Lafcadio Hearn was born on the Greek island of Santa
Maura, originally called Leucadia, in 1850, to an Irish
surgeon in the British army and a woman of Maltese ancestry.
He and his mother moved to Dublin in 1852 to be with his
Irish relatives. His mother went back to Greece two years
later leaving Lafcadio in Ireland with a great aunt who
sent him to a Catholic school in France in 1862 and the
following year to one in England. While there he had a schoolyard
accident that left him blind in one eye. His aunt took him
out of school in 1867 when she could no longer afford it.
He was given enough money to sail to America. When he arrived
in Cincinnati in 1869, he found himself on his own. His
aunt had led him to expect help from some people there,
but it failed to materialize. While working at odd jobs
he learned to set type, which led to work as assistant editor
of a trade journal and as a proofreader. He started doing
freelance work for newspapers and became a fulltime reporter
for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1874, earning a reputation
for writing about crimes featuring elements of gore and
horror. All his life he was interested in the odd and grotesque
and translated many ghost stories and tales of the unusual.
He also coedited a literary magazine while in Cincinnati.
He went to New Orleans to live in 1877 and stayed for ten
years. He found newspaper work there, wrote essays he called
fantastics, did translations of French authors,
and published his first book in 1882: One of Cleopatras
Nights and Other Fantastic Romances. In 1884 he published
Stray Leaves from Strange Literature, an anthology
of tales from various lands, and in 1887 Some Chinese
Ghosts. However, he is best known for his books about
Japan, all of which he wrote after going there in 1890.
Hearn was one of the first Westerners to read and appreciate
haiku. Even in works he wrote before he went to Japan and
discovered haiku one finds sections that reveal he already
possessed, to some degree, the haiku spirit. His close awareness
of nature and the world around him, combined with a love
and facility for language, led him to write a number of
descriptive passages that show the sensitive perceptions
of a haiku poet. There are several in his first novel, Chita,
written in the 1880s when he was living in New Orleans and
working on various writing projects for Harpers
and other magazines and newspapers. He sold it to Harpers
Monthly in 1887. It is a story about a great storm among
the islands off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.
Some of the descriptions of the Gulf sea and sky show how
sensorially intimate Hearn was in his relationship with
nature. The visual and aural aspects of these scenes are
deeply felt and skillfully expressed. As an avid and expert
swimmer, he was able to experience being in the midst of
the sea far from shore and he conveys the tactile impressions
he felt there in vivid and tangible prose:
Perhaps, if a bold swimmer, you may venture out a long
wayonce! Not twice!even in company. As the
water deepens beneath you, and you feel those ascending
wavecurrents of coldness arising which bespeak profundity,
you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as of
groping fingerstouches of the bodies of fish, innumerable
fish, fleeing toward shore. The farther you advance, the
more thickly you will feel them come; and above you and
around you, to right and left, others will leap and fall
so swiftly as to daze the sight, like intercrossing fountainjets
of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you, circling
with sinister squeaking cries;perhaps for an instant
your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe,
that rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear
of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the
Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those
opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into
you also.
This is too subjective and florid for haiku, but I think
the haikus way of making palpable in words a sense
of immediacy and direct contact with the forces of nature
comes through in this passage. Though the description of
the swimmers situation has to struggle in some waves
of sensationalism, carried over from Hearns newspaper
writing, it does create a scene of remarkable clarity. Shortly
after publishing this short novel (he wrote only one other),
Hearn spent two years living in the West Indies, and then,
after brief stays in New York and Philadelphia in 1899,
he, went on his fateful journey to Japan. The purpose of
the trip was to write a book for Harpers about
the culture of the Japanese and their way of life. He was
at once charmed and fascinated with the country, its customs,
and its people. He became a citizen of Japan, taking both
a Japanese wife and a Japanese name. He taught English literature
in various schools both public and private and published
the books on which his modest fame rests: books in English
on Japan, its culture, art, and literature. The books often
included translations of Japanese works of both prose and
poetry. At the same time Hearn continued to write articles
for American magazines and newspapers. He was to remain
in Japan until his death in 1904.
He may have been the first to write in English about haiku
as an important literary form and to translate them with
respect and understanding. His friend Basil Chamberlain,
another early translator, referred to them slightingly as
epigrams. Yet even Hearn could at times be puzzled by the
simplicity of Japanese haiku and be troubled with a feeling
that they failed to live up to the literary expectations
of Western readers. His writings on the subject vacillate
from apologies for their not giving us the kinds of philosophical
speculation about the natural world found in Western literature
to words of praise for haikus unique way of creating
a direct awareness of nature. He put this appreciation in
more emotional terms, however, often using the word delight
to describe the Japanese haiku poets reaction to nature.
