritor . . . and then what?

A second haiku from one of Senegal’s future books is the following.

En el candil cadáveres
de zancudos. Alguien solloza
en la habitación.

mosquito corpses in the lamp
someone sobbing
in the room

Two events come together synergystically to create an effect greater than the sum of parts: the cadavers of mosquitoes lie in the cemetery of a lamp and someone sobs in a room. At first reading, I don’t get the feeling that the sobbing person is grieving for the little deaths in the lamp. In my imagining of it, I see a triangulation of mosquito corpses, a sobbing person and the poet, who is also there, looking at the mosquitoes and hearing the sobbing. It is the poet’s consciousness that brings together the two other stimuli: the seen and the heard. Interestingly, he doesn’t describe the sobbing person but instead chooses to focus on the dead mosquitoes in the lamp. Senegal, the author of atom-sized stories, evokes here a micro-drama, a mini-tragedy of pain, loss and unspoken suffering. With deft, oblique understatement he leaves the reader to meditate and conjure. The imagination must choose, and, as I contemplate futher, mine chooses to picture this unspecified sobbing person in two different ways. In one vision she is a grieving woman whose pain is so keen the poet cannot bear to look at her and so instead gazes at the dead mosquitoes in the lamp. In the other vision, the sobbing person, though seeming to be external to the poet (after all, Senegal describes this individual as a third-person “someone”) is, in fact, the poet. In his contemplation of the tiny-sized deaths, the poet finds himself interrupted by the sound of sobs coming from the mouth of “someone”: himself! I like imagining the scene in both ways and feel no need to pick one or the other. One of them hints at a story of a man and a woman; a husband and a wife, perhaps—rich with history and subtext. The other suggests the psychodrama of a personality coming unglued: a fragmenting of self such that the poet, detached and alienated from his own grief, notes its expression—the sobbing—with eerie objectivity.

Here’s a third example, just as simple on its surface while complex in its depths:

Sobre la piedra
deja de ser mariposa
la mariposa.

on the stone
through with being a butterfly
a butterfly

The butterfly has always symbolized transformation and, in Buddhist poetry, rebirth and enlightenment. Maybe because I’m aware of Senegal’s study of Zen, I’m inclined to read this haiku not as an elegiac poem on the butterfly’s death, but as a celebration of its final letting-go that equates with nirvana and immersion into the All. The butterfly has spread its wings and flown over the great “stone” of planet Earth for a season of beauty and grace, but that season is now over. The thing on the stone is no longer what it was, no longer a butterfly. Like a loved one’s corpse, it is only a vestige: a delicate shadow of what it was. The butterfly game is over. Senegal, a poet steeped in mystical traditions—who alludes in his works not only to Zen but also to the Indian mystic Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna, to Sufism and to the Mahayana sutra, Saddharma Pundarika; slyly begs the question: Who was the butterfly, really? Who plays the game of being butterflies, human beings, mosquitoes, polar bears, willow trees, viruses?

The answer to this question cannot be expressed using the yes-no binaries of human language, but it might be hinted at, wordlessly, in the Buddha’s half-smile.

Cuartas Restrepo, Juan Manuel. Los siete poetas del haikú. Cali, Colombia: Programa Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2005.

Lanoue, David. G. “A Haiku Poet of Contemporary Spanish-America: Humberto Senegal.” Modern Haiku 24, No. 1 (Winter-Spring 1993): 47-49.

Senegal, Humberto, Ed. Antologia do haicai Latino-Americano; Antología del haikú latinoamericano. São Paolo: Aliança Cultural Brasil-Japaõ, 1993.

—–. Cuentos atómicos. 4th edition. Calarcá (Quindío) Colombia: Revista Minificciones, 2006. First edition, 2005.

—–. Dejé las flores en el sueño. Armenia (Quindío) Colombia: Ediciones Kanora, 1994.

—–. Pundarika: poesía zen. Armenia (Quindío) Colombia: Editorial Quingráficas, 1984.

—–. Relatos para un enano. Calarcá (Quindío) Colombia: Cuadernos Negros, 2008.

—–. Ventanas al nirvana. Calarcá (Quindío) Colombia: La Cámara de Representantes, 1988.

Tafur González, Javier and Robrigo Escobar Hoguín. Para el corazón que no duda: breve antología de haikú japonés. Second Edition. Cali, Colombia: Programa Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2005.

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• Periplum: Introduction
• Periplum #1: Keiji Minato
• Periplum #2: Petar Tchouhov
• Periplum #3: Masahiro Koike
• Periplum #4: Fay Aoyagi
• Periplum #5: Jean-Pierre Colleu
• Periplum #6: Casimiro de Brito
• Periplum #7: Saša Važić
• Periplum #8: Ami Tanaka
• Periplum #9: Chie Aiko
• Periplum #10: Slavko Sedlar

The word “suchness” evokes, in the lexicon of Zen Buddhism, a vivid perceiving of the here-and-now reality of a thing—not thoughts about a thing but the thing itself, just the way it is: palpable, unembellished and undefined. “Suchness” hints of a deeper reality than what we normally “see,” since we normally don’t really see things at all. We see the labels of things. We classify and organize raw sensation so that we don’t really see the poplar tree; our minds quickly categorize such-and-such a shape as a “poplar” based on a certain visual pattern and then, content with our categorizing, we move on. We never saw it at all.

