lectures on classical Japanese literature: Santōka's 山頭火 free haiku, Part 1

[Music] hi everyone my name is robert witkamp and here i am with another lecture on classical japanese literature actually in this and the next lectures i

will be talking about the haiku poet santoka danira santoka whose poetry belongs to modern literature

however santoka santokazu are closely related to classical japanese poetry and my first two santoka lectures

will deal with questions of reading interpretation and translation here you can see the english translations i'm going to present there are other translations within literary

histories and the book with translations by hiroako hiroagi sato but i will limit myself to these four however i will present the english

translations but i am not going to discuss them or to assess them i leave this to you of course after listening to my lectures aside from

the seminar article by james abrams published in 1977 in monumenta niponica there are these two books that are considered the standard

collections in english to date in english by the way the name tanera santoka has become common but in japanese it it is usually just santoka

this is consistent since santoka is a pen name that does not require a family name last summer i was finally able to receive the book by william scott wilson

that came out earlier in 2021 you can see the book on this slide and its title is the life and then haiku

poetry of santo cartanida japan's most beloved modern haiku poet as you can see the book is a translation of a japanese book by sumita oyama or

yamasumita in japanese who was a close friend of santoka he was born in 1899 seven years after santoka and passed

away in 1994.

the english book has a preface and introduction by william scott wilson and it also contains another translation the diary of the one grass hut is nikki

in japanese which is santoka's last diary contained in volume 10 of santo kazenjiu a collection of santokas works in 11

volumes in 1990 i bought the japanese books among other books to prepare my master thesis on sundoca

and it is still in my bookshelf the book which was published in 1983 seems to be a part of a series of books i myself still own these two other books

which you can see here and who knows maybe mr wilson will also translate these ones their titles in english are santoka's way santokanomichi

and sandro canoyaro dealing with the places where he stayed during his many travels i didn't open the japanese books for many years and when i did i was some it

was somehow funny and not so cushy nostalgic to see all the notes i have written into the books when i still was a beginner in reading japanese

i started to read the english book here and there a little and after some pages i saw a haiku which is in my mind all the time this haiku made me decide to add santoka to

my youtube lectures on classical japanese literature however i have to postpone this haiku because the first two lectures are dedicated to fundamental questions how to read how to

interpret and how to translate santoka's haiku well let me briefly introduce this modern haiku poet known as santoka

when he was born in december 1882 his name was tanera shoichi and he was not born into a poor family but his father was obviously not the

frugal type and ended up leading the family into poverty however the biggest shock in santoka's childhood was to see his mother fusa was brought

up from the well into which she threw herself to finish her life santoka was just 10 years old however

he was an excellent student and in 1902 he moved to tokyo to enter the literature department of the famous obazida university was it a daigaku

he only stayed until the next year in tokyo and moved back home he married sato sakino and their son ken was born the next year but family life was not

for sandoka while he devoted himself more and more to literary work he also began to drink more in 1930

he became a member of the haiku magazine zone which is uh which was directed by his mentor and haiku poet ugibara sesensui and he started to publish free haiku

haiku using his pen name santoka in 1916 the tanira family estate went bankrupt

and sandoka moved to kumamoto with his wife and child in october 1919 he traveled back to tokyo and the next year he divorced his wife

he continued to stay in tokyo where he then witnessed the great kanto earthquake in 1923

which killed over 130 000 people he left tokyo and returned to kumamoto one day in 1924 he was so drunk that he stood in front of a streetcar and

stopped it a buddhist monk saw this and took care of him that was a triggering triggering moment for santoka's career as a zen monk

he was put in charge of a small temple in kumamoto the mitori canondo but he did not endure being in charge

very long he left the temple in 1926 and that was the beginning of his begging and wandering years this life eventually continued until his death

he had a hut here and there for a short time and also some friends who supported him but his life consisted of long and lonely wandering much sake and even more

haiku in 1939 santoka went on a pilgrimage and visited the 88 temples in shikoku

in matsuyama the haiku capital he finally found a hut where he was allowed to live this was the mentioned island the one grasshad the next year

santoka died there after a haiku meeting he lived to the age of 58.

okay santoka is well known and i have occasionally had the opportunity to participate in haiku meetings of associations that preserve haiku in

the classical style according to bashor's haiku i sometimes ask the participants about santoka they all knew him but only a few

recognized his so-called free haiku his jiritsu haiku as haiku this is not because of the content but because of the form as you might know the free haiku does not

require a seasonal word a kiko or a fixed number of syllables five seven five let us start with the question of what

is meant in japanese by jioritsu haiku free haiku uh i'm quoting i'm quoting and reading and quoting from my dictionary

tanka matawa haikuno ichi so it is a it is a style a form in tanka this is a japanese short poem and

in haiku so it broke with the traditional 31 syllable poems the tanka

and with the 17 syllables of the haiku it was in haiku it was a sensory and others who proclaimed

the movement the quote comes from the renowned kojien and but whenever i am reading this i

can't shake the feeling that the word yabutta has something negative attached to it because yabutta also means to destroy but what santoka does is not

is no destruction but to liberate to free and i'm going to show this before getting into practice i would like to state that the

that three aspects are important for understanding santoka's haiku first the connections with classical poetry

second form and rhythm and finally third finally the sound i will go into the connections with classical poetry later but before we have to deal

