Haiku
Additionally, a minority movement within modern Japanese haiku (現代俳句, gendai-haiku), supported by Ogiwara Seisensui and his disciples, has varied from the tradition of 17 on as well as taking nature as their subject.
[9][10] The use of kireji distinguishes haiku and hokku from second and subsequent verses of renku; which may employ semantic and syntactic disjuncture, even to the point of occasionally end-stopping a phrase with a sentence-ending particle (終助詞, shūjoshi).
[11] In English, since kireji have no direct equivalent, poets sometimes use punctuation such as a dash or ellipsis, or an implied break to create a juxtaposition intended to prompt the reader to reflect on the relationship between the two parts.
[14] One of the best-known Japanese haiku[15] is Matsuo Bashō's "old pond": 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音 ふるいけやかわずとびこむみずのおと furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto Translated:[16] old pond frog leaps in water's sound This separates into on as: fu-ru-i-ke ya (5) ka-wa-zu to-bi-ko-mu (7) mi-zu-no-o-to (5) Another haiku by Bashō: 初しぐれ猿も小蓑をほしげ也 はつしぐれさるもこみのをほしげなり hatsu shigure saru mo komino o hoshige nari[17] Translated: the first cold shower even the monkey seems to want a little coat of straw As another example, this haiku by Bashō illustrates that he was not always constrained to a 5-7-5 on pattern.
His best-known work, Oku no Hosomichi, or Narrow Roads to the Interior, is counted as one of the classics of Japanese literature[23] and has been translated into English extensively.
Bashō was deified by both the imperial government and Shinto religious headquarters one hundred years after his death because he raised the haikai genre from a playful game of wit to sublime poetry.
Buson is recognized as one of the greatest masters of haiga (an art form where the painting is combined with haiku or haikai prose).
However, a very individualistic, and at the same time humanistic, approach to writing haiku was demonstrated by the poet Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), whose miserable childhood, poverty, sad life, and devotion to the Pure Land sect of Buddhism are evident in his poetry.
The term "hokku" is now used chiefly in its original sense of the opening verse of a renku, and rarely to distinguish haiku written before Shiki's time.
[citation needed] The earliest Westerner known to have written haiku was the Dutchman Hendrik Doeff (1764–1837), who was the Dutch commissioner in the Dejima trading post in Nagasaki during the first years of the 19th century.
[29] One of his haiku is the following:[30] 稲妻の 腕を借らん 草枕 inazuma no kaina wo karan kusamakura lend me your arms, fast as thunderbolts, for a pillow on my journey.
[citation needed] Early Western scholars such as Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) and William George Aston were mostly dismissive of hokku's poetic value.
The Japanese-Italian translator and poet Harukichi Shimoi introduced haiku to Italy in the 1920s, through his work with the magazine Sakura as well as his close personal relationships within the Italian literati.
Two notable influences are the haiku of his close friend Gabriele d'Annunzio, and to a lesser extent, those of Ezra Pound, to whom he was introduced in the early 1930s.
[31] An early example of his work appears in the 1919 novella La guerra italiana vista da un giapponese, which features a haiku by the Japanese feminist poet Yosano Akiko: L'autunno giovane è come un salone della Reggia, perchè in esso gli alberi, gli uccelli, i fiori e tutte le altre cose sono placcati di oro The young autumn is like a salon in the palace, for in it the trees, the birds, the flowers and all other things are plated with gold.
The Japanese-American scholar and translator Kenneth Yasuda published The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, with Selected Examples in 1957.
[note 1] In 1958, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashô to Shiki by Harold G. Henderson was published by Doubleday Anchor Books.
After World War II, Henderson and Blyth worked for the American Occupation in Japan and for the Imperial Household, respectively, and their shared appreciation of haiku helped form a bond between the two.
Because the normal modes of English poetry depend on accentual meter rather than on syllabics, Henderson chose to emphasize the order of events and images in the originals.
[37] In February 2008, the World Haiku Festival was held in Bangalore, gathering haijin from all over India and Bangladesh, as well as from Europe and the United States.
Haiku subsequently had a considerable influence on Imagists in the 1910s, notably Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" of 1913,[47] but, notwithstanding several efforts by Yone Noguchi to explain "the hokku spirit", there was as yet little understanding of the form and its history.
An Italian translation of a haiku by Akiko Yosano is included in Shimoi's 1919 novella La guerra italiana vista da un giapponese.
[52] In 1921 the magazine La Ronda published a negative critique of the Japanese "Hai-kai" fashion that was spreading in France and Spain, while in the following years many futurists appreciated the fast haiku style.
[53] In Italy, the national haiku association was founded in Rome in 1987 by Sono Uchida, the well-known Japanese haijin and the ambassador of Japan in Vatican.
In Spain, several prominent poets experimented with haiku, including Joan Alcover, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Luis Cernuda.
[57] The Mexican poet José Juan Tablada is credited with popularising haiku in his country, reinforced by the publication of two collections composed entirely in that form: Un dia (1919),[58] and El jarro de flores (1922).
[63][better source needed] The first publication in Yugoslavia treating haiku was Miloš Crnjanski's Poezija starog Japana (Poetry of Ancient Japan), published in 1925.
He was attracted to the aesthetics of aioi-no-matsu - the eternal - and Buddhist empathy, in common with his poetic theme of connecting distant things and concepts through affection.
Other writers include Vladimir Zorčić (1941–1995), Milan Tokin's (1909–1962) unpublished collection Godišnja doba (Seasons), Desanka Maksimović, Alexander Neugebauer (1930–1989), and Zvonko Petrović (1925–2009).
The carving of famous haiku on natural stone to make poem monuments known as kuhi (句碑) has been a popular practice for many centuries.
