I am inordinately fond of East Asian poetry, the older the better. This usually means I don’t dabble much in 20th century stuff, but I made this recent exception for a couple of reasons: the book was small and Santōka is the official poet of the Yamaguchi prefecture, with which I have personal ties. Also, Burton Watson is a very good translator whose work (from Chinese and Japanese) I have repeatedly enjoyed.
Taneda is an early 20th century Haiku poet. He led a pretty depressing but very literary life as a drunkard and a zen monk, taking long begging and walking trips around Japan and writing poetry. His style of haiku is pretty innovative, metrically and thematically: he employs a ‘free style’ that is brief but not restricted to the 7-5-7 pattern, and in his verse you have lovely depictions of nature but also very uncommon diction and images from time to time, like cocks and cunts in a hot water pool; he might sing of Autumn leaves, but they won’t be from the hackneyed maple trees.
Following a very old tradition, Taneda’s poetry has apparently objective depictions of nature which are meant to be read as psychological windows into the poetic persona’s soul. For this to be effective, you really have to know the background of the person, as the brevity and allusiveness of the haiku format gives you very little information to hook on to. In this collection, besides the biographical introduction, part of this background is given by translating and including excerpts of Santōka’s diaries.
I did not dislike the book: his poetry is very unadorned and unaffected, clear and transparent for the most part like water; some of the images have a power and charm all their own. In general, though, the style of poetry I tend to like is quite different, and Taneda can feel prosaic and anecdotal. Some of his snapshots, though, are haunting and evocative, like this one when he visits his no-longer-existent house and the close tombs of his dead relatives:
nothing left of the house
I was born in
fireflies
Or the following poignant , ambivalent note, when the the white boxes with the cremated remains of the soldiers who died fighting in China arrive:
valiantly - that too
pitifully - that too
white boxes
The sense of being lost, of endless striving, gets very well represented in this brief piece of his mountain walking, which is also significant for its iconoclastic use of repetition, something usually avoided in the already very compact haiku form:
the deeper I go
the deeper I go
green mountains
Some, like those depicting the poet’s drunken stupors or his mishaps, acquire an (intentional?) comic quality:
so drunk
I slept
with the crickets!
But the general tone is always usually sombre and dark, hinting at the poets loneliness and striving with hardship:
no help
for the likes of me
I go on walking
Sometimes, also in contravention of what you except from the haiku, images of modernity creep inside the poems:
nearly run over
by a car
cold cold road
And there are pieces that have some evocative, every day object (of nature of of human craft), that in a very modernist and imagistic way, just stands there, encapsulating the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary:
red mailbox
standing
in the morning mist
The pieces I like the most are those where the juxtaposition of nature and the poet’s feelings comes across most transparently, but also within the framework of a beautiful image:
water dragonflies
me too
all of us flow along
The book was a nice and easy read, and would probably benefit from a more paused and attentive reading than I displayed. As I said, if feels like drinking water - I really like the drink when I am thirsty and it is cold, but it can be rather bland as a standard fare.