Periplum

Periplum is a section that is devoted to 20th and 21st century haiku from around the world. Periplum is overseen by David G. Lanoue. For an introduction to this section, see Periplum.

Ami Tanaka was born in Tokyo on October 8, 1970. I learned this fact from the introduction to a selection of one hundred of her haiku that are included in an anthology of contemporary Japanese haiku, titled Shinsen 21, which came out in 2009. Normally, I would regard such information as unimportant. I had enough formalist indoctrination in my undergraduate English classes to scorn biography; I was taught to look for the meaning of a poem in the poem itself and not in the trivia of the poet’s life. Yet in this case, as I will explain later, the date of Tanaka’s birth is not trivial, for it supplies a vital clue to one of her haiku—a mysterious and compelling one. Tanaka introduces this haiku with a prescript in English that reads, “Atom Heart Mother, Pink Floyd (1970).”

Here it is in the original Japanese, followed by my English translation.

                                                                      Atom Heart Mother
                                                                      in the prefab bathroom
                                                                      spurts blood

Tanaka’s headnote sheds at least a little light on the otherwise impenetrable expression, “Atom Heart Mother.” Her haiku, the note tells us, nods to Pink Floyd’s fourth studio album. Its title derived from the headline of a news story that appeared in The Evening Standard on July 16, 1970. The headline read, “ATOM HEART MOTHER NAMED,” referring to a woman who had received a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Band member Ron Geesen saw the article and suggested that they name the album’s title track, 23 minutes and 44 seconds of instrumental rock, Atom Heart Mother. The track took up all of side one of an album that was originally sold in a cover that showed a picture of a cow in a field, with no text. Storm Thorgeson, the designer of the cow cover, said this about the title song and his cover: “When I asked them what it was about, they said they didn’t know themselves. It’s a conglomeration of pieces that weren’t related, or didn’t seem to be at the time. The picture isn’t related either; in fact, it was an attempt to do a picture that was unrelated, consciously unrelated” (Guitar World, Feb. 1998; quoted in “Atom Heart Mother,” Wikipedia). One of the song’s writers, band member Roger Waters, said in a 1985 radio interview, “Atom Heart Mother is a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again! . . . It was pretty kind of pompous, it wasn’t really about anything” (“Atom Heart Mother,” Wikipedia).

So now we understand who “Atom Heart Mother” is—or, at least, we are beginning to understand. Why this mother from a song that “wasn’t really about anything” shows up in Tanaka’s haiku, in a Japanese bathroom—a so-call unitto basu—is far from clear. A unitto basu or “unit bath” is a prefabricated bathroom module that includes ceiling, floor and tub made of the same continuous material. Found in hotels and apartments throughout Japan, unit baths have the advantage of being completely water-tight. They can be easily cleaned by showering the whole room. This is the type of bathroom that our Atom Heart Mother finds herself in, in Tanaka’s poem.

There is a semi-secret, semi-private symbolism at work in this haiku—not impossible to penetrate but, to do so, the reader must do some digging. Here’s where her birthdate becomes a clue. Ami Tanaka came into the world on the same day that Pink Floyd released their Atom Heart Mother album, on October 8, 1970.

The poet and the album were “born” together. The image of “Mother” in the haiku can thus suggest, on one level, Tanaka’s own mother. The blood flowing into the prefabricated bathroom can suggest the act of birth. The “unit bath” can suggest modern Japan. And the “Atom” of “Heart Mother” can imply the atomic age from the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki up to the present moment. Blood pouring into the antiseptic, leak-proof bath unit can suggest the poet’s life force. The fact that she came into this world on the same day that a disconnected musical suite was released with an unconnected cow cover says volumes about the absurdity into which she and all of us who are her contemporaries on this atomic world, have been thrown.

This haiku is a swirling whirlpool of images and juxtapositions—a poet’s birth with the “birth” of an album, blood and a prefab bathroom, “Atomic” and “Heart Mother.” Sit back, close your eyes, and live with this haiku for a while. Play it in your mind like a movie. What do these connections and juxtapositions show you?
To me, they show the micro-movie of a birth, a life, an era.

