To Fidelity or not Fidelity

I am learning the notion of fidelity in translation is quite complex. There is rarely a one-to-one meaning between languages, in terms of the literal definition of a word and the cultural engagement with the word, much less of a direct correlation when you consider strings of words and literary devices like idioms or metaphors. Even within the same language, we run into the difficulty of being understood when each reader comes with an entire lifetime of experience and perspective that will never be a 100% match that of the writer. 

Until I read Deborah Smith's account of attempting to translate The Vegetarian, I was partial to the view that she had made unforgivable errors in her translation. From some perspectives, it seemed her willing erasure of moments like the sister's jealousy or shifting moments into sounding more feminist as a way to "strengthen Han's own feminism" seemed like a great unfaithfulness to the text and, in a way, erased the voice of the initial author, as a means to Smith's own end And while I am aware that all translation requires a significant amount of creativity, as an attempting, amateur, barely-know-what-I-am-doing translator, I lean heavily towards attempting everything in my power to preserve the voice and meaning of the original author. Whether or not we agree or think there are places the original author could have improved. 

That being said, after reading Smith's reiteration of her experience, it felt much more like she had done all she could to honor the original author and was aware of the many imperfections and her own limitations. Without Smith, we would not even be having this conversation. Without imperfect translators attempting to translate, there would be so many great pieces of art that would not be able to be experienced by other audiences. Even if those translations are a part of the whole and missing some of the original voice and meaning, or if it is somewhat distorted, we get a chance to read and engage with something not previously available to us, which I feel is quite special. 

Translation feels like an archeological dig. With each translation, the amorphous shape becomes less and less a crude image and a more full picture of the original work. Deborah Smith discovered and gave us a crude shape of The Vegetarian, and now we get the opportunity to pick away with close care to better reveal what is at hand. 

 "I hope we all keep talking about translation because there’s always more to say, especially about what a joy it is, and because we need to put our heads together if we’re to ensure that it lives up to its potential — to disrupt hegemonies, work across difference without erasing it, and challenge the myth of the lone genius — while also enabling new audiences for voices and perspectives that might otherwise be silenced or spoken over, and works of art without which all our lives would be diminished." - Deborah Smith.

                                                                                                                                            Lauren

Haiku and Translation Considerations

These readings were really interesting to me. I, like probably many people, am familiar with haiku as a poetry style mostly in passing and didn’t know much about the history of it or how it came to be. One of the things that struck me the most was in Shirane’s writing about the earliest haikai style. The focus on seasonal and natural phenomena was something I was aware of, but I didn’t realise what a change this was from the traditionally accepted way of writing at the time. Haikus are seen by many in the West nowadays as a sort of elevated kind of poetry, and I think it is very cool that this style originally developed to be sort of humorous, even inappropriate, and incorporated many new elements of language at the time. I think this drew my attention for two reasons. Firstly, it was surprising and caught my eye because it was unexpected to me. Second, I also think it highlights the importance of not just translation, but also thoughtful and historically informed translation. The role of haikai as cultural development, challenging expectation and propriety, seems to me to be very important to the way we would be translating it.

Furthermore, when Machi Tawara commented on the combination of “old” and “new” that appears in these poems, I also considered the role that literature overall plays. Despite how brief and seemingly limited this style of writing might be, there is a lot more being communicated in them than just the meanings of the words themselves.

Kamryn Schult

(Sorry this is late, I had an issue with the blog and missed the email about when these are due.)

5-7-5

 

Exploring the history of haiku through the lens of Bashō and his predecessors reveals a poetic form far more affluent than its 5-7-5 structure suggests. What I found most interesting is how haiku, initially a part of linked verse, evolved into a distinct genre. It is not just about counting syllables; it's about capturing a moment in time, a feeling, a season. Bashō, in particular, utilized haiku to give us a glimpse of his life and travels. Bashō's haiku often incorporated elements of nature and everyday life, transforming the mundane into something profound. He explored the interplay between classical tradition and the contemporary world. The poems are evocative and often combine seemingly disparate elements to create new meanings. The way Basho incorporates these elements, whether the sound of water or the moon, elevates it beyond mere description into a more profound experience for the reader. Bashō's haiku captures the emotions, transience, and seasonal changes. His use of poetry to explore his spiritual and emotional states makes his work particularly compelling.

