The Heart of Haiku (5 page)

New Year’s Eve year-forgetting party—

wondering what fish feel,

what birds feel?

uo tori no kokoro wa shirazu toshiwasure

the cicada’s singing

does not show its body

is already dying

yagateshinu keshiki wa miezu semi no koe

too ill to eat

even a rice cake—

peach trees in flower.

wazuraeba mochi o mo kuwazu momo no hara

mountain cuckoo,

sing my grief-notes

into
sabi

uki ware wo sabishi garase yo kanko dori    

sea slugs,

frozen alive:

one body

i
kinagarahitotsu ni kōru namako kana     

octopus-catching jars—

the summer moon’s

brief dreams

takotsubo ya hakanaki yume o natsu no tsuki

These haiku bow to what lies on both sides of the skin’s millimeter-thick boundary. The reader who enters Bashō’s perceptions fully can’t help but find in them a kind of liberation. They unshackle the mind from any single or absolute story, unshackle us from the clumsy dividing of world into subjective and objective, self and other, illness and blossom, freedom and capture. Some haiku seem reports of internal awareness, some seem to point at the external, but Bashō’s work as a whole awakens us to the necessary permeability of all to all. Awareness of the mind’s movements makes clear that it is the mind’s nature to move. Feeling within ourselves the lives of others (people, creatures, plants, and things) who share this world is what allows us to feel as we do at all. First comes the sight of a block of sea slugs frozen while still alive, then the sharp, kinesthetic comprehension of the inseparability of the suffering of one from the suffering of all. First comes hearing the sound of one bird singing, then the recognition that solitude can carry its own form of beauty, able to turn pain into depth.

Bashō began by writing haiku as pastime, amusing himself as a young man by trying to make something new, unexpected, and of the moment. One of the more unexpected things he did was to turn that idle search to serious use. In his life, as in his poems, he continually took the unconventional turn, abandoning his place in the traditional structures of class, leaving the cultural center for its periphery in both geographical and intellectual realms, choosing to live as wanderer, outsider, provincial. He consistently chose the open over the known, chose to grow old sleeping in fields on grass pillows or in lice-ridden inns. He preferred a traveler’s straw hat with a few words inked inside its rim to a roof. At the end, his model for haiku was the artless expression of a child at play.

“The invincible power of poetry,” Bashō wrote, “has reduced me to the condition of a tattered beggar.” The statement was literal: one haiku expresses gratitude for the gift of a new pair of straw sandals, with straps the color of blue iris, at the start of a trip, and Bashō noted that he was always quite safe from robbers, as he carried nothing of value to anyone else. Yet the statement points to another level of meaning as well: a poet’s existence is necessarily open to dependence, to interdependence. Bashō’s haiku are the record of what the world placed in the open begging bowl of his life and his perceptions.

The words he wrote on the rim his home-made traveling hat can be translated, loosely, as these:

Under this world’s long rains,

here passes

poetry’s makeshift shelter. 

yo ni furu mo sarani sōgi no yadori kana    

All haiku translations, unless otherwise noted, are by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani;

translations and essay © Jane Hirshfield, 2007, 2011; all rights reserved.

My thanks to the Poetry Society of America and Poets House, whose joint invitation to lecture on Bashō in their 2007 Branching Out series of public library lectures was this project’s beginning. And my deep thanks, as always, to Mariko Aratani, for her unsurpassable assistance as co-translator of these poems, and to the several others who looked over this work along the way and offered suggestions, corrections, encouragement, interest, blessings.

^*
Satori: the Zen term for the experience of a sudden awakening into enlightnment; the image of lightning conventionally is used to convey this idea