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
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