 

This made me reflect on an Arab poet, Nujoom al-Ghanem, who writes in haiku, combining the literary practice of haiku with the principles of Zen philosophy and observations of life in the Gulf and beyond. Its immensely expressive poems are built of short verses following a three-line structure and a seventeen-syllable pattern. These non-rhyming, simple, yet extraordinarily philosophical and thought-provoking Zen poems invite the reader to embark on a unique inner journey of meditation, reflection, and self-discovery.

                                                                                            Ibrahim Fawzy

The Old and New; The Vernacular and the Classical

I think one of the recurring themes of the different readings, from Haikai poetry, Basho’s poetry and prose, to Machi Tawara’s “Salad Phenomenon,” is the interaction and tension between the vernacular and classical, or more simply, those between the old and new. I think the example,

Princess Saho

with the coming of spring

stands pissing

is a great one because the interaction and tension are present thematically and in the language. For instance, instead of “pissing,” “peeing” or “tinkling” could have been chosen but likely because the former is more vulgar and therefore heightens that tension, it is used to be juxtaposed against "Princess" and "the coming of spring." I’m currently translating a work in which the narrator vacillates between vernacular and classical in her language and would be interested to work through some examples of word choice and syntax construction when mixing the old and new/vernacular and classical.

- Lois

Blog Post 1 by Drew

Discussions of poetic form and shape tend to be really fascinating to me, and this introduction to Japanese literary history was no exception. In a Japanese-to-English translation setting, with so many elements to consider (sound, rhythm, meaning, tone, context, point of view), the appearance of the poem on the page might be the hardest to preserve. Juliet Winters Carpenter talks about how tanka are almost always a single line of vertical text, and how even Machi Tawara’s choice to employ breaks within the tanka was experimental and noteworthy. Carpenter uses a three-line format that reduplicates the original brevity, but I wonder what is lost when the poem is no longer a single column. Somehow (maybe due to the lack of space between units?) Beichman’s translations look a little better to me. But because I have no familiarity with Japanese characters, maybe I’m overthinking shape…

Also, wow! Basho was such a boss! It’s so exciting to me that, across the centuries, his poems still work so beautifully:

Dried salmon,

the gauntness of a Kūyu pilgrim

in the cold season

Just amazing.

Also amazing is that Yosano Akiko wrote upwards of 50,000 tanka. I wonder how scholars decide which entries to focus on for translation. It seems impossible to pick. “O, My Little Brother” is an obvious choice given its popularity and how stunning it is (I teared up hearing it read), but it makes me think about other poems that are lying dormant in the annals of her oeuvre.

Finally, this is a bit of a side note, but in my own writing and reading of poetry, I tend to enjoy unexpected, unfamiliar words, and how they present opportunities for curiosity, and how they contribute to a sonic landscape. As such, I’m selfishly excited about all the new terms this class has already added to my lexicon (kigo and kireji, haibun and haiga and haigon), and I hope that trend continues.

Translation as Recontextualization

In absorbing the Japanese poetry assigned today, I noticed a new definition of translation emerging; one that did not involve moving a text from one language to another, but rather moving a literary tradition from one cultural context to the next. The recontextualization of traditional forms of poetry examined in these readings and videos served to highlight new ideas in the same cultural landscape.

The very tradition of hakai "implied the interaction of diverse languages and subcultures, particularly between the new popular culture and the poetic tradition" and also "refamiliarized" traditions within this new context (Basho 180). This is a new understanding of translation to me, one that plays with old ideas and reframes them to highlight social change, provide humor, and generally reframe an understanding of a literary form.

This was particularly interesting to me when it came to the use of this recontextualization in poetry written by women. This practice will always be "defamiliarizing," because women were not always, and still are not always, welcome into literary and poetic spaces. For example, they were not always welcome into the world of haiku because it was believed that women were not capable of brevity. Because of this, hearing Yosano Akiko's poetry was especially moving. In the same hakai way, Akiko utilized traditional tanka forms to write moving feminist and anti-war pieces. More contemporary, Machi Tawara’s “Salad Anniversary” is “modern adaptation of classical verse form." 

More personally, I really enjoyed the imagery of the (language) translations of "Salad Anniversary," specifically the line: "think meltingly of you" (140).

- Lila Baltaxe

Haiku

I didn’t know anything about haiku besides the 5-7-5 syllable count. I was surprised that haiku was often meant to be funny in its juxtapositions because I thought of it as a mild and quiet form. I was struck by what Beichman said about Shiki using haiku to express his “sheer pleasure at being alive.” That’s such a beautiful sentiment. I was moved by Issa’s poem “The world of dew/is a world of dew/and yet…and yet…” even though it’s so short.