He did not use the term haiku either, since
Masaoka Shiki had only recently begun to popularize the
term at the time Hearn was writing his books on the subject.
To Hearn, they were still hokku.
In A Japanese Miscellany (1901), he says of the
twentyeight dragonfly haiku he has just translated:
Of course these compositions make but slight appeal to
aesthetic sentiment: they are merely curious for the most
part. But they help us to understand something of the
soul of the elder Japan. The people who could find delight,
century after century, in watching the ways of insects,
and in making such verses about them, must have comprehended,
better than we, the simple pleasure of existence. They
could not, indeed, describe the magic of nature as our
great Western poets have done; but they could feel the
beauty of the world without its sorrow, and rejoice in
the beauty, much after the manner of inquisitive and happy
children.
Here, Hearn gives praise with one hand and takes it away
with the other.
A more positive and consistently expressed insight into
the value of haiku is the following passage from an essay
Bits of Poetry that appeared in Hearns
In Ghostly Japan (1899):
The common artprinciple of the class of poems under present
consideration is identical with the common principle of
Japanese pictorial illustration. By the use of a few chosen
words the composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly
what the painter endeavors to do with a few strokes of
the brushto evoke an image or a moodto revive
a sensation or emotion. And the accomplishment of this
purposeby poet or by picturemakerdepends altogether
upon capacity to suggest, and only to suggest. A Japanese
artist would be condemned for attempting elaboration of
detail in a sketch intended to recreate the memory of
some landscape seen through the blue haze of a spring
morning, or under the great blond light of an autumn afternoon.
Not only would he be false to the traditions of his art:
he would necessarily defeat his own end thereby. In the
same way a poet would be condemned for attempting any
completeness of utterance in a very short poem: his object
should be only to stir the imagination without satisfying
it. So the term ittakkirimeaning all
gone, or entirely vanished, in the sense
of all toldis contemptuously applied
to verses in which the verse-maker has uttered his whole
thought;praise being reserved for compositions that
leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid.
Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect short
poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind
of the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long duration
(pp. 313-14).
In spite of his seeming acceptance of this principle, Hearn
in his translations is not willing to trust readers of English
to have the insight or awareness to appreciate this suggestiveness
of haiku. An awareness that he and the Japanese reader apparently
have when they read the originals. So in most of his translations
he tries to explain or describe with added words what he
believes is suggested by the Japanese.
Arthur E. Kunst in his valuable book, Lafcadio Hearn
(1969), shows by an incisive and thorough analysis of Hearns
translations of haiku where and how the translator failed
to fulfill his own standards. However, Kunsts choice
of the word wit to describe the literary values
inherent in haiku is lamentably inappropriate. It recalls
Chamberlains insensitive characterization of them
as epigrams and demonstrates how inadequate our own history
of literary criticism has been, until very recently, in
providing terms and intellectual theories with which we
can discuss and appreciate the aesthetic values to be found
in works so simple and directand shortas haiku.
Kunst also describes haiku as presenting ideas,
when it would be more accurate to say a haiku presents sensory
objects or images. After praising a prose piece by Hearn
about climbing Mount Fuji, Kunst writes:
Such artfulness with the literature of travel makes all
the more puzzling Hearns apparent inability to respond
to the wit in Japanese poetry. During the course of most
of the final eight volumes of his literary career . .
. Hearn was a collector of insects and poetry, usually
in the same piece since one was the excuse for the other
. . . what is curious is that he never found a means for
conveying in an English statement the peculiar, artful
combination of sensation and wit so characteristic of
the short Japanese poem. For a man so aware of the potentialities
of the order of impressions in a story to be so indifferent
to the order of brief ideas in a poem is incredible; and
yet his translations (or, since he was always publicly
modest, even distressed, about his equivalents,
his prose transcriptions) almost inevitably lose the thrill
which he himself analyzes deftly in his notes. None of
these anthologies of poems and insects have more than
a mild and pleasant taste to them; they are catchalls
for a kind of mania for small objects and for Hearns
contemplation of them. (page 102).
