At the beginning of the last century, Ion
Pillat was attending the higher-level courses of the Henri IV high school in
Paris. After a break of one year—due to his desire to serve as a volunteer
conscript—he returned to Paris, at the Sorbonne University, where he studied
at the same time the History, the Geography and the Law, and he earned his
degree diplomas in 1913 and 1914.
During his studies
in Paris Nicolae Iorga bought around 10,000 books—mainly publications concerning
historiography, while during his
university years, Ion Pillat—as reported by his contemporaries—acquired the
most impressive poetry library any Romanian had possessed until that time. He often visited
booksellers on the Seine-banks, from whom he bought poetry books imported
from around the world. Following the example of Al. Macedonski, his master
in symbolism, besides the great Western poets, Ion Pillat read those of the
East.
Paradoxically, in the West, and by its means, our
compatriot learned about Eastern poetry. In his book, “Scântei din vatra
haiku-ului” (Sparks in the haiku oven) (2000), Florin Vasiliu opines that
“Ion Pillat was familiar with tanka or haiku poems of classical or modern
Japanese poets, as Horiguchi, Hagiwara, Sasazawara, Masakazu, Ietsujiro, Sivol
Uko, Fujimura, were, some of them, dwelling in Paris and attending the Literary Circles
and poets of his time.” A pointed fact is that Ion Pillat made his
début in Paris on January 1, 1912, with the parable-tale "Povestea
celui din urmă sfânt” (The tale of the last Saint)—published on Japanese paper. In the same year, 1912, he published
the cycle of poems "Visări
păgâne” (Pagan dreams), inspired by Eastern philosophy and poetry.
Around this period, G. Călinescu wrote in his impressive History, on page 857:
“Even during those early years, the erudition of Ion Pillat, as specialist and
poetry taster proves to be noticeable... He will always be a collector of
poetry, a fevered bibliophile and bibliographer, always aware of the progresses
of his 'specialty', always adapted to another kind of poetry, sometimes in the
shape of a quasi translation, which do not surface at a superficial examination.
His Parnassianism in the "Visări păgâne” (Pagan dreams) is mainly
Far-Eastern, like at Leconte de Lisle.”
At a time when Macedonski had already written
more rondels inspired by Japanese civilization, Ion Pillat, in his poem
“Necredincioasei” (To the unfaithful), employed elements from Japanese
mythology:
Ca băiat visai la Sakya Muni: zile
Nemişcat stăteam recitind cuvântu-i
Şi basmul lui Jizo şi vechea poveste a
Fecioarei Kwanon
As a boy, I dreamt about
Sakya Muni:
I stood many days motionless,
re-reading his words,
Both the tale of Jizo, and the ancient
story
of the Kwanon maiden
At a certain point in time, the poet dedicated a long
poem to the Japanese civilization,"Din samisen” (From Samisen), from
which we cite the following verses:
Munte Fuji, Munte Fuji,
Peste tine zboară norii
Berze albe, berze negre,
Cu aripile întinse.
Mount Fuji, Mount Fuji,
Over you fly the clouds
White storks, black storks,
With stretched wings.
Mi se cerne lin iubirea
Pe cărări de Kumamoto,
La Kitzumo rânduri, rânduri,
Vântu-mi ninge tot trecutul.
My love is sieved softly
On Kumamoto’s paths,
At Kitzumo, time and time,
The wind covers up all my past with
snow.
Samisen cu două coarde,
Tremurând te-ating şi tremuri:
Strună veche, suflet tânăr,
Laolaltă ni se frâng.
Samisen with two strings,
I touch you trembling, and you
tremble too:
Ancient string, young soul,
Both are breaking.
Lângă templul vechi din Niko,
E un lac şi în oglinda-i,
Ca un nufăr peste nuferi,
Chipul de-aur al lui Buddha...
Near the ancient temple in Nikko,
There is a lake, and in its mirror,
Like a water lily over water
lilies,
The gilded countenance of Buddha
...
Having regard to those poems, wrote Călinescu
in his History, “Ion Pillat turns Fuji-Yama in the Ceahlău mountain and Brahma
in Jesus” (p.861). In fact, by our reading, we can see how
intimate he was with some places on the Japanese Earth, like Mount Fuji, the
island of Kumamoto, the great shrine of Nikko.
