Talk:Haiku

Contents

1 5-7-5 vs One breath 2 Kigo translation 3 Error messages 4 Translation removed 5 Removed kimo and wikihaiku 6 Another translation 7 Rajiv Lather 8 Three comments 9 "mailing list" vs. "e-mail list" 10 misc comments 11 Ezra Pound 12 Reorganization 13 morae = one phonetic character?

5-7-5 vs One breath

Given that the majority of modern English haijin don't subscribe to the 5-7-5 rule, I modified the first lines and added the "one breath" guideline. ray rasmussen, http://raysweb.net/haiku/

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Kigo translation

I assume that the haiku by Basho has the prescribed number of syllables in Japanese, but why, when the kigo got translated, is there no trace of the sense of season? <>< tbc

A frog, according to Saijiki, is a kigo for summer and it is associated with a rainy season in late June to late July in Japan. An image of water, like rain and pond, makes it more definite. So, a kigo is right there but most countries don't have a rainy season and thus it doesn't appear to have a kigo. Revth 05:14, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Error messages

Haiku error messages are mentioned in Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's 1990 novel "Good Omens". Is this the first instance, and were the competitions etc inspired by this?

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Translation removed

I removed this. Nothing I know about Basho or the haiku form or that particular haiku suggest that that's the "meaning of the original", and the translation plainly sucks:

another translation of this poem (which is less poetic, but gets at the core meaning of the Japnesse original a little more clearly) is:

When an old pond

Gets a new frog

It's a new pond.

-- Lament

I've always known this as:

The old pond

A frog jumps

Plop!

-- Tarimo

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Removed kimo and wikihaiku

I removed this:

Post-haiku forms include Kimo and wikihaiku.

Wikihaiku is listed on VfD and according to opinions there does not exist. Angela.

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Another translation

I like this translation of Basho's most well known poem:

Old pond,

Frog jumps in in ---

plop.

I would like to add this. Should I? ZenMondo

I think one or two examples are ok, as long as people don't try adding whole lists of them. Angela. 07:32, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, people get very attached to thier favorite translation of Old Pond, it could quickly become an Old Pond collection. It was right to remove the "new pond" 'translation', that one does suck, and is not very "Basho" from what I understand. I like the above translation becuase of its brevity, and how with the onomonopia it dashes the percieved "syllable rule".

ZenMondo

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Rajiv Lather

Hi, there is an article about Rajiv Lather, Haiku poet. It has been listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion as he is not considered to be notable enough. If he is considered popular in Haiku circles, maybe you can vote at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Rajiv Lather. Thanks. Jay 12:12, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

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Three comments

Three comments about the article on haiku.

1) The translations of the two haiku by Basho should have the translators listed. [There is also one haiku on the Matsuo Basho page that is uncredited.]

2) Other well-known authors besides Richard Wright who have written haiku include: Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Dag Hammarskjöld, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.

3) Shouldn't Basho have the macron or circumflex diacritical over the "o" in his name to denote the long vowel? It is shown that way only once in the Wikipedia Matsuo Basho article.

gK 4 Oct 2004

gK, thanks for your suggestions. Since Wikipedia is a wiki, you should feel free to add your improvements directly to the article. See Wikipedia:How to edit a page to learn how.

I added your list of authors to the article, but don't know anything about the translators of the Basho haiku in either article—perhaps you could help?

Regarding Basho's name, due to technical considerations regarding the display of special characters, it is common not to use special characters when keyboard characters will suffice—with certain exceptions, e.g. the first appearance of a foreign-language name, as in the Matsuo Basho article. I don't know that I'd consider it "wrong" for us to write his name either with or without the macron (though I've never seen it with a circumflex), and I can't find a definite Wikipedia policy on the matter. I wouldn't spend time "correcting" the current usage myself, but if someone else corrected it, I probably wouldn't undo their work either. —Triskaideka 18:12, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In my limitless spare time <grin> I do plan to learn how to properly edit and format a wiki page because I want to edit a few wiki pages (e.g. senryu, haiga and maybe the Basho page), plus probably add a few pages (scifaiku - science fiction haiku). Also, when I use the Wikipedia I keep finding places where there are missing links to other parts of the wikipedia and want to be able to make those quick changes.

I didn't recognize the Basho translation or I would have said who it was. There is a book available that has 100 translations/interpretations or Basho's famous frog haiku. The translation in the Wiki article is probably copywrited, but a single translation as part of a critical/academic discussion should be covered under "fair use". The very few haiku translations that I know about that would be in the public domain are pretty clunky and wordy.

