Narrow-Minded
Haiku
David
Coomler opens his introduction to Hokku with: This
little book will tell you exactly what hokku is and exactly
how to write it (7). He then rehashes some of R.H.
Blyths more biased views, and contends that only those
who hark back to pre-Shiki traditional haikuwhich
he would like us to call hokkucan ever
find the true Way of Hokku. The book presents
his limited view as if it were the only legitimate view
of haiku. Frankly, Blyth lays the Zen on more than sufficiently.
This guys hyper-biased view and failure to understand
even his mentors words just cannot stand up to any
great Japanese haiku poets work, past or present.
Unfortunately,
the book also promotes errors of fact and dogmatic statements
as truth. Anyone familiar with English-language haiku can
easily spot the fallacies in his rants on everything from
punctuation to the senses in haiku, so I will focus here
on the problems in his understanding of specific Japanese
haiku, and the illogical ways he uses translations to prove
his often wrong-headed points.
To
cite a prominent example (bold and italics as in the original):
The
dash () is used in hokku to indicate a long, indefinite
pause that either links to a following line or else just
stands on its own to show continuing action, as in this
example:
A
hoe standing,
no one about
the heat!
Shiki
In
Shikis example the dash indicates the continuing absence
of whoever was using the hoe. Shikis hokku also shows
the use of the comma in the first line as a brief pause
;
and it shows the use of the exclamation point for very strong
emphasis.
(25)
In
Japanese haiku only a minute number of poets has ever used
written punctuation. (Only one comes to mind, Takayanagi
Shigenobu [19231983], and he only rarely used punctuation
marks in any conventional manner.) The original Japanese
for Shikis poem, in rômaji, goes thus: kuwa
tatete atari hito naki atsusa kana (from Coomlers
evident source, Blyth, Haiku, 3, 9). There is no
punctuation in the original Japanese. The original ends
with the cutting word kana, for which many translators often
use an exclamation mark, so no problem there. The grammar
of the original, however, includes a run-on from line two
to line three, and thus the haiku might better be translated
as
A
hoe standing,
no one about
in this heat!
Not
to nit-pick a more or less passable translation, but let
readers note: the decision to use a dash here or not is
an English-language decision, made by a translator. Coomler
says yes; Higginson says no. No
Japanese haiku poet has anything to do with it.
Again,
acting as if features of a translation were intended by
the originals author, Coomler cites his version of
a poem by Suiha, then comments:
Spring
cold;
the puppeteer
keeps coughing.
Where
is the beauty in a puppeteer with a bad cold? But hearing
the cough of the sick puppeteer makes us feel the damp chill
of early spring even more intensely. (61)
When
we look at his probable source, Blyths History
of Haiku (2, 13536), we find Blyths rendition
of what the original poem did not do:
haru
samuku sekiiru ningyô-tsukai kana
This
spring it is cold;
The puppeteer
Keeps coughing.
No
pun appears in the Japanese. Evidently, Coomler altered
Blyths translation of only the first line in order
to create the pun, perhaps so his readers would get
it that the puppeteer was sick. And only several pages
later Coomler warns hokku-writers Do Not Play Word
Games! Since word-play has been a rather conspicuous
feature of Japanese haiku since the beginning (though not
in this particular poem), this only further points up Coomlers
abundant and willful ignorance of the whole genre.
Coomler
compounds the problem of speaking about his own translations
as if they reflected intentions impossible to the poems
original authors by freely mixing his own original creations
in English with his versions of Japanese originals. The
latter may be accompanied by obviously Japanese authors
names, but Coomler does not include any version of the original
texts. Thus, by mixing his own works among poems by Japanese
masters and discussing the translations as if they were
originals, he subtly suggests that his poems rank among
theirs. They do not.
Coomler has written some passable haiku, such as this one
used to demonstrate his view of a statement hokku
(8889):
How
cool
The call of the dove
Midsummer rain.
but
it hardly joins the company of such masterpieces as Shôhakus
poem, which he groups with it:
October;
I go nowhere,
No one comes
Does
that not seem like a masterpiece? Oh, sorry, thats
Coomlers version. Back to Blyth for the original,
jûgatsu ya yoso e mo yukazu hito mo kozu, and a clarifying
translation (Haiku, 3, 337):
It
is the Tenth Month:
I go nowhere;
No one comes here.
Shôhaku
does not speak of October, the Gregorian month of bright
leaves and glorious autumn outings. He speaks of the tenth
month of the lunar calendar, roughly equivalent to our November,
the first month of haiku winter, and the increasing chill
as leaves go brown and down. What Shôhaku said pierces
to the bone. Coomlers version is plain wrong, and
simply cannot be understood as a haiku of any great value.
It would be nice if Coomler at least understood Blyths
translations correctly, never mind the Japanese.
Coomlers
book not only attacks modern Japanese haiku, but ignores
all post-Blyth books and other resources, not to mention
the increasing wave of organizations and international events
dedicated to haiku. There is no bibliography or listing
of haiku resources. In fact, he directly criticizes those
who seek information on haiku from a variety of sources,
calling theirs a Chinese restaurant approach
in which people take from different dishes to make an unsatisfactory
meal. Fact is, Ive had many excellent, well-balanced
meals in Chinese restaurants just this way, and learned
a great deal more about haiku from reading beyond the first
book I got on the subject. Coomlers under-cooked book
is not among them.
Bashô
lamented that his dedication to poetry prevented him from
gaining enlightenment. Coomlers dedication to his
narrow view prevents him from getting anywhere beyond baby
steps in his own haiku. He ends the book with a small anthology
of 120 of his students haiku. Some of the poems in
this collection surpass in quality anything preceding it,
but a monotonous sameness pervades them overallnot
surprising, given his narrow view of haiku. Though clearly
beginners haiku, a few have a freshness that will
be the only reason I keep the book on my shelves. Whether
they know it or not, these students have already left Coomler
behind. Others could do as well by starting with Blyth in
the first place, then, hopefully, going beyond.
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