How the son of the samurai Matsuo Basho glorified the Japanese three-line haiku all over the world

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Haiku (hokku) remains popular largely due to the fact that it perfectly conveys the subtexts of the funny, allows you to achieve amusing understatement - a couple of expressive strokes, a reference to the mysterious oriental nature - and the joke is ready. But when the haiku, which at first bore the name "hokku", appeared in Japanese culture, his role was just that - a comic one. But thanks to the poet Matsuo Basho, the haiku genre rose to the very heights of Japanese art - it turned out that "", in the words of another famous haiku author, or haijin, Masaoka Shiki.

Matsuo Basho - haijin

The roots of Japanese poetry, as befits everything that this culture is famous for, goes back to the deep past. The genre from which haiku emerged is considered to be the poetry of renga, or tanka, in the form of five-verses, including exactly 31 syllables. This form of versification has been known in Japan since the 8th century. And the isolation of haiku as a separate genre of poetic art occurred in the 16th century.

At first, the three verses were in the nature of a comic work, were considered a "light" genre of poetry, but since the 17th century the semantic content of haiku has changed - the reason was the work of the poet Matsuo Basho, who is considered the main poet of this genre in its entire history.

Matsuo Jinsichiro, the future poet Basho, was born into the family of a poor samurai in 1644. From an early age, he was interested in poetry, which by that time was available not only to the elite, but also to the Japanese of small means. At the age of twenty, he began to study literature in the city of Kyoto and, forced to earn his own bread, entered the service of the noble samurai Todo Yoshitade, who was also a fan of literary art and an amateur poet. After the death of his master in 1666, Matsuo ended up in public service, after which he began to teach poetry. Father and elder brother Matsuo were also teachers - they taught calligraphy to wealthy aristocrats and their family members.

In 1667, Basho's first poems were published, and real fame came to him in 1681, when his three-verse about the raven was published:

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In this translation by Konstantin Balmont, some inaccuracy is allowed - a "dry" branch turns into a "dead" one here - to enhance the impression of the haiku. Another generally accepted translation is considered to be made by Vera Markova:

An additional word appeared here - "lonely" - for the same reasons.

Requirements for classical haiku and deviations from the rules

Generally speaking, only in the Western tradition is haiku written in three lines. The original Japanese poems were hieroglyphs depicted from top to bottom on the page. At the same time, there are several requirements for haiku that must be met in order to classify a work specifically in this genre.

The lines don't rhyme. Haiku consists of 17 syllables, they are distributed in a ratio of 5-7-5, each part is separated from the next by a dividing word - which is a kind of exclamation particle. In translations into European languages, the role of kireji is usually played by line breaks and punctuation marks. Classical haiku contains a reflection of nature in the eyes of a person, a poet, this is a recorded impression of what he saw or heard. In the text, there must be an indication of the season - - not necessarily direct, it can also be a context that allows you to determine when what the poet describes happens.

Haiku, as a rule, does not have a name and only describes what is happening in the present tense. Nevertheless, Basho himself repeatedly violated these rules - their requirements are not absolutely categorical, if the very essence of the poem corresponds to the idea of haiku. The main thing the poet strives for is to convey the impression of the moment in seventeen syllables. In haiku, there is no place for verbosity, complicated images, while the reader of the text opens up a deep philosophical meaning - in a completely oriental spirit.

Here is Matsuo Basho's haiku that made the poet famous for centuries:

(translated by T. P. Grigorieva)

The poem was published in 1686 and up to the present time has caused and is causing discussions among art critics about the true meaning of the text. Six words, of which only one is a verb - an action - give rise to a variety of interpretations: and about contemplation, which captured the poet and was interrupted by a quiet sound; and about stagnant water, symbolizing the past; and about the gloomy pessimism of the poet, for whom a frog, a toad is something that does not bring anything light into life - and many other attempts at interpretation, which, however, cannot in any way overshadow the simple charm of three short lines.

