"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