|
Haiku
On the brink of being
Haikus, we will not understand
them, as Roland Barthes wrote already.
How to write them ourselves? And
to translate them again? In the Dutch text I stick to the basic rule of
three lines and the rhythm of 5-7-5 syllables, in English I left this
behind and followed the units of sounds. And also I didn’t always give
nature a place in the poems. Most of these haiku texts here originate
from my travel in 1999 to South East Asia. However I have a reason to
set them aside, although they are integral part of the travel story in
the booklet ‘With a Hat shading the Light’.
Originally a haiku was just an ouverture of a longer poem the renga made
later autonomous and becoming a stand alone. Or the haiku was
incorporated in a story as for example in the journals of the Japanese
haiku poet Basho and called together a haibun. I do not pretend to call
my book a haibun although a friend of mine said your texts read or
should be read as poems. That is the reason why I love also the work of
the dutch writer Bert Schierbeek who wrote after World War II the first
so called experimental prose poems. It happens to be that he wrote also
about Zen in a booklet ‘The gardens of Zen’.
With these haiku texts I tried
to fix rare moments and peculiar observations, to set them in the mind
as a scent. In a radio interview I said that in writing a haiku I felt
like a bird watcher. One has to sit still in order to watch and to see
birds. If one makes noise or moves all of a sudden the watched birds fly
away. (Maybe it is paradoxically this sudden moment the poet is waiting
for) The dutch poet Chris van Geel wrote a beautiful poem about this
activity of watching, in which a heron (the poet) spies for fish.
a heron walks with care
on high heels through
the water and brings his spying
even when it is dark
as white fish to light.
It is not the white fish but the
spying that is brought to light, as the poet explained later to a
literary critic. The spying stands for writing poems. It requires a high
concentration, a focussing of attention, a feeling for the volatile.
This comes close to Zen meditation, to the writing of haiku. In the art
of painting it reminds of a still life. Therefore I added pictures of
still lives as a similarity in contrast. It remains difficult to touch
the essence of a haiku, it will often vanish or evaporate. Perhaps this
is why Chris van Geel once hided a haiku about dirt in a short poem
*:
old dirt
old dirt, while it so
beautifully rustles
has a strange voice in the wind.
Set in the structure of a haiku
old dirt, while it so
beautifully rustles has a
strange
voice in the wind
This example makes three things
clear. First a haiku is made of words. That is the basic material and
not the world outside. Emotions, all right. Secondly, a haiku is
difficult to translate. And last but not least the haiku shows it does
not matter what its topic is. Even old dirt is good enough to get a
voice, to rustle in the wind. For me, the haiku reflects rare moments in
daily life. Just a blink. Moments, happenings one can enjoy time and
again. When I reread my ‘haikus’ it is as the return of a memory that
deletes itself when I read it.
*
Hugo Brems: De Rentmeester van het Paradijs
Haikus&photos :
animations
|
