Haruo Shirane :: Haikai
meant that people got together, perhaps three people, four, five — it
could be any number of people — and one person would compose the opening
verse, referred to as hokku, and that was seventeen syllables. And that later
became what is now called haiku, but in Bashô's time was referred to
as hokku ("hokku" means opening verse). And then the second person would
then add a verse — he would link to that hokku — and then that
would be a fourteen-syllable verse. So we start out with seventeen, five-seven-five,
that's seventeen. I would add fourteen, that's seven-seven. Then we would
get another five-seven-five, [then] another seven-seven. So, seventeen,
fourteen, seventeen, fourteen, et cetera.
Each verse simply requires that the next verse take some part of it. The
two verses come together to form a new poem. And then the next verse creates
yet another poem. So you're moving away from the previous poem by linking.
You can only have two verses together form one poem, so you're constantly
moving away and kind of jumping by leaps and bounds from one association
to another.
This was a great hit among commoners, among the new urban popular audience,
and this painting here shows commoners enjoying themselves underneath the
cherry blossoms, drinking, eating, as they compose these verses.
[Excerpt from a haikai, "Beneath
the Boughs"]
beneath the boughs
the soup with fish and vegetables
flecked with cherry petals
— Bashô
beneath the boughs
the soup with fish and vegetables
flecked with cherry petals
the sun goes gently to the west
extending the day's fine weather
— Chinseki
the sun goes gently to the west
extending the day's fine weather
the single traveler
walks on scratching where lice bit him
as spring comes to a close
— Kyokusui
the single traveler
walks on scratching where the biting lice
as spring comes to a close
not yet grown used to wearing
his sword in a protective case
— Bashô
|
Excerpt from Earl Miner
and Hiroko Odagiri, trans., The Monkey's Straw Raincoat And Other Poetry
of the Bashô School (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981),
p. 82. |