Kunst then quotes part of the passage by Hearn on suggestiveness
that I quoted above; remarking that
[Hearn] insists vividly upon the necessity of the poets
leaving the matter incomplete in his poem . . . Yet most
of his versions in the same work are one or two flat,
completed sentences. He then quotes two examples,
including Happy Poverty (Hearn sometimes adds
his own interpretive titles, which frustrate the suggestiveness
of the originals even more): Wafted into my room,
the scent of the flowers of the plum tree/Changes my broken
window into a source of delight.
Kunst continues:
The more literal and fragmentary [Hearn] becomes (and
this happens only occasionally), the more highly suggestive
is his English version, For example, we have this famous
poem from Frogs: Old pondfrogs
jumping insound of water. The implications
of Bashôs contrast between the still, ancient
water and momentary, lively animals is particularly resilient
in Hearns brief resurrection because he chooses
the option of making frogs plural and then of reverting
to the singular for the delicate balance in the last line
. . . Or there is this mere thumbnail sketch
from Bits of Poetry:
Furu-dera ya:
Kané mono iwazu;
Sakura chiru.
Old temple: bell voiceless; cherry-flowers
fall
There are the reverberating strokes upon a canvas which
Hearn describes in the originalsnot the bland, finished
English water-colors he ordinarily gives us.
In the above quotation from Kunst I have corrected a mistake
in the translation of the frog poem. In Kunst it is frogs
jumped in, but Hearn actually translated it correctly,
using the present participle to put the image in the present,
now, where most haiku occur. The original, in the essay
Frogs from Exotics and Retrospectives
(1898), has parentheses around the translation as well as
quotation marks. (As in the case of the templebell haiku
above, Hearn does not always give the name of the poet.)
Kunst also faults Hearn for reversing the order of the imagery
in a number of his translations: The form of the short
poem is often like a joke: it has the unexpected twist which
is revealed as perfectly just. If the punchline comes first,
how is one to be startled into thoughtfulness?
The ways Hearn arranged the originals of the haiku and
his translations on the page are important for they were
to have an effect on subsequent translators and, ultimately,
though indirectly, on the way poets writing in English would
arrange the lines of their haiku. His usual habit was first
to quote the original haiku in three lines of rômaji
arranged with the first and third lines indented and then
the translation immediately under it. The translation was
usually in one or two lines of prose, but quite often he
would write it in two lines of verse, rough hexameters,
mixing iambic and anapestic feet, as he does in the following
example from his essay Semi in Shadowings
(1900):
Sémi no tatsu,
Ato suzushisa yo!
Matsu no koë.
Baijaku.
When
the sémi cease their storm, oh, how refreshing the
stillness!
Gratefully then resounds the musical speech of the pines.
These verse translations, signaled by the initial caps
in both lines, are probably his worst attempts, for he pads
out the original to get the six feet of his chosen verse
form as well as following his usual practice of adding words
to explain the poem. A more literal translation
might read:
when the cicadas cease
what coolness!
the voice of the pines
Hearn feels he has to add to the original to make sure
his readers realize the contrast, already suggested, between
the loudness of the cicadas and the refreshing stillness
of their silence, implied in the Japanese by the word coolness.
The stillness lets us hear the sound of the breeze in the
pines. The breeze is also suggested by coolness
and by voice(s). (Like the word haiku, which
is its own plural, Japanese nouns can often be read as either
singular or plural.) Though the original uses only voice(s),
Hearn elaborates with musical speech. He drags
in Gratefully then resounds out of nowhere to
make his translation seem more poetic. Of course, the addition
only gets in the way of the original image, blurring it,
(Unnecessarily, he also uses oh for emphasis
to match yo in the original. The yo
acts as a verbal exclamation point, and he uses a regular
one in his translation as well. One of a group of particles
called kireji or cutting words, used in haiku to
give emphasis, to mark a mood, act as a possessive, indicate
a pause, etc., such words do not usually function
as words with a literal meaning, but as a kind of punctuation.
The exclamation point Hearn has put after yo
in the Japanese rômaji is, of course, not in the original.)
Here is another example:
Kagéroishi
Kumo mata satté
Sémi no koë.
Kitô.
Gone
the shadowing cloudsagain the shrilling of sémi
Rises
and slowly swells,ever increasing the heat!
Heat is not even mentioned in the original, only suggested.
How much better if he had pared it down to something closer
to the Japanese, such as:
Taking the shade
the clouds have gone
cicadas voices
Though Hearns beginnings with haiku were helpful
to later scholars and intrigued a number of poets early
in the 20th century they did not reveal the depth and awareness
of the originals and as a result the birth of American haiku
had to wait for the great translations and interpretations
of R. H. Blyth and Harold Henderson that came after the
mid20th century. As Kunst says:
[Hearns haiku translations] do not any longer redeem
themselves as poetic intermediaries. If they did once,
for the dissatisfied young poets of the turn of the century,
we can only remark that most of these transcriptions,
those from the sophisticated tradition, lacked the poetic
heart of the originals and their intricate structural
wit. From all those hundreds, we would want to rescue
only one or two . . . (page 107).
