Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Haiku

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.2019.0043

1080-661X

Haruo Shirane,

Financial Crisis of the 21st Century

Haiku Haruo Shirane (bio) The seventeen-syllable (5/7/5) haiku is often said to be the shortest poetic genre in the world. How is it possible for it to be so short and still be poetry? How did the haiku come to be? Is the haiku really short? What impact did the genre have in the global marketplace? Let us begin with a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694): kareeda nikarasu no tomarikeriaki no kure on a leafless brancha crow comes to rest—autumn nightfall1 The haiku (originally called hokku, or the opening verse, in haikai, or popular linked verse) relies traditionally on a seasonal word (aki no kure, autumn evening), to indicate the time and place of the hokku. The haiku was usually composed in a communal setting, with the opening poem often an address from the guest (the poet) to the host. Equally important, the seasonal word anchored the poem in a historical and social moment, and the same haiku could be used later in diaries and travel literature, much like a photo might be today, as snapshots to record an experience or memorable scene. The seasonal word had another key function: to anchor the verse in an established poetic tradition, where "autumn" implied loneliness and fading of life, a culturally shared association. The other key aspect of haiku was the "cutting word" (kireji), which splits the poem in two and allows the two halves to reverberate. Here the image of the crow settling on a leafless branch in evening (kure means both "evening" and "end," implying the end of autumn) reverberates with the seasonal word ("autumn evening," or "evening in late autumn"). The reader must enter into the "cut," the open space, and connect the two parts in her head. As the term hokku (opening verse) suggests, the hokku was followed by a fourteen-syllable "added verse" (tsukeku) to create a world or scene [End Page 461] (5/7/5/7/7) that combined the world of the hokku with that of the tsukeku. The tsukeku, usually composed by another poet, was in turn followed by yet another "added verse" (5/7/5) that played on the hokku to create a new scene (5/7/5/7/7), which combined the third verse and the second verse. A group of poets (sometimes solo) thus created sequences of thirty-six verses, 100 verses, and so forth. The hokku/haiku (the opening verse of a haikai linked verse) was therefore both a short, autonomous form and the beginning of a larger sequence. Only in the modern period, under the influence of modern Western notions of autonomous verbal art "owned" by a single author, was the opening verse divorced from the poetic sequence and from the communal functions that it occupied in the premodern and early modern periods. Japan's preeminent classical genre was waka (literally, Japanese poetry), a short thirty-one-syllable (5/7/5/7/7) lyric that was identified with a single author and that could be read as an autonomous text. But most waka included a brief preface giving either the circumstances of composition or the poetic dai, or "topic" (such as "autumn evening"). Waka also appeared in collections, anthologies, poetic sequences, and in diaries and prose, where it was interspersed as a form of dialogue. Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), the pioneer of modern Japanese poetry, condemned haikai linked verse, which he regarded as a trivial social game, and declared that only the hokku, the opening seventeen-syllable verse, which he saw as textually autonomous, had value. "The hokku (haiku) is literature. Renga (classical linked verse) and haikai (popular linked verse) are not." "Linked verse emphasizes change, a non-literary element."2 However, the legacy of the linked verse genre today remains in at least three ways: first, the idea that the haiku marks a particular social time and space; second, that anyone should be able to compose a haiku; and third, that the reader must complete the haiku. The shortness and simplicity of haiku were the result of social necessity: the need for an easily accessible verbal medium to mark a social occasion. The haiku poet does not...