While reading Carpenter’s afterword, I thought about what seems to be the impossibility of fully translating Tawara’s poetry and its effect in Japanese. In fact, Carpenter admits this impossibility when introducing one of the poems. This made me wonder about what a translator’s aim should be in the face of an inability to recreate intention and effect. Carpenter only said she aimed for “brevity without attempting to duplicate syllable counts." When so much meaning is carried by aspects of a language only a native speaker can recognize, what does a straight word for word translation give a reader?

Emerson Archer 

Haiku as a Vehicle for Mindfulness and Imagination (Tennant)

I can't shake the image of Shiki's lampshade covered in feverishly written haiku verses. How beautiful. I appreciated how he characterizes himself in A Drop of Ink as powerless to his creative impulses and a mere repository for divine inspiration. In his telling, the act of writing, or producing art in any capacity, is imbued with a kind of providential potency that allows the artist to become "a second Creator" along the way. As a fiction writer myself, I found Shiki's argument for mindfulness to be especially refreshing and persuasive: a reminder not to get too caught up in the parameters and pressures of my craft, but rather to appreciate the abundance of "raw materials in nature" and take pleasure in the process of mining those materials, repurposing and defamiliarizing them through my sensory experience of them.

Many of this week's readings emphasized how the minimalist form of haiku (or that of tanka) is often liberating—unassuming in its expansiveness—and can thus serve a variety of poetic intentions, from the sweeping, suggestive scale of Matsuo Bashō's poetry (e.g., "The sea darkening—")  to the playful expression found in Kobayashi Issa's verse (e.g., "The peony's petals / s / c / a / t / t / e / r"). I think Yosa Buson's haiku about the sleeping butterfly on the temple bell offers a rich metaphor for considering haiku's generosity as a form. Each word in a haiku is like that perched butterfly (or "moon-moth" as translated by X.J. Kennedy): it sits atop a wealth of suggested connotations and meanings, preserved in fragile stillness, a resonant silence, the force of which lies in the depth of interpretations that it invites. 

                                                                                                                                    Sawyer  Tennant

Haikai Contains Multitudes (and Sometimes, Conversations): Haiku as both expansive and specific in its intertextuality

I found the question that Catherine Yeh asks in her welcome note so compelling: how does a literary form migrate, in particular, a form that is distinctly tied to a specific geography, culture, and history? Does it migrate with the spirit, Yeh asks, with the core DNA of the genre? This poses an interesting translation question—can not just individual works but entire literary forms be translated through time and across cultures? When it comes to haiku, both Yeh and Beichman seem to say yes. By design, the haiku is a form that through its minimalism creates expansiveness. It leaves space for writers to play, observe, imagine, and be in conversation with one another—and for translators to continue adding different “fanning” possibilities of interpretation. It’s a form that does not merely tolerate but invites the collision of old and new, tradition and experimentation, observation and imagination, lightness and stickiness. 

(A bit of a tangent: I love what Beichman said about the stickiness of haiku, more specifically of the octopus pot image. Though she’d never seen an octopus pot before, the haiku moved her, both evoking her own culturally specific image of lobster traps, and also bringing into her mind a “sticky” gesture at the imaginative/dreaming capacities of octopuses, or lobsters, or any underwater creature. Could these beings, as they waited to be plucked from their little containers, be dreaming? One thing, I think, that makes for great fiction is the ability to, by recreating a kind of visceral/psychological truth of an emotion, allow readers to really feel themselves going through something they may have never experienced. I think this stickiness that Beichman speaks of in haiku is related, that a “sticky” image that combines observation and imagination with a kind of emotional truth can sometimes transcend time and cultural specificity. I, too, felt something about that octopus maybe-dreaming in a pot, even though I’ve never seen an octopus pot.)

I’m also interested in the idea of haiku’s expansiveness/"migratability" as rooted in its conversational nature; not only was haiku a form that originated as one part of a larger, poetic conversation (linked verse/renga), but also a form that is intertextual in and of itself, drawing on classical imagery and repurposing it—even riffing on it—in new, contemporary contexts. As Shirane writes, haikai spirit involves "taking pleasure in recontextualization: defamiliarization, dislocating habitual, conventionalized perceptions, and their refamiliarization, recasting established poetic topics into contemporary language and culture." This reminds me of the intertextuality of certain musical genres that use sampling and interpolation. American hip hop, jazz, and some pop music come to mind, as does Bad Bunny’s recent album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which is rich with references to elements of the salsa, reggaeton, and dembow genres he draws from, and interpolates specific lines from individual artists. (Explored at length in this episode of Switched on Pop.) But while the intertextual and conversational nature of a form opens it up in some ways, it does so differently for those privy to the conversation—whether between multiple artists/writers, or between one writer and the tradition they're working in. To feel the full weight of the piece, I imagine, it must be understood in the context of that cultural/literary conversation, presenting another challenge to the translator—another voice, or set of voices, to listen to. What is missed in literary translation when you don't recognize that there may be a number of voices at work, in conversation, within what appears to be a discrete poem or story?

