On Anthony Opal’s Chapbook Series of Translations from the Japanese

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First, an obscure joke, more charming than funny, and maybe not that charming. I shall reproduce, from memory, a haiku I saw written on a library table at Penn State in the early ’90s. I did not put it there. Here it is.

       Only so much

I can take—

hototogisu

The above caused me to go Ahahahahah!!—but it wasn’t real mirth. It was delight at getting it.

Like the person who Sharpie’d that onto the tabletop, I had observed that many, many Japanese haiku deployed the word hototogisu as either their first or final line. The word means cuckoo, a specific kind of cuckoo they have in Japan—one that the Japanese regard as inherently poetic, like British poets with their nightingales, and Americans with cicadas.

My interpretation of the poem was that it had two layers: (1) “If that cuckoo doesn’t shut up I’m going to scream,” and (2) “There’s only so many haiku I can deal with in one sitting, especially if they’re all gonna end on the exact same note.”

This isn’t satire, however. There are millions of humorous haiku, including ones by the masters, that really do say things just like that. And moreover? There’s an insight there with which a lot of haiku poets would heartily agree. “Don’t sit there guzzling haiku all morning! Your brains’ll turn into hototo-guano. You gotta go slow; you gotta sip.”

Ideally? One haiku is supposed to last you at least twenty minutes. Later, after you’ve taken it in—it and a bunch of others—you can re-read ’em in a heap, that’s fine. But if you look at a hundred you’ve never seen before all at once? It’ll be as if you were trying to read poetry in French. Or put it this way. You’re making it so the only poems that are gonna get through to you…are the ones that tell you stuff you already know.

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There’s a guy in Hillside, Illinois who gets it. He’s been printing these chaste, understated chapbooks of various haiku MVPs: Bashō, Buson, Issa, others: the exact guys you find in books like The Essential Haiku (Ecco, 1996, trans. Hass). But—and this is huge—this Illinois dude has chosen to translate just six haiku at a time. Each chapbook ends with quite a few blank pages (almost everything after the staples), and of course it’s only one-haiku-per-page on the pages with writing. If one were instead to minimize the white space, one could print the texts of all five of these chapbooks combined, on the front side of a piece of typing paper. But!! such a presentation would quite spoil a very desirable effect. (People don’t understand how much readers need that white space. It’s the white space that tells you how to “take” it.)

(In a way? even better than minimalist chapbooks, the best physical medium for haiku might in fact be library tables. One haiku per table—or not even. More like six haiku on six tables spread out at random throughout the library. And the poems have to be done in hurried human handwriting; it can’t be an official thing instituted by the school.)

Here are some images of the chapbooks in question.

I don’t dare say the design could not possibly be improved, but given the constraints of time and PPP (Probably Penniless Publisher), I think these have to be considered a home run.

Since I’m throwing down fantasies, I’ll say my dream for these worthy artifacts is that they would be given as surprise parting gifts to friends who are about to head out to the airport. Reading these poems on a subway train on the way to the airport—that would surely produce the receptive/grateful headspace these things flourish in.

You can get all five chapbooks for $37.50, off the website, by the way. Then you’re all set for the next five people who come to visit.

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But how are the translations. Oh, I would use the word “expert.”

This Anthony Opal (to finally call him by his name) clearly either knows a lot of Japanese, or knows enough to check carefully with people who do. If you compare his translations with those published by, say, Columbia University Press, you find that his versions have no idiosyncrasies. Your overwhelming sense will be that he is striving to say in elegant English what it says in the elegant Japanese. (In Bashō’s case, the elegant seventeenth-century Japanese.)

Here, it may be good to say a word about the authentic spirit of haiku. It’s all very Buddhist or Buddhist-adjacent. The Self is not the show. The Self either does not exist or is in bad taste. When you write a haiku, you’re trying to do justice to a moment, especially an unintelligible-yet-lovely moment. Eloquence: no. Words as words: no. The moment.

For this reason, it shouldn’t really be possible to tell who wrote a given haiku. Personal style is not the thing. The ideal is that any poet, writing in the authentic manner, will write something just as good as the greats wrote. That’s more or less what Bashō taught. It’s not supposed to be you, writing the haiku. It’s the GHD (General Haiku Dharma) manifesting itself through you. GHD writes the words, not you.