For a long time, the poet kept
those exotic jewels for himself, namely his impressions of the Far East. The impulse to
create this new genre of poetry came to him from two diametrically opposed
poles. By reading the poetry of Victor Hugo, he noticed that some verses
detach themselves from the body of the poem, becoming autonomous, even
independent entities—some are “gifted verses”—meaning, they have grace. After this
finding, many years passed. In 1936, Al. T. Stamatiad, a poet writing for the
“Literatorul” magazine directed by Macedonski, published the first original
haiku poems written in Romanian language. At the same time, Traian Chelariu was
preparing to print the first anthology of Japanese poetry, tanka and haiku. I am
one-verse poems and to publish them. He wanted, in this way, to achieve an autochthonous
analogue to the exotic poem Japan has given as
a gift, first to Europe, and than to the entire world. And, because it is an
analogue—between haiku and one-verse poems there are both similarities
and, of course, differences.
In the foreword to his book ”Poeme într-un
vers” (Poems in One Verse) (Cartea Românească Publishing House, 1936),
Ion Pillat explains what the new genre of poetry consists of: “The poem in one
verse must not be mistaken nor with the Greek epigram, nor the Persian rubai,
neither with the Japanese haikai”. Deliberately, Pillat did not borrow aspects
from haiku aesthetics. He kept the Western versification, using iamb
and verses composed of 13 to 14 syllables. The new genre was defined by two essential
features: concision and oneness. “A single verse, born and not made,
carried around for years, often unconsciously, filtering years of passion,
summarizing in it many unwritten, verses, and so many faces and places, unable
to render the traveling secret of the poetry, reduced to its single wealth, to
be empty and eternal... the poetry which has reached such a despoilment, offers
to the reader the highest delectation, but requests in change a constant and
intimate collaboration. The less the poet has written, the more the reader has
to read... A long poem can be read in a hurry, because each verse helps one to
understand and enjoy the next. A single verse is to be read slowly. The
letters are read quickly, but the telegram stops us”.
Like haiku, in which it is usual to read aloud the same text
twice, the one-verse poem entails a slow lecture and a break
before each reading. This break allows to the reader to continue the poet’s
thoughts, thus, to participate, in his own way, in the creation. In both genres, nature is present. Whereas, in haiku,
the poet merges with nature, in the
one-verse poem, the poet can appear as a distinctive entity, outside
nature, in its contemplation. Like haiku, the one-verse poem often lays stress
on the echo—not on the sound, or even silence: “A
single Pan-pipe, but how many echoes in the woods” (the one-verse poem), or
“Not the words, but the silence give voice to the song” (The poetry).
In spite of his caution, G. Călinescu regarda some poems
opne-verse poems as “graceful miniatures and images—definitions
reminiscent of the technique of Jules Renard.” Among exegetists on the writings of
Ion Pillat we can quote Olga Duţu, who demonstrated that some one-verse
poems, if written in three lines, could be considered haiku”
("Ion Pillat—de la poemul într-un vers la haiku” [Ion Pillat—from the poem
in one verse to the haiku] Albatros Publishing House, IV, 1995, page 104).
It is an interesting point of view which attests the fact that this genre of
poetry could be a symbiosis between traditional Western poetry and the Far-Eastern
poem.
Polemizing with Sono Uchida, Florentin Vasiliu
stated that, on a statistical basis, instead of haiku, the one-verse poem is
actually the shortest genre
of poetry in the world. I think they are both right. The titles of the one-verse
poems written by Ion Pillat, have, as a rule, three
or four syllables. If added to the 13 or 14 syllables of the actual verse, the
result is just 17 syllables. On the other hand, taking into account the fact
that the title is a part of the poem, and that the poem is separated in two hemistiches by
caesura, we can assert that the genre invented by our compatriot consists also
of three components, with the difference being that of their placement. Kireji, which cannot be absent from a
haiku, has its counterpart in the caesura of the one-verse poem. Both
breaks, or silences, as they might be called, besides their aesthetical
or psychological value (I mean the psychology of the listener, rather than that
of the poetry reader), are caused physically. Both the kireji and
caesura last for the duration of time that air is in the lungs, namely the time-span needed by the
reader to “take a breath”.
To pamper himself, Ion Pillat wrote a
quatrain about himself and the poem in one verse, a quatrain published
posthumously in the 3rd volume of Works (Eminescu Publishing House,
1986):
C-un singur vers am încercat să farmec
În tine-o lume de simţiri şi vis—
Pătrunde-l cum pătrunde-n zori lucirea
Priveliştii printr-un oblon deschis.