Hearn must have been an influence on the great British
translator of haiku, R. H. Blyth, whose four-volume Haiku,
published from 1949 to 1952, was a seminal work in starting
the American haiku movement. Blyth was able to fulfill in
his translations the ideals of suggestiveness that Hearn
praised in the originals; ideals Hearn himself was rarely
able to achieve in his own renderings. Hearns three-line
arrangement for the rômaji of the original Japanese
poems was adopted by Blyth for his English translations.
Above the translation, Blyth put the rômaji in a single
line, two or three character spaces separating each of the
three parts. A couple of examples will show how Blyth improved
on Hearns translations. They also, along with many
more Ive come across, would seem to indicate that
Blyth had at times Hearns translations in mind, or
in front of him, when he worked out his own. Words and phrases,
as in the first of the following, seem too close to be accidental.
I will not repeat the rômaji. The Blyth translation
follows the Hearn:
Té no hira wo
Hau ashi miyuru
Hotaru kana!
Oh,
this firefly!as it crawls on the palm of my
hand,
its legs are visible [by its own light]!
The
fire-fly;
As it crawls on my palm,
Its
legs are visible.
Banko
Akénuréba,
Kusa no ha nomi zo
Hotaru-kago.
With
the coming of dawn, indeed, there is nothing
visible
but grass in the cage of the firefly.
When
dawn comes,
Only grass
In
the fire-fly cage.
Onchô
The brackets in the first haiku are Hearns. In the
second Hearn example, Ive corrected a few printers
errors in the rômaji. Both examples from Hearn are
from Kottô (1902), both of Blyths are
from Haiku, Vol. 3, pages 218 and 219, Ive
come across only two translations of haiku by Hearn that
are in three lines. They are both in Shadowings and are
on cicadas. Here is one of them (Hearn does not give the
author, but it seems to be a takeoff on a famous haiku by
Bashô, which is about the voice of a cicada sinking
into a rock):
Into the wood of the pine-tree
Seems to soak
The voice of the sémi.
It is interesting that he has the lines all flush left,
the most common form used today for English-language haiku.
Blyths indented form has not been popular. Blyth when
translating senryu (a kind of haiku about human nature rather
than nature itself) reversed his indenting. He indented
the second line of his three-line translations. Jack Kerouac
when writing his original English-language haiku adopted
this kind of lineation, almost certainly taking it from
the Blyth precedent. For a long time a staggered indentation
(line 2 indented then line 3 indented from that) was popular
with American haiku poets. O. Southard always wrote in this
form and Nick Virgilio started writing his haiku that way,
continuing to do so for some years before changing to the
flush-left form. When Virgilio published his Selected
Haiku in 1988, he followed a suggestion by his editor
and recast the line arrangement of all his earlier haiku
to match his later work.
At least one of Hearns translations ends with no
punctuation, the temple-bell haiku quoted above. Ive
not found any others. It is presented this way perhaps because
it is so fragmentary, though it is possible a period was
left out due to a printers error. This open-endedness
is employed by almost all writers of English-language haiku
today. In trying to define haiku, Hearn writes in Japanese
Miscellany (page 97) that Almost the only rule
about hokkunot at all a rigid one,is that the
poem shall be a little word-picture,that it shall
revive the memory of something seen or felt,that it
shall appeal to some experience of sense. It is only
after stumbling over the patronizing sentiments of little
word-picture and reviv[ing] memor[ies]
that he gets to the essence of haiku: an experience
of sense. He says something similar in his Frogs
essay: The triumph of this extremely brief form of
verse(three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively)is
to create one complete sensation-picture; and Bashôs
original accomplishes the feat,difficult, if not impossible,
to repeat in English. He then quotes Bashôs
old pond and gives his own translation. (See
above in the passage from Kunst.)
When Hearn trusts his reader and keeps his translation
short and simple, he can capture the elusive magic of the
original, as he does (in seventeen syllables!) in the following
from A Japanese Miscellany (page 108poet not cited):
Hiatari
no
Doté ya hinémosu
Tombô
tobu.
Over the sunlit bank, all
day long,
the dragonflies flit to and
fro.
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