Personally, I'd rather see Basho's raven/crow haiku in the wiki article which I think is more accessible to the average person. It really wasn't until I had been writing haiku for a half dozen years before I really appreciated and understood Basho's frog haiku.

on a barren branch / a raven has purched-- / autumn dusk

trans. William J. Higginson

I would also suggest that the romanji (transliterated) versions of the Basho haiku be included in the wiki article. The romanji frog haiku is:

furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto

Makoto Ueda's "Basho and his Interpreters" also includes literal translations, which might be something worth including. It is interesting to see how different the Japanes language is from English.

As for Basho's name. If you look at the Wiki article on diacriticals, you will learn that there are a couple of different ways of transliterating Japanese. The macron is used for double vowels in the most common system (Bash&#333), while the circumflex is less commonly used (Bashô). I've also seen a few cluges, like the Encyclopedia Brittanica website that uses underlines <gag!>.

Finally - I looked at the Rajiv Lather wiki article and also his website. My opinion is that it is a vanity Wiki webpage. There are a large number of haiku poets and haiku journal editors that I would think about including in the haiku article before I would add him to the article.

gK 7 Oct 2004

I added the author's name for the haiku from the winner of the Salon haiku error message contest. I couldn't figure out how to mark that as a minor change. For disambiguation purposes, there probably should be a mention of Haiku, Hawaii, and the creation of a Wiki Stub page for the city.

gK 8 Oct 2004

You can mark changes as minor by checking the "This is a minor edit" box that appears between the "Summary" line and the "Save page" button when you're editing. However, any change that adds content isn't really minor. The minor change flag is for really trivial stuff like fixing a typo or removing a comma.

It looks like the full name of the town in Hawaii is Haiku-Pauwela. In that case I don't know that we really need disambiguation, but since we already had a disambig line in the article, I figured I might as well add the town. Anyone else can set up Haiku (disambiguation) if they like, but again, I don't think it's really necessary; there's not a whole lot of room for confusion between the three subjects.

Regarding a couple of points in your previous comment: first, I wouldn't disagree with you about the Lather article, but it did already survive a vote for deletion. There's no need to link it from this article, though; he's probably not nearly as well-known as the other authors you mentioned. Second, you can change the example haiku to another one if you like, but as the frog haiku is probably more famous, I'm inclined to keep it. It's not terribly important, in my opinion, if readers fail to fully grasp it; in the context of an encyclopedia, we're just telling them what a haiku is, not teaching art appreciation. —Triskaideka 17:04, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A quick Google Test: "Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii" = 711, "Haiku, Hawaii" = 4,160. Also: I have a News Alert at Google News for "haiku" and news articles always have it as "Haiku, Hawaii" and never as "Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii". Should there be a redirect page for "Haiku, Hawaii" leading to "Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii"?

re: Basho's frog vs. raven haiku. I chose the raven haiku because it is probably Basho's 2nd most famous haiku. However, my point was more a quibble than anything else.

A bigger question for someone who knows Japanese: re: "haiku poet (haijin)". I've seen haijin defined as either "haiku poet" or "haiku master" but don't know which definition is correct.

gK 8 Oct 2004 11:28 PST

Regarding a redirect for the town, redirects are cheap, as they say, but I'm starting to wonder whether the two names refer to exactly the same place. See my comments at Talk:Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii. —Triskaideka 15:35, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

"mailing list" vs. "e-mail list"

A minor quibble, perhaps, but: I changed (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Haiku&diff=8651093&oldid=8644689) the term "mailing list" to "e-mail list" in the External links section, and it was soon changed back. Why use a term that has multiple meanings ("mailing list" often refers to postal mail) instead of one whose meaning is more immediately obvious? I'm not aware of anything objectionable about the term "e-mail list".

