On Haiku by Hiroaki Sato

Author:Hiroaki Sato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2018-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Haiku Reformer Shiki: How Important Is His Haiku?

In an email on October 4, 2015, Charlie Trumbull, the former editor of Modern Haiku, asked me: “Why have so few of Shiki’s haiku been translated? 100% of Bashō’s haiku have been translated into English at least once, about 50% of Issa’s, maybe 20% of Chiyo-ni’s and Buson’s, but only 6% of Shiki’s.”

My immediate response had to be short—“For all his importance, Shiki was a mediocre haiku poet”—as I was halfway out the door, on my way to the Haiku Society of America’s autumn meeting to introduce Nishimura Kazuko during her visit to New York City.

Let me now give a fuller response.

First, to deal with the numbers, Issa is said to have left about 24,000 haiku, so I am rather surprised to hear that half of them have been translated. Twelve thousand haiku translated, really? As it happens, Shiki is judged to have written a similar number of haiku, about 23,000, so 6 percent of them means about 1,400 haiku of his have been translated. Compared with these, the number of hokku of Bashō is small, about 1,000, but even of that small number, the majority are regarded as “bad pieces, worthless pieces,” so quoth none other than Shiki.

The count of the number of Shiki’s haiku varied over time, according to the haiku poet and scholar Tsubouchi Toshinori in his afterword to the 1993 Iwanami edition of Takahama Kyoshi’s 1940 selection of Shiki’s haiku. In the foreword to the selection, for which he picked 2,306 haiku, Kyoshi said he counted almost 20,000 haiku in what Shiki had left. Earlier, in 1909, when Kyoshi, along with his coeditor Kawahigashi Hekigodō, published a selection of 1,237 haiku by Shiki, he had counted around 10,000. Today, the count is put at more than 23,000.

Second, as to the quality of Shiki’s haiku, glancing through the books related to Shiki, I see that my immediate response was based on what the haiku commentator Yamamoto Kenkichi had written in his foreword to Masaoka Shiki • Takahama Kyoshi. In sum:

1. Of the three literary fields—haiku, tanka, and prose—that Shiki influenced as a reformer, haiku is the area where his influence was the greatest, but his own haiku, compared with his tanka and prose, is the least read.

2. Shiki learned the concept of shasei (写生), “sketch,” through some of his friends who had studied with the Italian landscape painter Antonio Fontanesi. He taught in Tokyo as a Japanese “government employee” for two years, from 1876 to 1878. When we talk about Shiki, we mainly think of shasei, which he began to stress with his book Outline of Haikai (Haikai taiyō) in 1895. But in fact he didn’t only stress “copying things as they are.” He emphasized the importance of “combining fantasy (kūsō 空想) and realism (shajitsu 写実) to create great works.”

3. Of the haiku (hokku) writers in the past that he studied partly through his stupendous effort on haiku (haikai) classification beginning in 1891, Yosa Buson fascinated Shiki the most. He wrote the analytic essay “Haijin Buson” in 1896, which he revised in 1899.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.