But if we open ourselves to the suchness of things, a different kind of seeing—true seeing—becomes possible. Letting go of labels and the urge to classify and to categorize, we meet this particular tree in this particular moment, and a marvelous thing happens. You might call it a little miracle. The color and patterns of the leaves, the texture and grain of the bark, its smell, the sound of wind rustling, the warmth or coolness of the trunk—suddenly the tree, this tree, is drawing us deeply into an encounter that many of us can go our whole lives without ever experiencing. We see the poplar!

A bilingual Serbian-English collection of Slavko Sedlar’s haiku has just been published. With English translations by Saša Važić, the book bears the title, T A К В О С Т 2 (SUCHNESS 2), a sequel to Sedlar’s T A К В О С Т (SUCHNESS). These titles are perfectly chosen. The poet, Slavko Sedlar, has made it his business to open himself to the magic of the ordinary, the miraculous power of unclouded vision. He indeed perceives the suchness of things, and he invites us to share in the joy of this. An ordinary moment of ordinary life, if we attend to it with open eyes and open heart, can shock and delight. Let’s consider some examples from SUCHNESS 2:

Док чека бетон
Мешалица меша воду
И парчад Сунца

Waiting for concrete
a mixer mixes water
with pieces of the sun

Most people who mix concrete don’t see beauty or poetry in their labor. Most of them, like most of us, don’t see the world at all. And yet, if we let Sedlar guide us, we can learn a new way to perceive. The ordinary moment becomes magical partly because we so seldomly take the time to attend to it, but there’s more going on here. When we stop, look and listen, we perceive the here-and-now the way it really is, and that thing which it really is—its suchness—is, in fact, a pure miracle. Even while we sit around waiting for concrete to become what it will become, water mixes with “pieces of the sun” in a primal, creative swirl: the same swirl of galaxies and subatomic particles. The English poet William Blake proposed that we “see the world in a grain of sand.” How many of us ever open our senses and minds wide enough to accomplish this? Sedlar does so on a daily basis.

Because he keeps himself open to the suchness of the here and now, he at times achieves epiphanies so transformative that what we thought of as real can seem suddenly unreal or—perhaps, a better word—surreal.

А дође с плаже
Мој глас постаде цвркут
Два папагаја

The moment I returned
from the beach — my voice becomes
the chirp of two parrots

A voice becoming the “chirp of two parrots” can seem a wild flight of fancy, but perhaps we should not rush to this conclusion. Perhaps, we should acknowledge that, in a moment of acute perception, the poet has returned from the beach and, in reality, experiences his voice becoming the voices of two parrots. What appears impossible in the external world can ring with psychological truth. The body takes a journey from beach to home, and the mind is not the same. A day of communing with the sea—perhaps swimming in it, perhaps simply watching its undulating waves, the suchness of the undulation—has profoundly changed, well, everything. As he walks in the door, are two parrots in a cage singing the story of what he has gained and felt today with perfect precision, with their wild, raucous voices? Or, perhaps, has the poet opened his own mouth to say something and discovered, by truly listening to it, his voice sounds different, for it has become the chirping of two parrots? The haiku is more powerful if we read it as not fancy, not a flight of pretending. There is no pretending here. This moment of life, along with all the moments chronicled in Sedlar’s collection, grow from honest, radical perception. I take the poet at his word. His voice is the chirping of two parrots. The ordinary moment is ordinary only to those who don’t really perceive it. Miracles happen all the time.

Seeing into suchness is a lifestyle choice: a daily discipline without which Sedlar’s haiku would be impossible. So much goes unnoticed in life, it takes real effort and real commitment to see and appreciate things and their connections.

На старчев осмех
Режи пас – обојици
Беле се зуби

A dog growls
at an old man’s smile:
both their teeth are white

Again the poet’s method is simplicity itself: to stop and see, and in so doing discover, again, a usually-overlooked suchness. There are juxtapositions and conflicts in the moment: a dog against a man, a growl against a smile—and yet the poet looks long and deeply enough to perceive a unifying sameness: “both their teeth are white.” Such a plain, blunt statement—and yet, if we ponder it a while, this statement can lead to a flash of enlightenment: an instant satori. The dog and man are connected. The dog and man are the same. The dog and man are one. There is no dog; there is no man. There are only white teeth framing growls or smiles.

Perhaps the most appealing haiku in this collection are those in which the poet discovers and celebrates the life of his fellow beings: people, animals, plants. When Slavko Sedlar sees a poplar tree, he really sees it—with wide-open eyes and, even more importantly, a wide-open heart.

Садео сено:
Сада топола спремно
Чека зимски сан

Piled hay:
now the poplar is ready
for winter dreams

Much of the above is taken from my introductory essay to T A К В О С Т 2 (SUCHNESS 2), titled “Such Suchness!” Copies of the book are available for $20 (U.S.) plus postage; contact Saša Važić at vazicsasa@gmail.com.

Blake, William. “Auguries of Innocence.” Accessed March 21, 2010. Web. http://www.artofeurope.com/blake/bla3.htm

The poem begins:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Sedlar, Slavko. T A К В О С Т (SUCHNESS). Belgrade: The Municipal Library Vršac, 2008.

—–. T A К В О С Т 2 (SUCHNESS 2). Belgrade: Saša Važić, 2010.

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• Periplum: Introduction
• Periplum #1: Keiji Minato
• Periplum #2: Petar Tchouhov
• Periplum #3: Masahiro Koike
• Periplum #4: Fay Aoyagi
• Periplum #5: Jean-Pierre Colleu
• Periplum #6: Casimiro de Brito
• Periplum #7: Saša Važić
• Periplum #8: Ami Tanaka
• Periplum #9: Chie Aiko