                                                                      until it becomes
                                                                      pure abstraction
                                                                      mincing parsley

A cook chops parsley into finer and finer shreds, until finally it is parsley no longer; it now becomes an “abstraction”: a pure idea of parsley. Is this Tanaka’s haiku esthetic? Is she the cook in the poem, revealing her recipe for making a haiku? Is her mind the sharp knife that minces and minces natural experience (the parsely) until it becomes pure idea? Or are we the cook, all of us human beings whose brains think by dividing: by cutting the universe into this and not this, plants and animals, men and women, boxers and briefs? We think and think, cut and cut, until that which we cut finally vanishes and, according to Tanaka, becomes abstraction. Or is the physical world an abstraction to begin with? Is the cook chopping parsely or, really, is she chopping her idea of parsley? Or, if it is indeed real parsley being cut, at what point will it reach the state of absolute abstraction? Logically, Tanaka’s method recalls one of Zeno’s paradoxes: the one that says to reach a wall I first must go halfway to the wall, then half of the remaining distance, and then half of the next remaining distance—on and on, ad infinitum. Zeno argued that I can’t possibly ever reach the wall, since it would take an infinite amount of time for me to do all that dividing, all that chopping of distance.

When does parsley get chopped so finely that it ceases to exist as a physical thing that can be divided? When does parsley become an idea? Answer: only in one place; only in our minds or, putting it another way, only in a poem that our minds are contemplating, for example, this poem.

Returning to the notion of the haiku being a recipe for haiku, I wonder if Tanaka might be claiming a new subject matter for the genre. Traditionally, the realm of haiku has been Nature, more exactly, human involvement in Nature with all its myriad cycles and seasons. Nature is the parsely. But our minds divide and divide that parsely, chop it and chop it, until, at some point, it is parsley no longer; Nature is Nature no longer. At that vanishing point of abstraction we enter a realm of pure ideas, which, just maybe, is the place where Ami Tanaka’s poetry lives.

A third example from her collection of one hundred haiku follows:

                                                                      the subway too
                                                                      is one of echoes . . .
                                                                      bird’s autumn

This haiku appears straightforward, without the semi-private symbolism of an Atom Heart Mother or a metaphysical puzzle such as parsely being chopped to abstraction. Compared to the first two haiku that we have looked at, this one seems downright traditional, complete with a seasonal reference to Nature (“bird’s autumn”). The subway station setting, of course, is modern. A bird tweets somewhere in the subterranean world of trains and travelers, in the darkness of echoes. More than in the other two haiku, this one inspires an immediate emotional response, at least for me. I feel for this spunky city bird that has adapted to the Tokyo of steel and concrete, finding warmth and refuge in a subway station or tunnel. I also sense its aloneness in the world; Bashô would surely approve of this sabi-filled verse. More than in the other two examples, this third one presents a moment that requires no great amount of pondering to arrive at a payoff . . . but wait, there’s more!

The word kodama can mean “echoes.” The little bird exists (I imagine it chirping) amid the resounding echoes of a subway station or tunnel. However, kodama has another, older meaning: a spirit or god that inhabits a tree. The haiku might therefore be translated: “the subway too/ is one of tree spirit(s) . . . / bird’s autumn.” This hint of a Nature spirit, the ghost of a tree, plainly clashes with the poem’s underground urban setting. No trees are visible here; they have all been cut down to make room for the paved-over progress of a city. The absent god’s bird might in fact be the last bird, the last remnant of Holy Nature that once thrived all over Japan, its twittering song in the shadows sounding a dirge.

The word kodama has a special contemporary resonance. Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki used kodama in his feature-length animated film, Princess Mononoke (1997). The film puts forth an ecological theme, dramatizing a struggle between forest spirits and the forest-killing humans of Iron Town. Among the spirits fighting for the life of the forest are the kodama, which Miyazaki portrays as small white beings with big, roundish heads that rattle when they shake. It’s possible that Tanaka, in her haiku, is remembering the kodama of this popular anime, the highest-grossing film in Japan at the time, topped only by Titanic, which came out later that same year. If so, the subway scene is a deeply sad one. A bird, the last minion of a forest god, faces autumn and the extinction of winter utterly alone, engulfed by the artificial structure of Iron Town: Tokyo.