Abbey Perreault

Fragments and Collectives

 When I first read the chapters from Shirane's book, I was surprised to discover how the English idea of haiku as individual three-line poems completely misses the complexity and interconnectedness of haiku and related forms. Both the historical communities like Basho's circle and modern connections like the poetry produced by Machi Tawara and her readers are so impactful because of how contextual they are. Given the importance of this aspect of haiku, I am excited to discuss how haiku can be translated in a way that honors its collective elements and connections to other poets past and present. I was especially intrigued by how haiku and tanka are presented as one or two lines, with some amount of variation. I'd be interested to see translations that embrace the fluidity of the original form and can in some way bring through the meaning that is created by its ties to classical texts and other poets.

                                                                                                                Grace Ashton

Haiku, Form, Language in Translation, Change

 

Machi Tawara's "combination of old and new" language made me think of how a translator chooses to decipher a poet's intentions with language. With our readings on Japanese poetry this week, I also wondered how colloquial use of language may, or may not, translate across languages and, ultimately, across cultures. Translating short poems might also present challenged in its length, especially in considering haiku. Coupling that with the intricacies of colloquialism, translating these poems may have had its unique challenges.

Similarly, reading Matsuo Bāsho's hokku, it's clear how limiting translating these pieces may be due to both each lines very short nature, and the overall poem's brevity. I can imagine some ideas not being transmitted across languages in the same way it was written. As an aside, I enjoyed the footnotes with background on each hokku.

Yosani Akiko wrote four hundred tanka written in classical tradition, "Disheveled Hair," though seen as controversial for its contents. Akiko compares the speaker's disheveled hair to a butterfly, signifying the disheveling of the tanka form into a feminist form, at least in these tanka, and a metamorphosis. It's interesting to think not only about the controversies of Akiko's poems due to their feminist rhetoric, but also how that works in a known traditional form. Although I'm not familiar with early 20th century Japanese poetry, I assume there may have been less traditional forms at the time, more accepting to images of female desire and passion. Additonally, I wonder if tanka, or other Japanese forms, were male-created and male-dominated, as we can see in early American literature.

Also in the 20th century, Sato writes, "I slip off / my flowery kimono / uncurl rainbow of laces." This poem, similar to Akiko's, talks about an undoing (uncurling), possibly signifying time for a change. The metaphor advocates for a social reform in how women were perceived at the time, perhaps even in how poems by women were interpreted.

- Hanan Akbari

"Breaking the Rules" in Order to Follow Them

It’s true for haiku as it’s true for all, or most, poetic forms: once you know the rules, you are able to work within their intention in order to functionally break them. This is to say that once you understand the reasoning behind a form’s specifications, you are able (if you’d like) to successfully bend those rules to get their desired effect. This feels particularly relevant to the translator, and to poetic forms that did not originate in one’s mother tongue. When translating haikai out of Japanese, I can infer that Beichman had to contend with three major factors beyond the obvious of mimicking the original’s sensibility: syllabics, and (to quote Meghan’s post, which I appreciated) each side of the binary of understanding a poem— intellectual engagement and emotional engagement. It’s when all of these factors are achieved in a poem, in a haiku, in a translation of a haiku, that we get that ecstatic feeling Beichman describes Shiki’s journal as he describes the “nameless pleasure” and “entrancement” which fell over him when in the rhythm of haiku writing.

I found this Buson translation of Beichman’s wonderful and surprising—

The peony’s petals

          s

       c

     a

    t

    t

       e

          r

                p

i

l

                e up

two    then    three

— and also exemplary of this knowing-the-rules-to-break-them, or maybe breaking the rules in order to follow them. Here, Beichman captures a very active moment both in word and form. Rather than forcing her understanding of the poem into a 5-7-5 syllabic form (which I’m not against, by the way, it does create beautiful sounds) she maintains a sense of rhythm by splitting the poem into three sets of three words, using the first line as an introduction to the situation, then using the letters in “scatter” and “pile up” to not only visually display a falling/scattering and a piling of the petals, but also to move our eyes down the page a bit and make us feel that fall physically. This is a great enactment of the “lightness and stickiness” which Beichman describes as characteristic of the haiku, a bodily engagement that lingers.