’Course, one often can reasonably predict that a given haiku is by, say, Issa. Buddhism is not, after all, invincible. You can defeat it, sometimes without even trying. But be that as it may, the ideal is what I’ve described above. And the translator, too, should ideally have no self, either. The mark of his or her personality should reside almost entirely in which poems he or she chooses to translate, just like the personality of the poets resides mainly in what they choose to write about, or in which topics accidentally play to their strengths.

One final point. The 5-7-5 thing. This is the one prosodic principle that everybody knows, apropos of Japanese haiku. Most Americans are still being told in elementary school that an English haiku must be structured this way. In the poetry world, however, hardly anyone thinks this. The wisdom on Parnassus is that 5-7-5 in English will tend to convey way more information than 5-7-5 in Japanese. This is why, when we translate Japanese haiku into English we get not seventeen syllables but more like eleven or twelve. This really is an important difference between the languages. Five-syllable words in Japanese are common as popcorn; in English, they’re somewhat exotic. For a Japanese poet to write within the confines of 5-7-5 syllables really does entail the most severe minimalism conceivable. In English, 5-7-5 still gives you room to “pad” your lines. As can be seen in virtually all naive English haiku . . . .

But let us come to cases. Here is a Bashō haiku that often makes the cut, when selections are being made:

この秋は  何で年寄る  雲に鳥

kono | aki | wa | nande | toshiyoru | kuma | ni | tori

this | autumn | as-for | why | grow-old | cloud | to | bird

The upright bars are there to help you see the word divisions. The word-for-word English above was done by Makoto Ueda, in his Bashō and His Interpreters (Stanford, 1991). Here is his smoothed-out English version:

this autumn

why am I aging so?

to the clouds, a bird

I am puzzled by Ueda’s awkward last line. I usually think of Ueda as a supremely graceful translator, but here I am not satisfied. So, let’s look at a couple of artistic versions. Here’s old Lucien Stryk, who seems to be more-or-less forgotten these days, though he was a beautiful poet. The following was made for the Penguin Classics–series book On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (1985):

Autumn—even

birds and clouds

look old.

OK, well, if we can trust Ueda’s word-for-word version above, the Stryk is simply offbeat. It works as a haiku, but it doesn’t seem to be what Bashō meant (?). This surprises me just like with the Ueda, because I know for a fact that Stryk is usually rather, well, strict.

How ’bout Robert Hass’s version (The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa, 1994) . . .

       This autumn—

why am I growing old?

bird disappearing among clouds.

Clean, good, but one does wish the last line were more efficient somehow. If you wanna talk about inefficient, though, have a look at this brand-new thing from University of California Press: Andrew Fitzsimons, The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō (2022):

In this autumntime

why do I so feel the years?

In the clouds a bird

“In this autumntime”—? All you have to do is count syllables to see what’s going on there. The old 5-7-5 trap…

And now lastly, here’s our new friend Anthony Opal:

    This autumn

why do I grow old?

bird in a cloud

I dunno, isn’t that the best of ’em? One thing you’ve probably picked up on by now: This is very late Bashō. He had less than a year to live. (I always pictured Bashō dying in his seventies, but he was like fifty.) Someone might object that this haiku doesn’t seem to answer the description in the hymn to selflessness that I sang above. And that is true. But this, to many people, is part of Bashō’s greatness. He didn’t die enlightened. His death poem is famously unreconciled, thoroughly attached to this world. He was a human being, not a Buddha—and his relationship to the GHD was flexible, subject to evolution. There are times he doesn’t even put in a season word!

I’ll end with Bashō’s death poem, since Opal translates it, but I want to note that Opal cunningly did not position the poem at the end of his chapbook. This is the kind of personal point-making that’s quite permissible, ’cuz it’s almost imperceptible. (That’s actually a fine aphorism for haiku writers: Whatever is invisible—is permissible.) Here’s the poem:

    Falling ill on a journey

my dreams rushing

through a withered field

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