If we switch our mythology from East to West, the haiku becomes just as evocative. This bird in a subway calls to mind Orpheus in the Underworld, who charmed the god of the dead with his music on an unsuccessful mission to rescue his wife, Eurydice. Applying Orpheus as a subtext, we see the great concrete bowels of Tokyo as a Kingdom of the Dead, the only glimmer of Nature in it being a solitary bird twittering in the shadows. Its orphic song does not, however, entrance the crowds that move on and off the trains that come and go. In fact, it is barely heard, barely noticed amid the thunderous echoes of a modern Hades.

The bird’s autumn can be viewed as the autumn of Nature on a planet wherein the human species deforests and destroys in the name of “progress.” On another level, the bird’s autumn might be the autumn of haiku. I think of Issa’s 1814 poem,

                                                                      like warbling pure haiku
                                                                      mountain
                                                                      cuckoo

. . . in which the singing of a bird amid the mountain cedars is equated with haiku poetry. Now, nearly two centuries later, the forest is paved over and under, leaving only echoes of the beauty and life-spirit that once existed. The bird’s autumn song in its subway nook hints at Holy Nature’s demise and, concurrently, the end of haiku as Nature poetry.

To read the haiku of Ami Tanaka with deep appreciation, we definitely need to put on our thinking caps. Her work presents us with word puzzles that tease but, ultimately, please the intellect. This is a poetry of and for the head, but—as the third example shows—it can, at times, arouse emotions too, becoming just as complexly meaningful to our hearts.

I would like to thank Keiji Minato for checking my translations and giving feedback.

“Atom Heart Mother.” Wikipedia. Accessed 17 January 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_Heart_Mother

Kobayashi Issa. 小林一茶。”like warbling pure haiku . . .” English translation by David G. Lanoue. Found in 『一茶全集』(Issa zenshû). Shinano: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1979. 1.349.

Miyazaki Hazao. 宮崎 駿。『もののけ姫』(Mononoke-hime: Princess Mononoke). Studio Ghibli. 1997.

Tanaka Ami. 田中亜美。Three haiku. English translations by David G. Lanoue. The Japanese originals appear in 『新選２１』(Shinsen 21).邑書林, 2009. 211-21.

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• 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 is a section that is devoted to 20th and 21st century haiku from around the world. Periplum is overseen by David G. Lanoue. For an introduction to this section, see Periplum.

Some haiku—let’s call them “special haiku”—take hold in our minds and imaginations so deeply that we can never, ever forget them. We revisit them often, reminded of them by random words or situations. We meditate on them compulsively, joyfully. Many of the world haiku that we’ve pondered together in this “Periplum” series, by this definition, have been special. I think of Keiji Minato’s “In my luggage” (“Periplum” #1), Petar Tchouhov’s “night storm” (# 2), Fay Aoyagi’s “ants out of a hole” (#4) and Casimiro de Brito’s “From song to song” (#6)—just to mention a few. The haiku of Saša Važić are also special in this way, including three that follow in Serbian with English translations provided by the poet.

As always, my comments do not pretend to unveil “the” meaning of a haiku but rather “a” meaning. I hope my musings will stimulate your own. If these three haiku take hold in your minds as they have in mine, you’ll be thinking about them for a long time to come.

Seoski vašar
U gornjem levom džepu—
licidersko srce

Country fair.
In my upper left pocket
a candy heart.

A candy heart lies in the poet’s shirt pocket, close to where her real heart beats. But her real heart goes unmentioned in the poem. A heart-shaped candy serves as its proxy, suggesting the sweetness and vulnerability of childhood.

Does the poet’s “candy” heart brim with memories of earlier country fairs, triggered by the familiar sights, sounds, tastes and smells of this one? I think so. But the exact nature of these feelings and associations lies tucked out of sight, inside her pocket—so easy to reach for her but, to the eyes of the world, hidden. Her poem announces a secret: only she knows the sweet treasure in her pocket. Other fair-goers—hundreds, thousands?—may look at her or ignore her, but either way, none will understand her, none will perceive her pocketed heart.

And how does she feel about this fact? How do we, putting ourselves in her place, feel about it? Are we happy to keep our hearts to ourselves? Do we smile with the pride of ownership? Or have we walked too long in the Country Fair of Life, hoping that someone would understand that which has never been given; hoping that someone, someday, would ask us for our candy hearts? Važić leaves plenty of suggestive space for the reader to build in. The answer to all the above questions depends on each reader’s experience and each reader’s relationship with his or her own heart. A poem that at first glance might seem pure whimsy opens to a world of resonance.