Moreover, both for the Japanese and for those familiar with the Eastern culture of Europeans, in these three simple strokes one can see, for example, the image of an ancient Buddhist temple, filled with silence and far from the bustle of the city. It is interesting that Basho paid attention to descriptions of sounds in his works quite often - they are mentioned in one hundred and ten poems (out of a total of about a thousand haiku by Basho).

Influence of Basho's creativity

Matsuo Basho's life was spent in poverty, even in poverty, but, being a Buddhist, he accepted this position with indifference. He lived in a simple hut that one of the students had built for him. In front of the hut, the poet planted a banana tree - "", this word became a pseudonym. Basho was described as moderate, caring and loyal to family and friends, but he sought peace of mind all his life, which he repeatedly confessed to his students. One day in 1682, during a fire in the city of Edo, where the poet lived, his hut burned down, and with it a banana tree. And despite the fact that a year later the poet again had a hut and a banana tree at the entrance, Basho's soul could not find rest. He left Edo - modern Tokyo - and went on a wandering tour of Japan. It was as a poet-wanderer that he would later go down in literary history.

Traveling in those days was difficult, associated with a lot of formalities, and simply dangerous, and during his wanderings Basho was ready for the fact that a sudden accident, or illness, would interrupt his path - including life. Nevertheless, the circumstances were favorable, and the poet gained more and more popularity, appearing in different cities of Japan and meeting both ordinary people and noble aristocrats. With him Basho kept only the most necessary things - a staff, a rosary with beads, and also a flute, a small wooden gong and a collection of poems. And this minimalism, and detachment from the world, and poverty, which makes it possible not to be distracted by the material, Basho took from Zen philosophy, she also found expression in his haiku. Difficult living conditions do not mean that the state of mind should be difficult - that was one of the meanings that Basho put into his work.

Travels provided not only material for travel notes, but also inspiration for new haiku. Basho described the calm and simple beauty of the world - not a riot of cherry blossoms, but a blade of grass breaking out from under the ground, not the grandiose grandeur of the mountains, but the modest outlines of a stone. Matsuo Basho's health, whether from wanderings or from asceticism, was weak - he died, having lived only half a century. The last poem that the poet wrote was the so-called "Death Song":

(Translated by Vera Markova)

The name Basho has enjoyed recognition and great respect in Japan for several centuries. In the 19th century, Basho's artistic techniques were revised by another outstanding poet, Masaoka Shiki, who, despite his short life, opened his own haiku school, where Basho's legacy was studied as the basis of Japanese poetry. He also developed a literary method, the essence of which boils down to the writer’s comprehension of the world around him. Haiku in this case plays the role of not just describing something that is happening in front of the author, it shows a small piece of the world through the prism of the poet's inner gaze. And it was Masaoka Shiki who, among other things, proposed the term "" instead of the former "".

Interest in haiku in the West arose back in the 19th century, and from the beginning of the last century, Japanese poetry began to be translated - first into English. There have been attempts to write the haiku in one line, without a break, but the arrangement of the haiku in the form of a three-line has become generally accepted. By tradition, when a collection is published, each poem is placed on a separate page, allowing the reader to feel the atmosphere of the haiku and not distracting him from creating a mental image. The rule of seventeen syllables is often violated during translation: taking into account linguistic differences, maintaining the required size can sometimes be achieved only at the expense of the expressiveness of the text and the accuracy of the translation.

If the driving force of Western art has traditionally been the desire to create a perfect - from the point of view of the author - a work, then Eastern art does not separate the result of creativity from the creator - it is in the harmony between the poet and his text that the meaning of Japanese poetry lies. Now, when the harmony of man and the world around him has become a fashionable topic in the West, several trends in Japanese art are gaining worldwide recognition. Ikebana, rock garden, tea ceremony along with haiku embody wabi-sabi - a worldview based on loneliness, modesty, inner strength, and authenticity.

Japanese beauty is what is natural, simple, genuine, what is fleeting and elusive. Haiku is precisely about the beauty of the world in the understanding of the Japanese. And it must be admitted that it was from Japan that came to the Western world - fashion for minimalism in everything, including, it turns out, and photographs.