The Great Enigma by Tomas Tranströmer

Haiku is one of the best-known poetic forms on earth. The Japanese seventeen syllable haiku has been around since the 1600s, today there are about 780 haiku magazines in Japan, and Japanese schoolchildren learn early on how to use as few words as possible when describing events – the task of minimizing a narrative to just a few keywords becomes a game with signs that captivates the young.

In 2011, the society that is in charge of the Nobel Prize in literature – for the first time ever – brought up the presence of haiku in an author’s output when announcing the winner of the award. Unsurprisingly, the poet, Tomas Tranströmer, was not Japanese but Swedish, for haiku poems are today written all over the world.

Tomas Tranströmer was attracted to haiku early on in his career, but it wasn’t until after his stroke in 1990 that he once again embraced the form. And the majority of Tranströmer’s work is not haiku – in the world of poetry he is known as a master of metaphor, and metaphor has no place in traditional haiku. However, Tranströmer’s poetry has always been bare, elegant, precise, and serene, and when he returned to haiku it was as if the poet had come home again.

And just like in the poetry of the Japanese haiku masters, nature plays a major part in Tranströmer’s poetry. Nature, of course, uses many different dresses, but to Tranströmer it is always holy and divine: “The darkening leaves/ in autumn are as precious/ as the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

The Japanese term “mono no aware” is often (lamely) translated as “sadness,” but it is more correct to understand it as an awareness of impermanence, or the transient nature of all things. This is a recurring theme in Tranströmer’s verse. In “Snow Is Falling,” he says, “The funerals keep coming/ more and more of them/ like the traffic signs/ as we approach a town./ Thousands of people gazing/ in the land of long shadows.” Which may seem bleak, but Tranströmer is too sophisticated to be categorized as either gloomy or bright, and the poem reaches this conclusion, “A bridge builds itself/ slowly/ straight out into space.”

Death itself may be the end. Then again, it may not. In the prose poem “Answers to Letters,” the poet speaks of a place, possibly New York City, which is beyond death, “One day I will answer. One day when I am dead and can finally concentrate. Or at least as far away from here that I can find myself again. When I’m walking, newly arrived, in the big city, on 125th Street, in the wind on the street of dancing garbage. I who love to stray off and vanish in the crowd, a letter T in the endless mass of text.”

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The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa edited by Robert Hass

Every now and then the book lover may discover a volume that might invoke a library rather than a book, and as the pages are turned everything seems to be in it. The Essential Haiku, edited and partly translated by Robert Hass, is one of these “libraries” – albeit (and as the title suggests) a specialized one.
Hass’ book offers much more than just haiku poems: there are essays devoted to Basho, Buson, and Issa; there are examples of each poet’s prose; one chapter is dedicated to Basho’s thoughts on poetry; there are notes on different Japanese genres; a note on translation; and an extensive list of further readings – all in all a generous source.

Japan’s poetry tradition is rich and ancient, but outside of the country the knowledge of Japanese verse is usually limited to the seventeen syllable haiku. There are quite a few traits of the haiku poems that make them untranslatable – puns are, as Hass explains, often lost; Syllable count? Don’t bother! The syntax? Well… – but some elements do survive the passage from Japanese to English. For example, the spirit of haiku requires plain language, and this can certainly be a building block of a translation. And then there is matter of nature and seasons, and the presence of Zen Buddhism.

Basho once said that a poet should detach his mind from self, and enter into the object, sharing its delicate life and feelings, and this monastic mindset can transcend language barriers and give a sense of the original poem, as in this interpretation of Basho by Hass: The winter sun – / on the horse’s back / my frozen shadow.

Haiku can be understood as purely descriptive (although some poets would shun this notion), but it is also symbolic. The ever-present seasons are what they are, but they also stand for something else. However, a reader doesn’t have to study Japanese culture, history, and mindset in order to embrace haiku – like art in general, haiku can be grasped on many different levels, and (to use Basho’s words once again) perhaps it’s enough if the poem seems as light “as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed,” as in this Basho haiku: Winter garden, / the moon thinned to a thread, / insects singing.

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