Yes, it’s special. And here’s another:

Srušeni most
Kroz oblak dima
preleti ptica

Broken bridge.
Through clouds of smoke
birds fly.

In one breath the haiku captures both a moment of history and one of history’s tragically recurring themes. Bridges connect people; wars destroy connections. In this instance, a Serbian bridge, bombed and broken by NATO forces in the spring of 1999, is a powerful metaphor for the brutal tendency of all wars to end converstaion and understanding, to demonize “the enemy,” and to thereby justify acts of outrageous violence. Human history happens in the poem, but “Through clouds of smoke/ birds fly”—suggesting that Nature endures along with (I hope) the nobler human feelings that connect us.

Bombs and cruise missles rained destruction on Belgrade from March 24th to June 11th, 1999. In October of 2007 I visited Saša Važić at her home in the Zemun neighborhood of Belgrade. We walked past a flower-stuffed shrine marking the spot where a young girl died from the NATO air attacks. Later, I sat in Saša’s house, listening to her stories of the war, when suddenly the power went out, leaving us in blackness. She lit a candle; explained that the power plant and electrical grid, bombed in the war, still wasn’t completely repaired.

During my stay in Belgrade, enjoying the hospitality and spontaneous generosity of Saša, her daughter Ana, and my other new Serbian friends—including editor and poet Dragan J. Ristić—drinking with them, dancing with them, eating with them . . . I discovered something about myself. I can never again support the bridge-breakers of this world. Instead, I’ll fly with the birds: through the smoke, over the river.

This haiku’s imprint in my mind is deep, indelible. Here’s a third, just as special:

Zimsko veče
Glas što pozdravlja komšiju
na moj mi liči

Winter evening.
A voice greeting a neighbor
sounds like my own.

It’s shocking to hear, out of the blue, a voice sounding like one’s own. In this case, amid the gathering darkness of a cold winter evening, the poet has a sudden out-of-body experience: someone else greets a neighbor using her voice. For just a second, she slips away from herself, becoming a ghost, while her doppelgänger takes her place. An ordinary neighborly greeting—part of what would normally be viewed as a lackluster moment of everyday life—suddenly becomes extraordinary and strange.

Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky saw literature as a “making strange” of language. Važić’s third haiku takes this a step further: it achieves the making strange of reality. But this evocative strangeness hints at a truth: something oddly familiar, comforting even—something we knew once as children or, perhaps, even before that but have forgotten. There is a stranger out there, somewhere, in the night: someone we have never met, who sounds like us, who looks like us, and who is perhaps, just as we are, even now, thinking the very thoughts that we are thinking. We are not alone in the winter dark.

Važić, Saša, “Country fair,” first appeared in Haiku novine, 2002, in Serbian; “Broken bridge” won 2nd place in the English Tanka and Haiku Water, Lake and Sea Contest, sponsored by the 35th Annual Conference Committee of the Japan Society on Water Environment, 2001; and “Winter Evening” first appeared in Simply Haiku, 2004.

“Victor Shklovsky.” Wikipedia. Accessed 16 January 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shklovsky

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• 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

Casimiro de Brito is a prolific writer of essays, fiction and poetry who, from time to time, also writes haiku. He is the author of fifty books. His works have appeared in more than 180 anthologies and translated into 25 languages. The president of the General Assembly of Portuguese P.E.N., an advisor to the World Haiku Association and to the International Poetry Festival Voix de la Méditérranéeanne, de Brito travels widely. I had the pleasure of meeting him in Tenri, Japan, at a haiku conference in 2003, and since that time have broken bread with him in Sofia, Bulgaria, and in his home city of Lisbon. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that he arranged for me to stay, one fantastic summer, in the Casa do Artista: an artist’s residence in the hills of Machico on the glorious, green island of Madeira. There, I wrote the first draft of Haiku Wars, in which a purely fictitious poet named João appears: “a tall, kindly-faced man with glasses” with a “luxuriant head of ivory hair,” who recites his haiku in “lush and sensuous Portuguese” (70, 91). João strongly resembles Casimiro.

In Tenri, I digitally recorded Casimiro reciting the following haiku. I’ve searched and searched for this file, but it seems to have been lost in the chaos of transferring data from my old computer to the new one. This is a pity, because his voice truly sounds “lush and sensuous.” When you read the Portuguese original, I hope that you can conjure in your mind such a voice.

