Re: The utter irrelevance of 5-7-5
citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Thu, 14 Oct 1999 08:42:48 -0700
Enjoyed all that!
A note: Buddy recommends haiku (and senryu) translated by R.H. Blyth. His
four-volume set on haiku is a keeper.
A quibble: did Li Po, who was Chinese, ever write in the haiku style?
Thought he just drank alot. :)
An insight [?]: I vaguely recall reading a book titled along the lines of
"Japanese Death Poems". Something about it being a tradition to write a
poem just before dying. Like Seymour, in Room 507.
To end with a quote [:)]: "Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since
he's a highhanded old poem himself, but he's also sublime--and who goes to
poetry for safety anyway?"
amen to *that*,
Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Sundeep Dougal <holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
To: bananafish@lists.nyu.edu <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 12:05 AM
Subject: The utter irrelevance of 5-7-5
>> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>