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VII. Haiku Reductions -- Charles Trumbull(TrumbullC@aol.com)
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Dogwood Blossoms No. 8 printed the answer to a riddle about a
mysterious "haiku" that resulted from a reverse translation from
Finnish into English of an American poem that read:
one needs winter's mind
to view the mantle of snow
on evergreen boughs
This turned out to be a rendering of the first stanza of Wallace
Stevens's 1921 poem, "The Snow Man:"
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Harold Henderson, in his Introduction to Haiku (1958), pointed
out that the climax of Edward Shanks' "Night Piece" is (quite
accidentally) "pure haiku of the highest order:"
So far . . . so low . . .
A drowsy thrush? A waking nightingale?
Silence. We do not know.
Then, in his review of Lucien Stryk's book about Basho, again in
DB No. 8, Andreas Schoter wrote, "It seems to me that what Stryk
has done is to enter into each experience which Basho captures,
internalize it, and then recreate it for us." What an intriguing
thought! I started to speculate about what would happen if we
could enter into the minds of some non-Japanese poets and bring
their thoughts out as haiku.
The following "haiku reductions" are offered as a challenge to DB
readers who want to take a break from more serious pursuits. I
suggest proceeding as follows: first, resist the urge to look at
the full texts below, but examine each of the following four
verses and decide if they work as haiku; second,
try to guess the original poem or poet; then, third, peek:
(1) Pitter, pause, patter --
A cat stalking the city --
Fog!
(2) Dark, deep snow-filled woods
Still the traveler must heed
Restless harness-bells.
(3) A funeral speech
Nobody heard; no one came.
Eleanor Rigby.
(4) A live-oak grows strong,
Unbending, yet so alone
In Louisiana.
Here are the original poems:
(1) The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
("Fog," from Carl Sandburg, Harvest Poems, 1910-1960. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, (c) 1960.)
(2) Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," from Robert Frost's
Poems. New York: Washington Square Press, (c) 1971)
(3) Ah, look at all the lonely people!
Ah, look at all the lonely people!
Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,
Lives in a dream,
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.
Who is it for?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?
Father McKenzie,
Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear,
No one comes near
Look at him working,
darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there.
What does he care?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?
Eleanor Rigby
Died in the church and was buried along with her name.
Nobody came.
Father McKenzie,
Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave,
No one was saved.
All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?
Ah, look at all the lonely people!
Ah, look at all the lonely people!
("Eleanor Rigby," by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, (c) 1966
Northern Songs Ltd. The song appeared on the Beatles' 1966
album, Revolver. Text copied from X.J. Kennedy, An Introduction
to Poetry, 7th ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1990)
(4) I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves
of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of
myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing all
alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could
not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon
it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my
room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think
of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in
Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover
near,
I know very well I could not.
("I Saw in Louisiana a Live-oak Growing" from Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass. New York: Signet Classics, 1980)
In preparing these reductions I was intrigued by a number of
things: the difficulty of finding and expressing the real kernel
of meaning in a longer poem; the relative wordiness of many
Western works; the intricate relationship of language, form, and
meaning; and, of course the raw hubris of a poetic nobody trying
to gild the lily!
Here is a somewhat more serious reduction attempt of mine:
you too?
sleepless moon,
pale and wasting
This is a verse by an unnamed Indian poet in John Brough, Poems
from the Sanskrit (Penguin, 1968), p. 24:
You are pale, friend moon, and do not sleep at night,
And day by day you waste away.
Can it be that you also
Think only of her, as I do?
Anyone want to try a haiku reduction? Here's a challenge to
reduce one or both of the following poems to a credible haiku (or
senryu). Send them to trumbullc@aol.com and we can discuss them.
(1) I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.
("A Minor Bird," from Robert Frost's Poems. New York: Washington
Square Press, (c) 1971)
(2) Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
The see the cherry hung with snow.
("Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now," by A.E. Houseman, copied
from Kennedy, op. cit.)
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