This and the other English translations are provided by the poet:

I have read this haiku many times, thought of it many times, even recorded the poet reading it (as I mentioned), yet never connected it, until now, to Basho’s old pond. Instead of a frog jumping into this “pond of silence,” the poet himself takes the plunge. More accurately, he is taking the plunge—in the process of plunging, of falling, into a watery silence. One need not be a Jungian to catch the association of falling into water with an archetypal return to Mother, to Death. Gravity pulls the poet down to an inevitable moment after which he will be heard no more. Meanwhile, on the way down, the way back, he keeps singing. I am reminded here of Issa, who might be talking about himself as a poet, coasting toward his own silence, when he writes:

    鳴ながら虫の流るる浮木かな
    
naki nagara mushi no nagaruru ukigi kana

    still singing
the insect drifts away . . . 
floating branch

What can the insect do but sing? What can a poet do but make poetry? In a single breath de Brito encapsulates his past, present and future: he sang, he sings, he will sing—until silence. This awareness of the silence that will swallow him (and us!) makes this moment of song, of poetry, precious.

Note that the verse flows as a single utterance without the break and grammatical rupture found in most traditional haiku. In the original Portuguese and in its English translation, it reads as a single sentence. Casimiro de Brito, a practising poet of many genres, feels no compulsion to bow to haiku form, or perhaps we should say, to a traditional conception of form. He allows each “song” to chart its own destiny. In this case, the destiny of the poem is to flow without interruption, like the life of the poet who sings and will keep singing until the final silence. I hope that he won’t think of me as being morbid, but I nominate this haiku as a perfect inscription for his gravestone: the summation of a life.

Here we have a haiku whose destiny has led it to take on the traditional shape of haiku: two statements interrupted by a breaking pause, signaled here by the dash. It begins with a statement and feeling of resignation: “I can’t change the world.” Then, surprisingly, a second statement pulls the reader into an intimate scene: “let me shake the sand/ off your sandals.” The gesture seems loving, tender. A stirring of memory sends me running to the Bible to look up the passage in which Jesus instructs his disciples, “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet” (Matthew 10:14). De Brito transforms the meaning of this biblical action so that it now denotes acceptance, not rejection. He seems to be saying: “It’s a hard, unchangeable world out there; let me shake your sandals clean of their taint; come inside!”

De Brito’s use of the second person, “your feet,” makes the haiku into an atypical (for haiku) dramatic monologue addressed to a listener. This listener could be interpreted generally as the reader, but I prefer to imagine a more particular sandal-wearer. If his offer of comfort and safe harbor is addressed to all the readers of the poem, it sounds grandiose and impossible. But if he is speaking to a particular person, to a friend or lover present in the scene, the offer sounds plausible and kind. Again, de Brito stretches the haiku genre to fit the needs of this poem, this moment. Haiku poets rarely talk to a specific someone in their verses, but it happens. Basho normally addresses readers in general but on rare occasions does exactly what de Brito has done here: speak to a particular listener who is part of an interactive scene. Such is the case in a haiga in which the concluding haiku addresses his friend, Sora:

    きみ火をたけよき物見せん雪まろげ
    kimi hi o take yokimono misen yukimaroge

    you start a fire
    I’ll show you something good . . .
    a snowball!

De Brito, however, does not present his haiku as part of a haiga. He gives no introduction, no clue external to the poem as to the identity of his listener or the dramatic setting. He leaves to the reader’s imagination the task of filling in these spaces. I like to read the haiku as love speech. It reminds me of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” another dramatic monologue, though much longer: addressed to a lover and striking a similar, comforting note in a world “where ignorant armies clash by night.”

De Brito is a personal, lyric poet whose own life takes front and center position in his work. All three of these examples that I have selected to present here include references to himself, “I” and “me”—and this is typical. Of the thirteen haiku that he sent me when I asked him for a sampling, nine contain references to “I” and/or “me.” His poetry is the chronicle of a life and a heart. As in the first example, he again shows himself falling into water. This time, however, the self-portrait seems comic—or at least my initial feeling is to read it as such. A hapless search for love has sent the poet slipping “from stone to stone” (relationship to relationship?) only to fall, in slapstick fashion, into “the fountain.”

