Free Haiku by Stephen Addiss Page A

hurting the flow and even the meaning. However, when closer translations succeed, they are powerfully satisfying.
    The fact that the spirit of the haiku can be effectively rendered in English translation indicates that the 5-7-5 syllabic count captures the outward rhythmic form of traditional Japanese haiku but does not necessarily define them. The strength of haiku is their ability to suggest and evoke rather than merely to describe. With or without the 5-7-5 formula and seasonal references, readers are invited to place themselves in a poetic mode and to explore nature as their imaginations permit.
    Returning to Bashō’s frog, what does the poem actually say? On the surface, not very much—one or more frogs jumping into one or more ponds and making one or more sounds. Yet this poem has fascinated people for more than three hundred years, and the reason why remains something of a mystery. Is it that it combines old (the pond) and new (the jumping)? A long time span and immediacy? Sight and sound? Serenity and the surprise of breaking it? Our ability to harmonize with the nature? All of these may evoke an experience that we can share in our own imaginations.
    Whatever meanings it brings forth in readers, this haiku has not only been appreciated but also variously modeled after and sometimes even parodied in Japan, the latter suggesting that readers should not take it too seriously. To give a few examples, the Chinese-style poet-painter Kameda Bōsai (1752–1826) wrote:
    Old pond—
    after that time
    no frog jumps in
    while the Zen master Sengai Gibon (1750–1837) added new versions:
    Old pond—
    something has PLOP
    just jumped in
    Old pond—
    Bashō jumps in
    the sound of water
    Bashō has become so famous for his haiku that this eighteenth-century senryÅ« mocks the now self-conscious master himself:
    Master Bashō,
    at every plop
    stops walking
    In the modern world, new transformations of this poem keep appearing even across the ocean, including this haiku with an environmental undertone by Stephen Addiss:
    Old pond paved over
    into a parking lot—
    one frog still singing
    Perhaps one reason why haiku have become internationally popular in recent decades comes from our sensitivity to our surroundings, even to the development of towns and cities, often to the detriment of the natural world: poets have power to keep on singing the connection to nature in their new milieu.
    Haiku in Japan
    Although haiku is now a worldwide phenomenon, its roots stretch far back into Japan’s history. The form itself began with poets sharing the composition of “linked verse” in the form of a series of five-line waka (5-7-5-7-7 syllables), a much older form of poem. W aka poets, working in sequence, noted that the 5-7-5–syllable sections could often stand alone. Separate couplets of 7-7 syllables were less appealing to the Japanese taste for asymmetry, but from the 5-7-5 links, haiku were born.
    It is generally considered that Bashō was the poet who brought haiku into full flowering, deepening and enriching it and also utilizing haiku in accounts of his travels such as Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior). Bashō’s pupils then continued his tradition of infusing seemingly simple haiku with evocative undertones, while continuing a sense of play that kept haiku from becoming the least bit ponderous.
    The next two of the “three great masters” were Buson (1716–83), a major painter as well as poet who developed haiku-painting ( haiga ) to its height, and Issa (1763–1827), whose profound empathy with all living beings was a major feature of his poetry. With the abrupt advent of Western civilization to Japan in the late nineteenth century, haiku seemed to be facing an uncertain future, but it was revived by Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) and his followers, and it has continued unabated until the present day.
    Despite some historical changes over the