I suppose it's debatable whether tinywords is best described as an e-mail list at all. I'm sure many users simply visit the web site each day to read the haiku. Perhaps we should call it a "A haiku-a-day web site", or something like that. —Triskaideka 21:43, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I changed "e-mail list" to "mailing list" because the latter is a generally accepted term and the former isn't (I have never encountered it before. Google gives a bunch of hits but many of them are about [i]lists of email addresses[/i], and that's probably how I would interpret "e-mail list" without context). --lament 22:51, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The mailing list article you linked actually raises the point that electronic mailing list may be a preferable term. —Triskaideka 16:31, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

misc comments

a couple of comments:

1. I'm not convinced that it's appropriate to start talking about English haiku as early as the 2nd paragraph; I think the article could be improved by focusing initially on Japanese haiku, and then grouping together the stuff on non-Japanese haiku into a section further down the article.
2. it would be nice to know the literal meaning of the kanji for "haiku" (given as 俳句) (posted by 80.229.160.150)

• Well, this is the english wiki -- the japanese article presumably has less of an english-language focus. (posted by User:Tlogmer)
  • But this is an encyclopedia. Haiku has a roughly 400 year history as the most commonly written poetry form in Japan, and is still a very big part of the Japanese culture (there are daily haiku columns in every major Japanese newspaper, for example). English-language haiku only started to become developed in the late 1950's, and even today a major English-language haiku journal will only have a few hundred subscribers. The Japanese Wikipedia may not even discuss non-Japanese haiku (there is a vocal traditionalist faction in the Japanese haiku community that believes that haiku must be written in Japanese), or may only discuss it briefly (haiku is written around the world with one strong haiku community in the Balkans, for example). BlankVerse ∅ 20:25, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
    • OK, fair enough. (Maybe I'll try to track down someone who speaks japanese and copy some of the content over.) Tlogmer 06:02, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ezra Pound

User:Dumbledad added Ezra Pound to the list of Non-Japanese haiku poets. While he and the other Imagists admitted they were influenced by haiku, I don't think that they ever called any of them poems haiku. On the other hand, I've read one modern haiku expert who argued that Pound's famous "In a Station of the Metro" (at least in its last revision) was a genuine haiku. I am still not convinced, so I am asking what others think. BlankVerse ∅ 11:24, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

I added Ezra Pound because he was so clearly influenced by haiku, and his influence in turn was so important for C20 poetry in English. I do believe that his poem "In a Station of the Metro" (http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=212) is a particularly fine haiku: though the form may break the rules, the spirit is clearly there. And, as User:BlankVerse points out, it is a famous poem, so Pound's omission felt weird. Dumbledad 10:11, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Because he is not considered a haiku poet, I think that a better solution might be to remove him, but then add a section on "Haiku in English" starting with the early translations by Lafcadio Hearn and others, and then adding a paragraph on the influence of haiku and tanka or the Imagists and Ezra Pound. That way we might even add in the "metro" poem to the article. After that, there is a l-o-n-g pause before the works of R. H. Blyth and his influence on the Beat poets. BlankVerse ∅ 10:48, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I'd agree that Pound does not really belong here, despite his own influence on the Beats (especially Snyder) and on others who did write haiku in English. Even the Metro poem is a haiku in the sense that a 15-line poem could be a sonnet. Filiocht | Blarneyman 12:48, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

The "Metro" poem has a kigo (season word) in "Petals", it has a break or kireji with the semicolon, it has the juxtaposition of the faces and the petals...it is a haiku. Although a good poem, I wouldn't call it a good example of haiku, but it is still haiku. BlankVerse ∅ 13:14, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Maybe Cid Corman should be added to replace Pound? Filiocht | Blarneyman 13:07, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

I wouldn't necessarily call it replacing Pound, but I don't think that Pound belongs, but Corman does belong. BlankVerse ∅ 13:14, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Reorganization

I've deleted some of the non-haiku nonsense that had been recently added to this article and I've started reorganizing things. I won't be spending a lot of effort on the Haiku article until I am satisfied with the Kigo article, but hopefully this reorganization will help jumpstart the improvement of this Haiku article.

One more new section that I think needs to be added is one titled "Non-Japanese Haiku" (and the new "Haiku in English" section should then be turned into a subsection). There is a long history of French haiku, a small number of Spanish poets who have written haiku, and roughly within the last decade a strong community of haiku poets in the Balkans that can be mentioned in this section, just for starters. BlankVerse ∅ 16:05, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

morae = one phonetic character?

Having read the article and the entry for morae and some other links it still isn't clear to me whether the rule is really 5/7/5 phonetic characters (katakana or equivalently hiragana).

Or perhaps lengthened vowels are considered one mora instead of two? Is the 'n' sound without a following vowel a mora? 'N' the only lone consonant in Japanese. Is a glottal stop ('っ') a mora? Template:Unsigned

The best answers that I've seen to you question about Japanese characters in haiku are in the "Stalking the Wild Onji" article listed in the External links in the Haiku article. Lengthened vowels, like the "ō" in Bashō, get a count of two. I don't know the answer for the glottal stop. BlankVerse ∅ 11:15, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)