Kigo, or seasonal phrases, are the essence of haiku and in one way simple enough to translate. But, as Mark Morris observes, "translation cannot convey the feeling of at-homeness, of being inserted in the cycle of a natural and ritual calendar that kigo communicate to the haikai reader." My personal theory, not especially well-informed, about kigo is that their origin is shamanic, animist, and ritualistic, that the words for "winter blast" and "spring blossoms" and "summer shower" were intended at one time to call forth the living spirits manifested in those natural phenomena. American poets began to take an interest in haiku around the same time at which they became interested in the translation of Native American songs, and the similarity between them was often noted. I think the reason is that they bear the traces of a similar function. The Chippewa hunter's song, soliciting the spirit of the deer, is not very different from the Japanese poet soliciting the spirit of the cherry blossoms. The shaman's songs passed into folk songs; the folk songs provided the basis for a courtly poetic tradition, on the one hand, and for a Buddhist poetic tradition ,on the other. In the courtly tradition, the traditional symbols of the seasons became psychological, ways of expressing states of desire for tanka poets such as Komachi and Shikibu. In the priestly tradition of poets such as Saigyou, they became instruments of Buddhist meditation on the reality and unreality of the phenomenal world. And in the culture they became the basis, as Morris, said, for a calendar of festivals, a liturgy of the seasons that told people, both high and low, how they were at home in the world and what powers they moved among.
Basho has called attention to this process:
The beginning of art—
a rice-planting song
in the back country.
The word I've translated "art" is furyu and it also means "elegance, refinement" and calls to mind specifically the manners of the court. This is the transformation of magic into aesthetics. But the focus of the transformation of the kigo was Buddhism, particularly the idea of mujo, the transience or mutability of things. In this idea the aesthetic and the religious are joined in Japanese culture. The cherry blossoms, associated anciently with the orchard, the fertility cycle, and the priapic spring, became, in their beauty and briefness, poignant emblems of the transience of the world, and this was in Buddhism a religious thought. Thus furyu, the court, and by extension Japanese society, and mujo, insight into the transitoriness of the world from which the path to enlightenment begins, and oku, the backcountry, the old magic of the furrow and the seed, are joined in a single image and together they make a whole culture.
From the point of view of poetry, time is the crucial element here. The haikai and haiku anthologies were usually organized seasonally: spring, summer, fall, winter. They were, and still are, magical and ritual accounts of the Japanese year. At the same time—and this is one of the tensions at the heart of the form—they are ta record of the evanescence of all being. Buson expresses this tension between the comfort of magical, cyclical time and the self-erasing linear time, which, in Buddhism, is to be transcended, in this poem where, as is often the case, he has it both ways:
The old calendar
fills me with gratitude
like a sutra.
Zen complicates this issue further by putting such pressure on the moment of perception. Cycles and their passing can be experienced collectively through common cultural symbols, but only individual persons experience moments. Though haiku has been presented in the West as a unique expression of Zen, none of the three great poets in the tradition was, formally, a Zen Buddhist. Only Basho seems to have studied it seriously, and that for a short time. But all three of them read intensely in classical Chinese poetry, and both Buson and Issa studied Basho. And there is no much doubt that it is something like the Zen habit of mind that led Basho in the early 1680s to transform the haikai tradition, and to created a style that eventually turned the hokku into the haiku, a poem centered in an individual human consciousness. I believe this is something that came to him through the literary tradition, through Chinese poets like Tu Fu, and through the priestly tradition in the poetry of Sogi and Sigyo, rather than from formal religious training. In any case, it was crucial. It added to or imposed on, the ideas of cyclical time and linear time the no time of Zen Buddhism. In Basho's best poems, each individual moment of perception is all there is—or what there is, and at the same time, it isn't anything at all. There are different ways to say this, or parts of it—the world really seen is the word; every moment is eternal; or, every moment of time is all time; therefore time doesn't exist. In any case, after Basho, the genius of the form is the way in which, through trained perception, it compresses the experiences of cyclical time, linear time and the all time-no time of Zen into seventeen syllables.
The kigo is the focus of this compression. The subtleties of the kigo — that the uguisu, or bush warbler, is the harbinger of spring, that the hotogisu, or little cuckoo, is a bird of early summer, the kankadori, or Himalayan cuckoo, a bird of midsummer, that harusame, "spring rain," is the rain of the first and second months, haru no ame, "rain of spring," the rain of the second and third months--is bound to be lost on most readers in English, as it is lost on most modern urban Japanese. The full weight of these terms is simply not translatable. But the experience of time, of being-in-time, that they evoke, since it's the fundamental human experience, should be there for anyone who reads the poems carefully.
As for why this is why, I may elaborate at a later date.
No comments:
Post a Comment