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WHC Translation Project of Haiku Poems by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)
Part 4

 

A Withering Wind

Compiled and edited by John E. Carley
Pennines, UK

 

By December 2001The WHC Translation Project of Masaoka Shiki Haiku Poems had completed work on three of the poet’s more famous later works. Holidays or no holidays it was time to start another. On 23/12/01 Susumu Takiguchi posted a new challenge:

Let us start the fourth session of our Shiki translation project. Today, we discuss an early haiku which Shiki wrote in 1891 (Meiji 24). It is an important poem in terms of Shiki’s development as a haiku poet.

Quite how and why the poem might be so important would keep for later; first the romaji and a literal rendering:

kogarashi ya arao kui-komu suge-no-kasa

Masaoka Shiki, 1891, Meiji 24

kogarashi -winter wind/withering wind
ya -a kireji: emphatic/exclamatory
arao -straw strap
kui-komu -cut into (the flesh)
suge-no-kasa -sedge hat

withering wind -
the straw strap eats into me,
my sedge hat

version by Susumu Takiguchi

Susumu also posted a short background essay on the poem. The full text appears elsewhere in this issue of World Haiku Review [link] but a short extract might be helpful by way of orientation:

(Shiki’s) haiku was constantly developing and evolving, going through numerous changes. This can be divided roughly into five stages.

Tsukinami (banal) [1885 - 1887 (M 18 - 20)]

Influence of Ohara Kiju [1887 - 1891 (M 20 - 24)]

Study of Basho and old haiku [1891 - 1894 (M 24 - 27)]

Fusetsu and shasei [1894 - 1897 (M 27 - 30)]

Buson and shasei [1897 - 1902 (M 30 - 35)]

By general consent, Shiki’s haiku poems during the first two stages are regarded as mediocre (…) It was not until Shiki started to study Basho and other old haiku poems that his eyes were opened and his critical faculty and creative originality began to manifest themselves. That is why the year 1891 is important when reviewing Shiki’s development.

Setting the poem firmly in the context of Shiki’s extensive travels of that period Susumu continued:

The main aim of these trips was to find new inspiration for the budding haiku of his own style and sensibility (…) Japan was being rapidly modernised, industrialised and Westernised. Towards the end of this year, Shiki managed to establish an embryonic theory which was to develop into his Shasei theory (…) The most significant characteristic of this haiku is that it depicts what actually happened as it was without embellishment, subjective explanation or interpretation or emotion.

And, as if to emphasise the lack of ostentation:

ara in arao means 'rough', 'coarse' or 'raw' and indicates that the strap was not of good quality, which in turn suggests that the sedge hat itself was probably a cheap one

So, we have a young man, on a mission, in an ill fitting straw hat. What else? Well... this from Chibi:

I see and feel in this haiku the cold of the wind... cutting along with the strap... the hat is (...) not much against the cold

Indeed. And if empathy is one pillar of translation, another is research; Debra Woolard Bender had been researching. Along with a wealth of information on the nature of travel (this illuminating extract from the Edo period)...

...things that you should carry with you on a journey: a portable brush-and-ink kit, a fan, needle and thread, a pocket mirror, a notebook for keeping a diary, a comb, hair oil, a lantern, candles, a flint-and-steel kit, pocket spills for lighting from a fire, hemp cord, seal block, and a hook.

... there were literary insights too:

I read one of Kimiyo Tanaka's pages on Shiki based on a talk given by Prof. Shigeki Wada, former curator of the Shiki Memorial Museum (...) Kimiyo Tanaka writes:

...at the end of the year 1891 (...) he realized that word play would not be enough to express the truth, and that we should write things as they are. He had an open-eye to haiku for the first time. He composed [among others on that journey]:

cold winter blast
a cord of a sedge hat
cut into my neck

Translation by Kimiyo Tanaka

Appreciation of this ‘open eye’ was also apparent in a commentary picked up from Janine Beichman’s Shiki Masaoka:

There is no single work in which Shiki set out all of his major ideas in one handy compendium; but from his writings taken as a whole, a coherent picture does emerge. Three contentions are stressed again and again: first, that the haiku is literature; second, that it must be grounded in reality; and third, that the old-style haiku masters must be replaced if the haiku were to survive

Meanwhile Aha! Poetry was called on for further precisions:

kogarashi: literally a tree-withering wind, that refers to the cold winds that blow from late autumn to early winter.

