Lots of stuff!
I'm glad you found the complete run after all. Can you tell me anything about those Japanese poems, please, Brian?
The poems cover a broad variety of periods, and primarily consist of tanka, rather than haiku, which the translator Rexroth feels has received too much emphasis.
Nonetheless, there is still an emphasis on
kigo (season words) and subtle shift of mood, the use of "pillow words" (words which serve as two meanings, something akin to a pun and a metaphor, and a linguistic pivot), etc. See
Pillow Words Sometimes the "pillow words" are compared to the epithets of Homeric poetry, like "rosy-fingered dawn", or the kennings of Anglo-saxon, like "whale-path" for the sea, in Beowulf.
Kigo is relatively easy to translate in terms of imagery, although the associated meanings may be lost, as certain kigo have specific associated connotations. See
The World Kigo Database.
I have a pretty firm grasp on the Kigo concept, but the finer shades of meaning in the pillow word idea is still something that I am studying.
Skipping the technicalities for a moment, here are a sample:
Tomorrow I was
going to the Spring meadows
to pick the young greens.
It snowed all day yesterday
and snowed all day today.
The sense of irony is
shown, not expressly
told, which is the hallmark of effective poetry.
The imagery is often vivid, and involves multiple senses:
I wish I were close
to you as the wet skirt of
a salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.
In other cases, the sense of humor is evident in understanding the human condition:
You say, "I will come."
And you do not come.
Now you say, "I will not come."
So I shall expect you.
Have I learned to understand you?
Again, the personality is shown through the narrators perception, rather than told. The narrator does not say, "You are contradictory. You are fickle." He shows it through the selection of dialogue, actions and reactions, and leaves the reader to draw the conclusion.
The following contain an example of a "pillow word" that translates fairly well to English. The Pillow Word is "pine", and it serve the dual meaning of the evergreen tree and the emotion "to pine", meaning "to long for". It is a curious coincidence that there is a comparable word in English with a similar dual use:
I must leave you, but
if I hear the sound
of the pine that grows
on Mount Inaba,
I shall come back at once.
In the original, the use of the pillow word for "pine" is a signal to interpret the imagery both literally and according to the associated emotional meaning. The "sound/ of the pine" is the moan of the emotionally distraught lover, and it is echoed in the wind through the trees on the mountain.
There are also some examples of haiku, including the famous frog haiku by Basho, but some lesser known ones. This one struck me as very poignant, and an excellent example of the form:
A blind child
guided by his mother,
admires the cherry blossoms.
This has a wonderful sense of the surprise and contrast that true haiku are known for (as opposed to the uninspired 5-7-5 crap that so-called "haiku" that school children [and others] write without any understanding of imagery, contrast, or seasonal references.). In this haiku, the
kigo is "cherry blossoms", which is a season word associated with spring.
Not only that, but the cherry blossom is associated with certain social festivities, and it would be understood that the meaning of this poem is that the blind child is being treated as a whole person who is a part of human society, rather than being hidden or disregarded because of his disability.
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I wrote a haiku last year on the death of my sister-in-law Hiromi's mother Masako:
The crested ibis
flies beyond the turtle's sight:
Masako follows.
This was picked up by the curator of the Daruma Museum in Okayama Prefecture, Gabi Greve, who maintains
The World Kigo Database, and it is now used as an example in the online collection:
See
Ibis (Hadada) (You have to page down a bit to see it.)
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I hope this has been of some help.
BrianIs
AtYou