Or . . . does his sliding and falling imply something more serious than physical comedy? The fountain is an old symbol for life and rebirth, associated since the Middle Ages with baptism and resurrection. Casimiro’s fountain could, perhaps, embody the answer to his love-search. He may have slipped into the very Fountain of Love, despite his clumsy search among the slippery rocks. Or, of course, the fountain is just a fountain. De Brito, a sly myth-maker, lets us have it both ways, leaving in his haiku plenty of room for the imagination to play.

Jump on in. The water’s fine.

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” Wikipedia-English. Accessed 10/10/09. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach

Basho. “you start a fire…”, trans. David G. Lanoue; Japanese text taken from 『松尾芭蕉集』 Matsuo Bashô shû, ed. Imoto Nôichi and Hori Obuo. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1995；rpt. 2003. Vol. 1, 152.

Bible. King James Version.

de Brito, Casimiro. Three haiku–first published in Através do Ar/Through the Air. Tokyo: Shichigatsudo, 2007.

Issa. “still singing…” from The Haiku of Kobayashi Issa, tran. David G. Lanoue. http://haikuguy.com/issa/.

Lanoue, David G. Haiku Wars. Winchester, VA.: Red Moon Press, 2009.

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Periplum is a section that is devoted to 20th and 21st century haiku from around the world. Periplum is overseen by David G. Lanoue. For an introduction to this section, see Periplum.

Jean-Pierre Colleu is a young French poet who lives in the city of Rennes. His two books to-date, Une manière d’extase (“A Way of Ecstasy” – 2006) and Le passage intérieur (“The Interior Passage” -2008), might be described as haibun mixed with philosophical essay. Both books portray the poet as a wanderer in the world of Brittany or, as the French know it, Bretagne. This is haibun on the move; I picture Colleu walking along, noticing something that strikes an inner spark, then stopping, taking out pen and pad from his pocket, and, on the scene—part of the scene—writing the reflections, vignettes and haiku that fill his books. I met him in Rennes last year. He’s a studious, quiet person with an intense gaze and depths of humor that bubble to the surface as the beer and conversation flow. I’m honored to present a sampling of his writing here, in the original French and in English translation, for the first time on the Web. When I asked Jean-Pierre, in my fumbling French, for his e-mail address, he replied that he had none—adding to my overall image of him as someone from an earlier time: a seeker, an itinerant priest, a Cloud-Water Wanderer: unsui (雲水), as the Japanese say. Breton haiku poet Alain Kervern, my cousin, provides the preface for Colleu’s first book, Une manière d’extase, finding precedents for his “poetic rambling” (la randonnée poetique) in the work of that “walking poet” (le poète-marcheur) William Wordsworth, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire (“Reveries of a Solitary Walker”), in the automatic writing of André Breton and his surrealist cohorts, in the poetry of Ozaki Hōsai, whom Colleu cites, and, of course, in the time-honored tradition of Japanese haibun (7-9).

I should interject here that Alain Kervern, as a cousin, is quite distant: my Lanoue ancestors left Bretagne for Acadia in the 1690s, but I was tickled when Alain addressed me, nevertheless, as “cousin.” By that measure, then, I’m also Jean-Pierre Colleu’s cousin, and proud of it.

I’ve chosen three of his haibun: the first two from his first book and the third from his second. I present them here in French followed by my far less mellifluous English translations and reflections.

Rennes

(Quelques rues, quelques friches avant le cours de la Vilaine)

Sur le trottoir un coquelicot

pour rendre grâce

aux mauvaises herbes

Ensemble

Nous avons sursauté

Le chien errant et moi

Sur le chemin, il s’agit de mettre une pensée, une lumière orientée, dans les gestes les plus simples, les plus courtes entrevues ; marcher sans bruit, observer la paix, le cotôiement des êtres, l’arbre qui lorgne, immobile, la faille souterraine ou le coin du ciel ; suivre l’échappée d’un oiseau dans une touffe d’ombres. Traversant ainsi l’espace et l’instant, je sais parfois ce que j’ai pu faire vivre dans mes yeux : la perte pure d’une présence, de toute présence.