With a single verse I have tried to charm
In you a world of feelings and of dreams—
Penetrate it like at dawn the glimmer of the sight
Penetrates through an open shutter.
Nice and true. Through the one-verse poem,
Ion Pillat opened a window towards universality. He has thrown to the
wind, but not in vain, the seeds of a poetry genre related to haiku, but
still different. In his time, the echoes were few and insubstantial; the
seed lay waiting for the bad weather to pass, then fructified over half a
century. Among his contemporaries, we may quote Lucian Blaga and V. Voiculescu,
who have both tried to write poems in one verse. The one-verse poems written
by the latter, “Aşchii de poezie” (Poetry Splinters), and published posthumously ("Gânduri albe” [White Dreams], Cartea Românească
Publishing House, 1986), are the nearest to those of Ion Pillat. One difference
is that they
do not bear a title. I quote several of his poems:
Uleiul negru al nopţii...........se-ntinde peste cer
The black oil of the night...........spreads over the sky....
......Şi munţii de tămâie...........
ardeau cuprinşi de dor.
....The incense mountains...........
burned with a grief.........
.......Un ţipăt alb de crivăţ...........
străpunge miazănoaptea...
....A white scream of the icy north wind...........
piercing the Septentrion.....................
..............Şi în orbita nopţii............
lucea pupila lunii..............
.............In the night’s eye-hole...........
glistened the Moon’s pupil........
Among the early experiments in this field, I
quote a single poem of Bazil Gruia, one of the disciples of Lucian Blaga:
Vernisaj în imagini
Geana somnului. Grea. Peste amintiri. Ghilotinând.
Varnishing day in images
The sleep’s eyelashes. Heavy. Over the memory. Guillotining.
In only 15 syllables, four sentences. It’s
true that three are elliptical. The micro-poem is staked by the letter g
(as in "grievous" or "grave"). It is a concentration pushed to the limits. An
obsessive tailing-off idea which forces us to think, challenging us to
gymnastics of the mind.
Recollections... The man returned in the past, in his
childhood. He remembered and revived bits of life. With so much zeal and
absorption, that he became tired as after a day of mowing with the scythe. So
many memories make him tired. And then the eyelashes move down, covering his
sight. Move down like a guillotine. Guillotining, lapidating. What? That’s the
question. Maybe the memory. Maybe the dreams.
The establishment of "Haiku Magazine" in
1990, and of the Romanian Haiku Society (SRH) one year later, has led to a
rise of interest in the one-verse poem. To the best of my knowledge, over the
last 15 years about 150 haiku books have been published in Romania. Sixty years
after the publication of Ion Pillat’s book ,”Poeme într-un vers” (Poems in One Verse),
a book by the same title, written by the academician Victor Săhleanu was
published. In the decade since, more than 20 books of one-verse poems have been published.
Besides dedicated authors of the genre,
Florin Vasiliu, Dan Florică, Ioan Marinescu, and Dumitru Radu, we can
examine the poet, Bogdan I. Pascu. The reviewer, Constantin Sorescu, wrote of him: “The
author juxtaposes the one-verse poem and the haiku: the one-verse poem is
a parallelepiped, built impeccably, with the edges well polished, carrying
mysterious meanings, some even impenetrable, while the poem in haiku-style is a
sagacious terza rima, a multivalent architecture of simplicity”. In the writings
of Bogdan I. Pascu, we find an interesting confluence of religions. Being an
European spirit, by birth and education, he inserts many Christian elements in
his poems in one verse:
Taina
Doar umbra unui înger de strajă Învierii
The Mystery
Only the shadow of an Angel watches the Resurrection
Îndumnezeire
Peste păcatul lumii iubirea cuib îşi face
Deification
Over the original sin, love makes its nest
Via Dolorosa
Urcând înspre Golgota porţi crucea vieţii noastre
Via Dolorosa
Climbing Golgotha, You carry our life’s cross
Pieta
În inima Fecioarei, durerea trup se face
Pieta
In the heart of the Virgin Maiden, pain incarnates
Naştere sfântă
În ieslea tainei pruncul, lumină din lumină
Holy Birth
In the mystery manger the child, light out of light
Vecernie
Cu glas de bronz ne cheamă spre ceruri înserarea
Vespers
With bronze sounds, the evening is calling us to heaven
Educated at the haiku-school, the author
assumes Buddhistic precepts from its poetry and transposes them in his poems in
one verse. The process is similar to horticultural
grafting and to
medical transplants:
Nirvana
Acolo lumea-ncape într-un strop de rouă