And the great Google contributed too. The key-word kogarashi was rewarded with Letter of Season No.83 filed by K. Isomichi on November the second 2001:

Now it is transference season from Kohso to Ritto, both of 24 seasons. Ritto means 'the beginning of winter season from November 7. 2001'. Soon after Ritto, cold days will come quickly and cover all over Japan. The leaves of Gingkyo tree is being increased yellow day by day and dying at same time by cold dried wind from north. And soon it will fall quietly in calm day or will be scattered by blowing of storm someday.

Idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, K. Isomichi leaves us in no doubt of the very exact nature of the word kogarashi, of its resonances and moods.

Speaking of 'resonances’, all sources were agreed that Shiki had begun his study of Basho and this led Debra to speculate:

I wonder if the following haiku might have come to Shiki's thoughts as he donned his sedge hat and braved the winter wind, even though he was in early stages of tuberculosis:

Bamboo hat, straw coat
the very essence of Basho
falling winter rain

(This translation of Buson quoted from www.celerity.co.uk/pawprints/sigs/haiku.txt) Debra continued:

No doubt, thoughts of Basho, the master's travels and writings on themes including sedge hats, raincoats [and monkey's] must have accompanied him (...) I see an underlying correlation between the word kogarashi - ‘tree withering wind’ and the image of the hat's cord cutting through he who is like a ‘weather-exposed skeleton’.

And so to the translation. Or translations. The first a freely adapted quatrain:

oh, tree-withering Northern
a coarse straw cord
eats through this flesh
in its hat of sedge

version by Debra Woolard Bender

Then variated as a fixed-form couplet in the ‘crystalline’ style haiku proposed by the American poet Dennis Garrison:

The withering wind! A thin, coarse cord
of a sedge hat bites into skin.

version by Debra Woolard Bender

Followed by a yuki teikei 5/7/5 tercet variation

tree-shrivelling wind!
a rough cord saws though this flesh
in a hat of sedge

version by Debra Woolard Bender

And finishing with a ‘minimalist Western present moment tercet’:

winter wind
a cord gnaws the flesh
sedge hat

version by Debra Woolard Bender

That particular post, filed on the 24th of December, finishes with the comment ‘Having too much fun!’. As well it might. Bah, humbug!

But if many members were busy hanging their World Haiku Club socks from the end of their beds others were busy with quill, brush and keyboard. Terry Ishi, without preamble:

cold piercing blast
the straw strap of my sedge hat
cut into my cheek

version by Terry Ishi

And, crossing in cyberspace, a very similar interpretation, also adopting ‘set pattern’ from Karma Tenzing Wangchuk:

A withering wind--
the straw strap of the sedge hat
cuts into my cheek.

version by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk

Very good translations! Straightforward. But the original is also straightforward, so that's good.

This from Susumu Takiguchi who continued, poignantly:

Shiki was only 24 years old when he wrote this and still a university student. And he COULD walk! The sedge hat he bought for his Musashino trip was later hung on a pillar at Shiki-an for the rest of his life [i.e. even after he became bed-ridden].

So it would seem that the sedge hat was a symbol. In life, if not in the poem.

Next up, Johnye Strickland:

my sedge hat strap pulled tight
cutting into me
the winter wind

version by Johnye Strickland

Johnye’s version earned an immediate response, firstly to commend the way in which it captured the spirit of the original, and secondly to discuss the image-order. Whilst not advancing a hard and fast rule Terry Ishi commented:

...a haiku poet in general in Japan (will often) use the first part [5 letters] as a subject which a haijin emphasize and focus on. When I read haiku the first word used would lead me to a scenery [or image]. As for me since Kogarashi is the first word I would rather put ‘the winter wind’ in the first line.

On a different tack, James Karkoski had been examining the background to the poem, specifically Shiki’s attitude toward Basho:

Shiki's study of Basho was mainly as a hostile critic. Among the few comments levelled at Basho in Basho Zatsudan were:

I would like to state at the outset my judgement that the majority of Basho's haiku are bad or even doggerel, and not more than a tenth can be called first-rate. Even barely passable verses are as rare as morning stars.

Fierce criticism indeed. And these were Shiki’s own words, quoted from Donald Keene's Dawn to the West, Japanese Literature in the Modern Era. James then gives us Keene’s opinion:

Shiki, however, denied that he thought Basho's poetry was worthless; on the contrary, his good haiku possessed the qualities most lacking in Japanese literature: masculinity and grandeur.

A grudging respect? Possibly. But would that extend to a desire, as Debra Woolard Bender had suggested, to pay tribute to an earlier work? James again:

Given Shiki denounced some of Basho as plagiarism it is unlikely that he would write an allusion to another haiku (...) Shiki's appreciation of Buson came a few years after the date of this haiku.

A section in Keene lists those haiku by Basho that Shiki is on record as considering to have merit, and James went on to note that they are all of the type that might be called "emotions at a specific place".

