The The Routledge Global Haiku Reader, edited By James Shea and Grant Caldwell, Routledge 2023, was launched on-line by Alice Wanderer on 1 November 2023
Hello everyone. I am honoured to give the launch speech for The Routledge Global Haiku Reader today. I am also looking forward to hearing the remarks from the contributors. I am here simply to give my impression of what this book has to offer and to whom.
The Routledge Global Haiku Reader comprises an Introduction, an Afterword and sixteen previously published essays that focus upon the history, nature of and evolving possibilities for haiku outside Japan.
These essays are grouped under the four general categories of Haiku in Transit (which deals primarily with translation issues), Haiku and Social Consciousness (which explodes the often-held belief that Japanese haiku is a quietist matter of birds and flowers), Haiku and Experimentation (which explores haiku's capacity to disrupt "common sense") and the Future of Global Haiku.
The essays are rich, provocative and often usefully at loggerheads with one another. They provide essential background for scholars and translators and the lists of works cited offer plenty of suggestions for further reading. The book is also an inspiration for writers of haiku in English.
While the essays are primarily discursive, The Routledge Global Haiku Reader can also be read as an informal anthology aimed at unsettling conventional and often highly defended notions of what haiku is.
Written during WW1 and translated from the French by Jan Walsh Hokenson:
Cla, cla, cla, cla, cla…
sinister noise, machine-gun
Skeleton counting its fingers on its teeth.
................................(Julien Vocance, France)
Written during World War Two and translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato.
machine gun: between his eyebrows a red flower blooms
................................(Saitou Sanki)
On a hill I saw a mysterious town called Home Front
................................(Watanabe Hakusen)
night laundering I shed tears in the water unrestrained
................................(Fubasami Fusae)
for my child going to war I pick and cook moonlit eggplants
................................(Takeshita Shizunojo)
The following, written neither in Japanese nor English are translated by Charles Turnball. The first one has a title:
Jellyfish
Glass parachutes
Full of roses coming down
To a submerged continent
................................(Flavio Herrera, Guatemala)
He who plays with mirrors runs the risk of losing his image ................................
................................(Norberto de la Torre González, Mexico)
Always within us
a history, petrified,
that still breathes
................................(Alain Kervern, France)
And translated from the Russian by Cécile Rousselet
A haiku is written with resin on a pine tree
Bashō the wanderer
With water on a fish
................................(Serge Belyakov)
If we have the haiku, why do we need essays? Most published haiku appears without comment, often bracketed by work from different poets. Competition judges are presented with piles of anonymous haiku from which to select the most moving and extraordinary. Many readers hate being told how or what to read. Ambiguity is sometimes deliberately sought, and many poets applaud the reader's response however distant that is from their own thoughts or associations. My experience of reading many of the haiku in the book has, nevertheless, been enhanced by the essays in which they appeared.
For example, Hiroaki Sato quotes Saitō Masaya's translation of Saitō Sanki's contextualisation of this haiku he wrote about Hiroshima.
Sitting on a stone by the side of the road, I took out a boiled egg and slowly peeled the shell, unexpectedly shocked by the smooth surface of the egg. With a flash of searing incandescence, the skins of human beings had easily slipped off all over this city. To eat a boiled egg in the wind of that black night I was forced to open my mouth. At that moment, this haiku came to me:
Hiroshima –
to eat a boiled egg
the mouth opens.
Sanki's anecdote does not stop the reader from making their own interpretations. That the victims of the bomb, would probably have gaped in shock; that they had been forced to swallow the experience; that for many the effect of the radiation expanded like the exponentially proliferating cells of an egg are my first associations. Added to them now is a new sense of the feel of a slippery hard-boiled egg, a deepened sympathy for Sanki the man, and a wider knowledge of what it is to be a human being.
Where we do not know otherwise, it is easy to assume a writer, more or less, shares our context and thus that their work means what it seems to mean. It is natural to assume that we are a part of the target audience. But this might not be so.
Any puzzle in
Harried mosquito
I am not the last of my kind
Ticking my neck
................................(Gerald Vizenor, USA)
Becomes abundantly clear when the reader knows that Vizenor is a First Nations poet. This haiku attracted me, first of all, because I read it as a joke. But perhaps I have it wrong. In Karen Jackson Ford's essay I learn he is one of a group of First Nations poets who have used haiku to escape the stereotypical identities attributed to them by the mainstream in the USA.
Similarly, read cold, the first association I would have had to:
Not yet extinct,
fishing as his forebears did,
The Great Blue Heron
................................(Forster and Rhoda Jewell, USA)
is the Climate Catastrophe.
In fact, this comes from a 1976 book, Hiawatha's Country by an Anglo-American couple, who note in their forward that the Great Blue Heron is intended as an Indian figure.
I will finish by very briefly outlining how some of the essays approach the task of liberating haiku from mystification:
Haruo Shirane refutes beliefs - long perpetuated in the English-speaking world - about the necessity of haiku's intrinsic association with Zen Buddhism and consequently each haiku's status as the record of an actual moment of cleansed perception. On the other hand, Yoshinobu Hakutani shows how the Japanese ex-patriot performer and poet, Yone Noguchi, expressed some of the foundational views (for example "nature is a mirror of an enlightened self") which continue to provide a model for some English language haiku poets.
Hiroaki Sato and Yūki Itō show that intense and even violent subject matter often said to be out-of-bounds for haiku is certainly part of Japan's twentieth century haiku corpus, despite the fact such work was rejected by powerful individuals and institutions there.
Charles Trumball traces some of the important influences that lead to quite different kinds of haiku in the English-speaking world, Hispanic America, France, Russia and Brazil. Adding to Trumball's survey, Cécile Rousselet explores how haiku has been written in post-Soviet Russia.
Jan Walsh Hokenson unpacks how early twentieth century French translator and haiku poet Paul-Louis Couchoud approached modernist haiku as "a form and a method rather than canonical products of a particular national culture or shaping cultural tradition".
Taking a completely different tack, Richard Gilbert addresses the question of "How is it that haiku do what they do, particularly in English: affect the reader in a manner unlike any other poetic form?" He answers this through a taxonomy of strategies that he sees as enabling a very short poem to achieve both surprise and lasting resonance.
Also entirely uninterested in the writer's subjectivity, Banya Natsuishi propounds his view that the "verbal universe made by an excellent haiku is boundless". He finishes his essay with, "World Haiku is one of the most active, growing and attractive creatures of poety in the twenty-first century." And that is an excellent place for me to stop as well.
- Alice Wanderer
--------------------------
Alice Wanderer lived for many years in Japan and has been engaged with haiku since 1995. Her PhD on Sugita Hisajo and her haiku is available through Monash University. Her small volume of translations Lips Licked Clean was published by Red Moon Press and won a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award in 2021. Alice's recent chapbook, Flow, a collection of 23 haibun is available from Ginninderra Press.
The Routledge Global Haiku Reader is available from https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Global-Haiku-Reader/Shea-Caldwell/p/book/9781032272658
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