Samantha

Post by Ece Celikkol

I was not familiar with Japanese literature, and through the videos, essays, and poems, I discovered the fascinating world of haiku and its poets. The minimalist, enriching, and symbolic nature of haiku impressed me. Each word in a haiku carries deep connotations and symbolic meanings, making it a playful yet profound exploration of language.

Matsuo Basho stands out as the greatest haiku poet. His poems possess deep meanings, allowing readers to experience them uniquely within their own worlds. This shared yet individual experience is a reflection of Basho's poems. Learning about the art of haikai and its related genres—hokku, linked verse, haibun, and haiga (haikai painting)—was particularly impressive. Basho referred to these as the haikai spirit (haii), emphasizing the interaction of diverse languages and subcultures, particularly between the new popular culture and the poetic tradition. Its imagination implied the ability to interact in a playful, lively dialogue that produced communal art.

 

Issa and Shiki were notable autobiographical poets. The early Meiji period threatened for a time to kill of not only linked verse, but also that first verse haiku. Matsuoka Shiki saved it. He began making rules for haiku and the most important one was dedicated observation of one’s surrounding. ‘’You can observe the nature by listening as well as looking simply by closing your eyes and listening intently.’’ Buson, another significant poet, shared this interest in nature, meticulously observing the details of flora and fauna.

 

Japan's first feminist poet, Yosano Akiko, broke societal norms with her brave and erotic poetry. In a culture where, expressing certain desires publicly was strange and not common, Akiko's poems were revolutionary. She used classical, old-fashioned language to express her thoughts, showing her love for Japanese tradition while expressing women's enjoyment of sex. Akiko's poetry and herself became the voice of Japanese women. This indicates the power of poetry, or the power Akiko gained through poetry. Throughout her life, she wrote fifty thousand tanka, with love being her central theme.

The achievement of Machi Tawara, another remarkable poet, lies in her ability to use fresh, contemporary language without sacrificing the traditional tanka virtues of concision, evocativeness, and musicality. She skillfully balances traditional, classical language with modernism, making her work accessible and relevant. She is a example of the power of translation. Tawara’s success reminded me of Aslı Erdoğan's case, where translation played a crucial role in raising awareness about her. She went to prison for some political issues and meanwhile, Sevinç Türkkan translated her works. The success of translation led people to know more about Erdoğan and her case. She got out of the jail after people reacted violently.

Stickiness, Light and Syllable Counts

It is hard to write short poetry. We tend towards over-explanation for the sake of getting our thoughts and ideas across. For some, the idea of being misunderstood is debilitating. But the practice of Haiku, and even Tanka, directly resists that, perhaps Western, need. These forms, while void of rising action and a climactic event and often without a clear narrator, still manage to impact the reader. I loved how Beichman introduced the terminology of stickiness and lightness to describe the residue a Haiku or Tanka can leave behind. Reading through some of Basho's work, those words became very useful in describing my experience. The images of the Octopus pot, the summer moon, the sea darkening, autumn deepening... all these resonated with me in a sticky way, but the shortness of them kept the experience light. It is amazing to me how effective these poems can be. 

It is interesting to look at the translations of Basho's work and note what they deemed to be most important. Most of the translations stray away from the strict syllable count, choosing to prioritize the meaning, but many preserve the shape of an English Haiku. The first and third lines are shorter, while the middle line is the longest. While this could be a result of the two extra syllables in the lines of the original language, it seems that they fit into the general expectation of what a Haiku looks like. This could be a signal to the reader, who may not be as versed in the tradition of Haiku, to be aware of the work of a different form and to approach with that in mind. This could be serendipitous, but it is interesting to think about how a translator may choose to approach translating a form that relies so heavily on syllable count. 

 

Lauren Szenderski

Balance in Haikai Poetry and Beyond

From the readings and the video/podcast, I was particularly struck by this element of balance that seems so foundational to haikai art forms. The Shirane piece emphasizes the balance between traditional and contemporary; the classical language and the vernacular that was such a hallmark of haiku poems at the beginning of their emergence. Working with Arabic in translation, I often grapple with the question of the vernacular. The simple breakdown of Arabic is that dialects (or colloquial Arabic) are spoken, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is written. Yet the lines are blurred on this binary, as many artists and linguistic activists seek to increase the visibility and ‘literariness’ of Arabic dialects. 