In Japanese, the verb/adjective form which precedes a noun is the prenominal of ‘the/a ....that.... or the/a ....which....’ In this haiku, the ‘aroa kui-komu’ is in front of ‘suge-no-kasa’ which makes it a prenominal. It actually says ‘a sedge hat with a straw strap that cuts.’

Which is extremely ‘masculine’ in diction and a grandiose poetic way to state the concept. Which, in my opinion, comes off the same when literally rendered in English.

Withering winds!
My sedge hat
with a
straw strap
that raws the skin.

version by James Karkoski

Commenting on the ‘masculine style’, a none too serious Sheila Windsor pointed out:

...it is evident, without recourse to the poet's name, that this haiku was written by a man: it is a complaint (!)

And in the matter of image order and fixed form translations the present author was ruminating on:

the straw strap...of this sedge hat cuts
.. .. .. . my flesh...this withering wind

version by John Edmund Carley

But all this time the (allegedly) value-neutral sedge hat had been hanging on its pillar at Shiki-an. James Karkoski:

Basho had an intense liking for the medieval aesthetics of wabi and sabi [weathered, imperfect, austere](...) Given that Shiki was dealing with a world where Basho-fu [Basho style] was the ruling style of the day, a style which revelled in bathos, it is an interesting concept to see Shiki in a the sedge hat of a poet traveller with a strap so tight that it rawed his skin as he walked in defiance against the withering wind.

It took great courage for Shiki to make such a harsh critical attack on Basho.

Kogarashi as a symbol for the malign influence of Basho? An interesting idea.

In the matter of critical attacks, Robert Wilson argued for the strengths of both poets:

Art is subjective. What moves one, touches another. Personally, I like most of Basho's haiku (...) I also like Shiki's haiku and the depth he encompasses. Each with his own voice. Each with his own mindset and bias.

But for James Karkoski it was ‘voice’ that held the key:

The problem is, Shiki couldn't develop his own voice with Basho's ringing in his ear. The American literary critic Harold Bloom called it something along the line of the Freudian Oedipus theory, that later generations of writers always have to 'murder' their literary fathers before them.

As Wordsworth damned Gray, so Wordsworth in turn was condemned by Elliot. Sheila Windsor:

I would add Shakespeare as another example of the theory:

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red
If snow be white why then her breasts are dun . ."

People have pondered over why he wrote such an unflattering portrayal of his ‘mistress’ . . he didn't . . this sonnet is an exasperated rejection of the Petrarchan sonnet and ensuing pale, sickly sweet and cloying, imitations of it which were common poetic currency at the time (Yet) Shakespeare did not after all reject the sonnet form completely: he simply threw out what he disliked and kept what suited him: the result was what we now call the Shakespearean sonnet.

And there, dear reader, with reflections on the nature of patricide, and the intriguing suspicion that Shiki’s seminal rejection of 'subjective interpretation' might itself be read symbolically, we must leave the WHC Masaoka Shiki Translation Project, Part 4.

Our last word goes to three poets:

a withering wind -
the straw strap of my sedge hat
cut into my cheek

Terry Ishi, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, after Masaoka Shiki

Read COMMENTS  - Masaoka Shiki, 1891, Meiji 24:  kogarashi ya arao kui-komu suge-no-kasa, Susumu Takiguchi

Read Essay: Visiting Shiki’s House, Susumu Takiguchi

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The WHC Member's Versions:

withering wind -
the straw strap eats into me,
my sedge hat

version by Susumu Takiguchi

oh, tree-withering Northern
a coarse straw cord
eats through this flesh
in its hat of sedge

version by Debra Woolard Bender

The withering wind! A thin, coarse cord
of a sedge hat bites into skin.

version by Debra Woolard Bender

tree-shriveling wind!
a rough cord saws though this flesh
in a hat of sedge

version by Debra Woolard Bender

winter wind
a cord gnaws the flesh
sedge hat

version by Debra Woolard Bender

cold piercing blast
the straw strap of my sedge hat
cut into my cheek

version by Terry Ishi

A withering wind--
the straw strap of the sedge hat
cuts into my cheek.

version by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk

my sedge hat strap pulled tight
cutting into me
the winter wind

version by Johnye Strickland

Withering winds!
My sedge hat
with a
straw strap
that raws the skin.

version by James Karkoski

the straw strap...of this sedge hat cuts
.. .. .. . my flesh...this withering wind

version by John Edmund Carley

a withering wind -
the straw strap of my sedge hat
cut into my cheek

Terry Ishi, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, after Masaoka Shiki

 

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