Far
Beyond the Field includes translations of four hundred
haiku written by twenty poets from the seventeenth century
to the present. The poets and their poems appear chronologically,
creating an overview of the way haiku has been used and
experimented with over the last 400 years or so. At
the same time, the reader is admitted to the often marginalized
world of female experience in Japan, revealing voices every
bit as rich and colorful, and perhaps even more lyrical
and erotic, than those found in male haiku. So says
the advertising copy of Columbia University Presss
web site. You bet! Some of these haiku sing of subjects,
moods, and situations that most male haiku poets seem not
to comprehend, Japanese or otherwise. At the same time,
however, most of these haiku sing universal human themes
that have long been cherished in Japanese haiku and been
marginalized by the Zen-dominated male anthologizers and
commentators of the early to mid 20th century, both Japanese
and English. In fact, many of the kinds of haiku found in
Far Beyond the Field have existed in Japanese haiku by both
women and men since the beginning of haiku.
The
list of poets represented here reads like a roll-call of
the greats of Japanese haikai and haiku, past and present:
Den Sutejo (16331698), Kawai Chigetsu (1634?1718),
Shiba Sonome (16641726), Chiyojo (17031775),
Enomoto Seifu (17321815), Tagami Kikusha (17531826),
Takeshita Shizunojo (18871951), Sugita Hisajo (18901946),
Hashimoto Takako (18991963), Mitsuhashi Takajo (18991972),
Ishibashi Hideno (19091947), Katsura Nobuko (b. 1914),
Yoshino Yoshiko (b. 1915), Tsuda Kiyoko (b. 1920), Inahata
Teiko (b. 1931), Uda Kiyoko (b. 1935), Kuroda Momoko (b.
1938), Tsuji Momoko (b. 1945), Katayama Yumiko (b. 1952),
Mayuzumi Madoka (b. 1965). A few of these folks will already
be somewhat familiar to avid readers who have tracked down
the nearly-absent-in-English women of Japanese haiku one
place or anotherone thinks of the more modest but
excellent anthologies edited by Leza Lowitz et al., A Long
Rainy Season: Haiku & Tanka, and Kôko Katô
and David Burleigh, A Hidden PondAnthology of Modern
Haiku, soon to be reissued. But nowhere that I know of do
we have so full and thorough a collection of works by these
stars in Japans haiku firmament.
Also,
no precedents for Far Beyond the Field exist in English,
though Japanese publishers often issue anthologies of and
commentaries on womens haiku. For the moment, we must
follow that misogynist lead, unfortunately. Like the Japanese,
we have also been continually bathed for a half-century
or more in Japanese haiku by men in collections edited by
men who admittedly dislike womens haiku,
as if the haiku of women were somehow less human, less universal
than those of men. (I am constantly reminded of the truism
that more than half of humanity consists of females; when
do we suppose the menJapanese, American, otherswill
get it?)
Ueda provides a rich and comprehensive introduction, with
more clear and accurate background on Japanese haiku and
its development over the past four centuries than can be
found in so few words elsewhere in English. (Note that I
did not restrict my comment to womens haiku;
neither does Ueda.) Following that, we have the women poets
who rounded out Bashôs own day, some of them
his actual disciples or close relatives of disciples. Ueda
precedes each poets work with a brief sketch of her
life. The only real gap in Uedas sequence of poets,
in the later years of the Tokugawa or Edo Era after Kikusha
(Issas contemporary), reflects the failing haiku of
that time as well as the increasing repression of women
in a declining culture. Lovers of Bashô, Buson, and
Issa will find much to ponder in the poems by and thumbnail
biographies of poets mostly unknown to readers both in and
out of Japan.
like
a fish
in the sea, this body of mine
cool in the moonlight
Does
Seifus simile surprise you? No modern turn-coat, she,
but a major poet of her era, 200 years ago. The translation
is accurate. (And yes, despite Blyth and Henderson, Japanese
haiku poetsmen and womendo use similes and metaphors.)
does
a dustpan
share in the Buddhas nature?
blossoms shade
As
this example by Kikusha demonstrates, men have no lock on
the Buddhism-and-haiku connection. Read the book to find
out how Kikusha illustrates this poem, what Zen story it
alludes to.
Uedas
introduction and the inclusion of several early women haiku
poets brief biographies and samplings of poems constitute
a kind of catch-up history, of which much more needs to
be done. Going on into modern times, Ueda gives a good overview
of the work of a powerful group of haiku poets who also,
like their predecessors, refuse to be stuck in the haiku
moment box or the haiku Zen box or any
other box, even the womens haiku box:
in
the sweltering sky
a laddersomeone carries it
to the deep shade
by
Hashimoto Takako,
rich
in humor and a love of the arcana of daily life.
Can
haiku have titles? Try this one:
clear
starlit sky
in the freezing night, after the planes
roar has vanished
then
add the title, Air raids night after night.
Apparently Ishibashi Hideno had not heard that rule about
omitting titles for haiku. (And note that the haiku of Sarajevo
and other recently war-torn places do have their precedents
in Japanese.)
Here
we have also Katsura Nobuko, a strikingly intimate and sensitive
poet:
on
the scale
my bathed and steaming body
this night of snow
How
compare the lightness and heaviness of snow to anything
human? And again, Nobuko uncovers herself:
think
of the burning fire
at the bottom of the earth
last year, this year
What?
Thinking in haiku?? Remember Bashôs
masterpiece (my translation):
New
Years Day
I rememberloneliness
autumn dusk
And
then we have the incursion of modern mass culture, with
its genuine and its false all mixed up together, as in Kuroda
Momokos:
fugu
soup
on the wall, a great big
John Lennon
Momoko
is as merciless as any true poet:
whispering
something to the rose
she cuts the rose
To
be sure, there are infrequent lapses in a translation here
or there:
a
flowering chestnut
falls, the sound assailing me
as I stand
Here
the Japanese (provided throughout in romanized form) makes
clear that Hashimoto Takako hears the flowers of the tree
fall, not the tree itself, as the translation suggests.
Such problems beset all translators; one only hopes to avoid
getting them all the way to print, but invariably one or
another slips through. Such small difficulties only point
up the humanity and pitfalls of this enterprise, trying
to bring a true account of Japanese haiku to our world.
Far
Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women is published
in the same format as Uedas anthologies Modern Japanese
Tanka and Light Verse from the Floating World: An Anthology
of Premodern Japanese Senryu. More than either of these,
however, it takes us into a world largely undiscoverable
in English until now. In this one book, Ueda not only redresses
the unconscionable marginalization of Japanese women haiku
poets that pervades almost all previous works on Japanese
haiku in English, but corrects the imbalance of his own
earlier and still extraordinary work, Modern Japanese Haiku:
An Anthology, which was compiled in the 1970s, before modern
Japanese women haiku masters had come fully into their own.
Now,
at last, the stage is set for a comprehensive, multi-volume
collection of modern Japanese haiku that ignores gender
as an issue, but allows the full range and depth of that
great genre to enter our lives. Until such an anthology
appears, however, Makoto Ueda will be our best guide to
both the men and women who have made Japanese haiku what
it is today. Reverently, I keep both Modern Japanese
Haiku and Far Beyond the Field close at hand
on my work table. Either is indispensable; together, they
are incomparable.
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