I think of an example from a Moroccan rapper named Moutchou, who recently released a song called ‘Mou3llaqate’ - a Moroccan-Arabized spelling of Mu'allaqat, the seven pre-Islamic poems considered to be the primary source of early Arabic poetry. For the song, the title mainly reflects Moutchou’s assertion that as one of Morocco’s first rappers, he holds the most significance in the rap scene. However, his clear interaction with the influence that the Mu'allaqat hold in Arab literature and culture is evidence of a general awareness of Arabic’s literary past, and a call to recognize that same literary value in the dialects, which are often stripped of their literary and academic value in the claim that they are merely colloquial. This case is but one example - connections to classical Arabic in contemporary, dialectal Arabic art and literature are widespread. I think that Juliet Carpenter expertly articulates this phenomenon in her Afterword to Salad Anniversary, as she describes Machi Tawara’s language in her Tankas: “[it] is thus not mere ‘young people’s Japanese’ but a literate and sophisticated mixture of old and new - with emphasis, throughout, on new.’” (Carpenter, 138).

Though, as Janine Beichman offers in her talk, the balance in haikai art is not just between the old and the new (to put it simply), but rather also between more metaphysical elements like imagination and mindfulness or rationality. Her approach helped me feel less intimidated by haikus, as I often felt that I was somehow missing the point; that with so few words, there must be some big, hidden meaning that I was not grasping. Listening to Beichman’s talk made me realize that the only way I could go wrong when reading a haiku is by not letting my imagination interact with the words, and therefore, by limiting myself simply to what I think must be the meaning. In supplying my imagination to the poem, I am able to find its beauty in its simplicity and applicability to my experiences. 

- Luisa Bocconcelli

Beyond the Binary: Haiku and the Whole Self

Beyond the Binary: Haiku and the Whole Self

Meghan Miraglia

As I engaged with this week’s readings, I was struck by several realizations/observations about haiku and haikai; I had a few questions arise, too. Haikai’s intention to bridge popular culture with classical allusions leads me to wonder about the lasting/futility of a poet and their words. If one is writing about popular culture, how will those references endure or fade? Is there a balance one must strike between engaging with “the current moment” and being “universal”? Should this even be a concern for poets and translators?

I am drawn to Beichman’s fan metaphor: the poem functions as the handle of a fan, and each interpretation is a blade emerging from its center. There is more than just the right interpretation/wrong interpretation binary. I am struck by the thought that, with haiku, the reader has to bring something to the table. They are asked to participate, or co-create, the poem along with the poet. For instance, the reader must picture the coxcombs; they must mindfully engage with the images rather than passively accept them. I find this a pretty feminist idea, too - and one that connects to concepts around education theory (passive vessels waiting to receive information vs. active beings who already have worth and are bringing it to the table).

I am excited to center my whole-body experiences of and with the poems we’ll be translating for this week. Instead of letting a poem/poet/reader fall on either side of the binary (analyze/intellectually engage with a poem OR "love"/emotionally engage with the poem), haiku and haikai allow for the opportunity to do both.

A Real World Poetry: Community and Language within the Haikai Tradition

I was struck by the collaborative nature of Bashō's linked verse. Similarly, the democratization of language within the Haikai tradition, wherein whole types of use-language and hybrid-language were available to the Haikai poet which were unavailable in other traditional forms, seems like a wonderful celebration of the variety, intricacy, and interconnection of real-world language. In particular, I like the concept of very different dictions and syntaxes cohabitating within a poem, especially in such a concentrated and brief form.  

With these two ideals in mind, I found the afterward to the English translation of Machi Tawara’s collection to convincingly place her in that same tradition. She takes up the practices, according to the afterward, of juxtaposing and interlocking modern and traditional words and phrases and of celebrating the community aspect of the work itself—publishing 1,500 Tankas from inspired fans alongside her own poems.   

It strikes me that following these ideals in constructing new poetry and celebrating the output of the previous generations of poets are not obviously (to me anyway) unified ends. For one thing, the constant evolution of language entrenches even the most inspired syntactic combinations. A process which is only exacerbated as texts become canonized.    

-Elijah Frydman

Welcome to the class blog!

 Welcome to the class blog!

 We are looking forward to reading your thoughts about the assigned readings.

Anna Elliott and Christopher Maurer