(Une manière d’extase 33)

Rennes

(Some streets, some fallow land by the banks of the Vilaine)

On the sidewalk a red poppy

to grace

the weeds

we startle

each other

the stray dog and I

On the road, it’s a question of seizing a thought, a guiding light, in the simplest of gestures, the briefest of encounters; to walk soundlessly, adhering to peace, to existential encounters, to the tree that casts a sidelong glance, motionless, to the subterranean fault or a patch of sky, to follow a bird’s flight into a cluster of shadows. Traversing in this way space and the moment, I come to know, now and then, what I’m able to make live in my eyes: the pure loss of a presence, of all presence.

Here and often, Colleu starts with haiku and then expands to prose, inverting the traditional organization of Japanese haibun. Instead of serving as the end punctuation, the crystallizing punch line of the piece, the haiku—in this case, two haiku—come first, triggering the poet’s meditation in prose. Both haiku are records of, as Colleu describes them, “the briefest of encounters” (les plus courtes entrevues): with a red poppy, with a stray dog. The second encounter evokes subtle humor, establishing an equality of wandering dog and wandering poet that is reminiscent of Issa. Colleu, however, struggles to put into words something that Issa never attempted: a description of “ecstasy,” of satori found in the ordinary moment when he grasps, fleetingly, “the pure loss of a presence, of all presence” (la perte pure d’une présence, de toute presence). To describe a mystical experience, he resorts to the language of paradox (as mystics have always done). He senses a loss of presence; an annihilation of self, other and universe; a flash of enlightenment on the banks of the Vilaine. Siddhartha, too, we recall, woke up by a river.

Moguériec (Finistère nord)

Je découvre un petit port à marée basse. Sur les quais traînent des kilos d’amarres, un goéland boîteux, des odeurs d’huile et de poisson. Je regarde sous la coque ventrue des chalutiers :

Même morts

au fond du port les crabes

usinent encore la vase

(Une manière d’extase 42)

Moguériec (North Finistère)

I find a little harbor at low tide. Over the piers that spill out miles of moorings, one lame sea-gull, the smell of oil, of fish. I peek under the bulging hull of a trawler:

Even in death

at the harbor’s bottom, crabs

still make ooze

This time Colleu follows the traditional structure of haibun, starting with prose that builds to the revelation of the haiku. His trek has taken him to the misty shores of North Finistère, the austere and windswept edge of a continent. From a wide-angle description he zooms in to focus on dead crabs under a trawler’s hull, still making ooze. Life and death in the haiku appear not as discrete states but as a single continuum. Living crabs excrete and contribute to the marine slime exposed at low tide, but here, dead crabs do the same. This ooze calls to mind the primordial soup from which life emerged, as scientists say, and the wet clay with which God fashioned Adam in the Book of Genesis—or Khnum, the ancient Egyptian god, who similarly formed the first human from mud. Colleu’s haiku, too, is a creation story, but in his case the story describes a continual creation of life flowing to death, flowing to life.

Marché des Lices

Un bouquet dans chaque main

Silencieuse à midi,

La fleuriste aux cheveux gris

Debout derrière son étal (modeste : des fleurs mais aussi quelques légumes), elle reste immobile, comme saisie par un rêve ou une fatigue, tandis que le corps, machinalement, tend aux passants les produits à vendre, pour vivre.

(Le passage intérieur 62)

Lices Market

A bouquet in each hand

Silent at noon

Gray-haired florist

Standing behind her stand (a modest one—of flowers and some vegetables), she’s motionless, as if rapt in a dream or numb with fatigue, while her body, machine-like, holds out to passers-by her goods for sale, to live.

In his second book, Colleu continues his poetic stroll through Bretagne. This particular vignette takes place in his home city of Rennes at the Market of Lices. This time, his “existential encounter” (cotôiement des êtres) involves a human being: an old woman-turned-automaton who sells bouquets and vegetables at her little market stand. Colleu’s gaze is not voyeuristic. His sympathy for the woman is clear in his concluding phrase: she sells these simple, garden-grown things “to live” (pour vivre). An ordinary moment on an ordinary day, yet this woman’s gesture of holding out her flowers is a matter of life or death.

Colleu, Jean-Pierre. Une manière d’extase. Rennes: Éditions La Part Commune, 2006; and Le passage intérieur. Rennes: Editions La Part Commune, 2008. English translations by David G. Lanoue.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire. Paris: Le Livre du Poche, 2001.

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Periplum is a section that is devoted to 20th and 21st century haiku from around the world. Periplum is overseen by David G. Lanoue. For an introduction to this section, see Periplum.