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Sparrow as Kigo ~
GD#4
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| Posted by Narayanan Raghunathan Sat, Sep 30th 2006, 08:40 :: English | |||
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--- In WHCindia@yahoogroups.com, > Narayanan Wrote Hello friends~ Sparrow (suzume, Japan) ***** Location: Japan, worldwide ***** Season: non-seasonal topic ***** Category: animal http://worldkigo2005.blogspot.com/2006/07/sparrow-suzume.html suzume [sparrow(s)] ~ Higginson in his book [ The Haiku Handbook in the reference section chapter season - Word List and Index ]mentions "suzume" as a spring kigo. I hope Gabi san clarifies this issue. Gabi Greve Wrote *In Haiku World, Higginson mentions suzume as an all year topic, not SPRING !*** ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ the sparrows are a non-seasonal topic if used without any specification. There are two kigo for spring baby sparrows, little sparrows, suzume no ko ¿ý¤Î»Ò kigo for late spring nest of a sparrow, suzume no su ¿ý¤ÎÁã kigo for all spring http://worldkigo2005.blogspot.com/2006/07/sparrow-suzume.html ............................................. I have a few haiku on Amida myself, he is very close to daily life in Japan,even now. http://happyhaiku.blogspot.com/2005/06/amida-buddha.html with more links on this page. Greetings from Japan GABI Narayanan wrote ~ Dear Gabi san In the Higginson Book i have, suzume [sparrow(s)] is listed as a spring kigo. [p.269] Could you please check and clarify or send a note to Prof Higginson to check and rectify the tentative error. [Haiku HandBook ] Pardon me for this interruption! Narayanan Gabi Greve Wrote Dear Narayanan san, I was quoting Higginson from the book Haiku World an international poetry almanac. And I am always consulting the Great Japanese Saijiki too. Sparrow in itself is NOT a spring kigo. Maybe Higginson made a mistake in the book you quote. In the Haiku Handbook he quotes on p. 29 the Japanese last line reads: susume no koe ... but I guess this again might be a misprint (it has 6 beats instead of 5) for *susume no ko,* which is a kigo for spring. (with 5 beats as a haiku should have) In the haiku quoted on page 108, the kigo is atatakasa, for summer, the suzume, sparrow is not a kigo here at all, but a non-seasonal topic. the verse quoted on page 187 is a tanka, which does not have a kigo. I guess, it was a mistake to list suzume, the sparrow, as an animal kigo for spring with these three quotations in the Haiku Handbook . The later book, Haiku World, gets it right! (by the way, I have found other mistakes in books from Higginson, as we all make mistakes, if we write a lot ... including myself ...:o). I hope this clarifies things for you. The World Kigo Databasee is correct in the quotations about the kigo related to sparrows. GABI Narayanan wrote ~ Thank you Gabi san for this clarification. I checked the Higginson Kigo list before I made my comment. so that clears the issue! It was two reliable sources saying different things and I needed the clarification. Narayanan Raghunathan Gabi Greve Wrote Dear Narayanan san, you made a good point about the sparrow as kigo quoted by Higginson. Now Bill has clarified the problem in more detail. The Haiku Handbook was wrong, just as I thought. Read it here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/worldkigolibrary/message/168 Bill Higginson was kind enough to comment on the mention of SPARROW as a kigo in the Handbook and Haiku World. Here is his comment: "Sparrow" is indeed not a season word. The Handbook is wrong on that score. Haiku World is correct: sparrow is non-seasonal; baby sparrow(s) is (late) spring; sparrows' nest is (all) spring. But any such "is" must needs be somewhat tentative. The astute, deep reader may have noticed that R. H. Blyth firmly situates "sparrow" in spring, as well. It is possible that some saijiki he had pre-war indicated this, or that he, perhaps like myself, was taken in by the references to "baby sparrows" and "sparrows' nest", and dumped all his sparrows there. (More on this below.) We can see that this is "wrong", in that some of the poems in his spring-sparrow section are clearly from other seasons: Bashoo: inasuzume / cha no kibatake ya / nigedokoro >> Rice-field sparrows; >> The tea-plantation >> Is their haven of refuge. Blyth (Haiku, Spring, paperback, p. 518) >> wjh The season word here is "rice-sparrows", meaning sparrows who have come to autumn rice-fields to glean loose grains from the ground, or pluck them from the plants before harvest. Hence, rice-sparrows is an autumnal season word. While Blyth waxes philosophical about this poem, the simple fact is that rice paddies and tea fields often lie next to each other, and when the workers come to harvest the sparrows will escape among the tea plants, like the rabbit in his briar patch. Note also that the break comes after the kireji "ya", not after the "rice-field sparrows", as Blyth has it. Again, we have Shikô, in fact, the first haiku Blyth presents on sparrows in spring: >> shokudoo ni suzume naku nari yuushigure >> At the refectory, >> Sparrows are chirping >> In the evening rain. Blyth (Haiku, Spring, paperback, p. 517) >> in the dining hall >> the sparrows are chirping . . . >> evening showers >> wjh >> The season word is "yuushigure" or "evening showers". These are specifically the chill, misty, drenching showers of early winter, and hence this is an early winter poem. (The religious overtones of "refectory" --a monastery dining hall-- are fully warranted in Blyth's version for "shokudoo"; I use "dining hall" simply because many contemporary readers may not know the more specific word.) Again, as above, Blyth also indicates the break at the wrong place. Note clearly: In virtually no Japanese haiku are there two equal grammatical breaks, and in very few Japanese haiku is there one through-composed sentence. Almost never have I come across a Japanese haiku with two adverbial phrases both linked to the same main statement, as Blyth does here in this translation. In the original, the last phrase (which I give as "<>") is completely independent of the rest of the poem. This sort of structure, with two "lines" or phrases running together and another phrase quite separate, is THE structure of haiku in Japanese, and any translation that fails to represent this is usually a bad translation. This kind of blindness in so many of Blyth's translations is exactly why I started translating haiku myself, to try to get at the real structures involved. Back to season words. The large pre-WWII *Haikai saijiki* (5 vol.) edited by Kyoshi Takahama and his colleagues-- he was the dominant force in haiku at the time-- has a half-dozen phrases involving sparrows listed as spring season words. For someone like Blyth, who simply plundered poems from his reading and did not study the seasonal system carefully, probably tossing all poems on sparrows into the "sparrow pile", this may have seemed to indicate that "sparrow" by itself was a spring season word. Not so. For someone like Higginson, trying to figure things out at the arms-length of books by Henderson, Blyth, Yasuda, etc., in the early 1980s, when the Handbook was written, following Blyth's lead seemed like the thing to do. It is only since I've made my own investigation of the seasonal system, and been collecting saijiki, that I've become disenchanted with Blyth on that score, as well. But the Handbook, whatever its faults, was the key to my being invited to Japan again and again, and to my coming to discover how the seasonal reference, not "nature", and not, God help us, Zen, is the real key to "getting" Japanese haiku. Blyth built his books around his notion of Zen in haiku, and their anti-poetry aspects. Henderson built his around the notion of nature in haiku, and their poetry. Yasuda built his around a weird attempt to marry syllable-counting with end-rime, and injected the ideas of a few Japanese critics in pre-WWII Japan, making their views the only legitimate view of haiku. (I believe Yasuda's books are our first source for the notion of "haiku moment" that so weakens our haiku.) Thank heavens, each caught something of the essence of haiku, viewed from a dominantly Western perspective. I have tried to give a more Japanese perspective, which is not anti-nature, but focussed on the seasons, and which is not anti-Zen, but simply ignores Zen. And which is not anti-haiku-moment, but which focusses on the depth of the tradition as part-source of all truly memorable moments, however much the present sensations may be involved. At the same time, I have approached translation very differently from Blyth, Henderson, or Yasuda. My translations are neither paraphrases, like Blyth's, nor attempts at creating a rimed haiku form that seems to satisfy traditional-poetry ears in English, a la Henderson, nor some hybrid between syllable-counting and rime, like Yasuda's. Rather, I've tried to marry a concern for the structures of the originals, each taken as itself, with an overall sense of the Japanese form, modified always by my roots in organic form in American English (Williams> Olson> Levertov). Hopefully, my work serves to correct the imbalances of my masters. No doubt, later this century perhaps, someone will detect some central flaw in my approach, and correct it. Hopefully, this wobbling pivot will gradually come more and more to center, until someday the true core of haiku will emerge in the hearts and minds of millions of poets worldwide. Bill Higginson, September 2006 ************************************************** Back to the SPARROW as a KIGO ................................................................................... Thank you for your contribution, Bill ! GABI GREVE World Kigo Database |
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