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