The utter irrelevance of 5-7-5
Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Wed, 13 Oct 1999 12:41:30 +0530
> didn't li po write haikus that would be, like, a page long?
> or is it just the translations?
Just the translations.
"Haiku: A lyrical Japanese verse form stemming from Zen Buddhism,
tending to emphasize nature, change, surprise, spontaneity, and the
times of year, and consisting usually of seventeen syllables arranged
in three lines containing five, seven, and find syllables,
respectively."
Let me freely adapt from our 'poor, poor Salinger' guy, Hofstadter,
from whose last book the above is taken.
Consider this, though not from Li Po but from Basho, a charming
translation in a Dantean tercet, complete with rhyme and all, done by
one Curtis Hidden Page in 1923
A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps...
Apart, unstilled by sound or motion...till
Suddenly into it a little frog leaps.
50 years later, Lindley Williams Hubbell offered the following two
versions:
An old pond
A frog jumping
Sound of water.
&
O thou unripples pool of quietness
Upon whose shimmering surface, like the tears
Of olden days, a small batrachian leaps,
The while aquatic sounds assail our ears
& then you have the canonical 5-7-5 anglicization by Earl Minor:
The old pond is still
a frog leaps right into it
splashing the water.
Sato, the celebrated translator from Japanese, was pretty offended by
the last word of the first line which he thought was padding:
"...apparently based on the assumption, which Professor Page had, that
Basho, who wrote the original poem, was jolted into a supreme
awareness of life when a silence was broken. (If that were what
enlightenment is all about, all the nervous wrecks in New York City
would have to be appointed Zen abbots in Kyoto.)"
[New York City residents, please note that I would happily substitute
New Delhi for it - just reporting]
Sato's main problem was that by adding 'still' in his translation,
though it helped approximate the syllabic count, Miner was helping
perpetuate a long-standing myth about Basho's poem by erroneously, if
pleasantly, linking it too closely with Zen.
Sato's favourite translation?
pond
frog
plop!
(and of course it doesn't maintain the syllabic count)
Hofstadter, decides to carry the idea further, by deciding to change
the structural level itself, from the syllabic-count to the
letter-count and offers:
swamp
tadpole
plunk
Or as Hofstadter says,
Twice five syllables,
Plus seven, can't say much - but...
That's haiku for you.
Sonny