with the material aspects of rhythm and sound in the case of sound in turn two aspects can be distinguished namely on the one hand the sound of the words or syllables

themselves the sound of the poem and on the other hand the sound of the words and syllables as an imitation of reality

this respect is usually described as onomatopoeia and i would like to make a remark on the linguistic basic in the so-called dyadic sign of sign

model science consists of two components which are described as signified or content and signifier from or form in english

since ferdinand de saussure we know that the relation of the two components is arbitrary thus there are no natural reasons why

for example the english word tree must be so named in german one says bomb in spanish and in chinese mu

in pre-modern poetry however attempts are often made to erase this randomness and more closely linked form with content

however this is hardly possible in traditional haiku poetry because first japanese has many homonyms secondly however and this reason is

important the fixed form of 17 syllables does not leave much room for maneuver of course the fixed form also has a meaning especially the connection to

classical classical japanese poetry the classical haiku form is an expression of cultural identity and cultural memory

and therefore so important so what santoka and other adapts of the free haiku movement accomplished

was not the destruction of the fixed form but the liberation of the form they reopened the form to the content

and therefore it is extremely important to pay attention to these aspects of to the aspects of form in interpretation and in translation

as an aside the english translations often happen in three lines although the three haiku in japanese appear only in one or in in two lines

when the poem is longer or there is no and not enough space this is probably an attempt by the translation translators to put the

content of the poem into a form the only question is whether this is a sufficient in japanese printed collections the

haiku usually appear in only one line on this slide you can see so called tanzaku they were all inscribed by santoka and you can see that he had a very

distinctive handwriting whether a haiku appears in one or two lines is a matter of the size on of the handwriting and the paper

the haiku on the right side is found in two variants ones with a karudu at the end the original version and once was more uru at the end

unfortunately my reading ability is not sufficient to identify the last line please let me know if anyone can read it

i come back to the haiku on the left but you can see that it is written once in one line and the other time in two lines the two large and colorful tanzaku comes from

come from the collection of a former colleague i was allowed to photograph these and others and i will hopefully be able to introduce them

one day in any case i would like to thank my colleague mr tanaka these tanzaku bring me to another aspect that is also important for printed haiku

namely the materiality of writing for example it is important whether a word is written with hiragana phonograms or with chinese characters

okay here comes my first example the haiku consists of 16 syllables but two halves of eight syllables can be distinguished

you can see the structure on this slide the structure of 16 syllables is typical of santoka's haiku and i will discuss another example later

what we don't see is a season word but in fact the season is expressed it is winter the season when it is usually dry

or at least used to be dry the word karu in classical japanese poetry or kaleru to dry in modern japanese also refers to the plants that

have dried up in winter and come to life again or explode in summer as natsukusa summer plants summer grass

dryness is emphasized by the two words but by the repetition but they these two words also serve another

function the heart sound of the consonants makes audible the sound of stones rolling down a slope bumping

against each other these rolling stones are then made the subject of the second half ishikoro goroguro the translation by john stevens captures

the content quite well although parched can be somewhat misleading as some dictionaries tend to associate it with heat that would be summer

roll and roll on the other hand rendered render the goruguro very nicely as well as rolling tumbling however what is not taking into account in both

translations is the syllable structure to emphasize that here once again precisely because the form is free it must be taken into account in the translation

it doesn't necessarily have to be the same syllable structure but a form must be recognizable wilson's translations

are principally done in three lines and thus they just they are just as rigid as the fixed form in traditional haiku

let us take another look at the material level of sound this time at the volts now we see that the first half consists of light walls but in the second half

the dark o wolves dominate in japan the ah vowel is among the light sounds but o and oo are considered as dark

the haikudas shows an opposition of light and dark sounds in the two halves but what that means is a matter of interpretation for this of course it is important to realize what a lonely and

long walking means i will try an interpretation later on another poem so we see that altogether the content was translated

however the material aspects of the sound that is the opposition of light and dark walls as well as the heart k consonants

are hardly taken into account and the rhythm also is missing it is of course extremely difficult to translate all aspects of form and content artfully

but when comparing different translations i i sometimes wonder if these aspects have been recognized or considered at all in this haiku of course

koro gorogoro is too striking not to be recognized in other haiku however you have to look much closer here comes my second example

if we first look at the syllable structure and rhythm the structure of two halves of seven syllables each stands out the internal structure of the two halves

consists of three four and four three syllables so the inner rhythm is a converse in the translation the word before

stands out because it does not exist in the original poem it may be that stevens chose the word to approximate the rhythm

or it is the result of his interpretation of kakioki which is to write something to leave it for the future or for someone his translation

consists of two halves with six and seven syllables seven and six syllables respectively

but let's ask ourselves honestly what is actually interesting about this haiku there must be at least something that increased stevens

however in my understanding the content is rather not so interesting and therefore i looked for the answer in the material aspects of the form

repeated reading in a loud voice makes it uh clear what it is all about then the many k consonants are

noticeable as seen this can have two causes namely on the one hand the sound of the words themselves for example as opposition of light and dark dark worlds

or it is again about the sound of the real world which is imitated as onomatopoeia but what then does it mean the uh to answer this question we have

to consider the content of the poem which is about writing means to write something down

to write something again and oku oku at the end is an auxiliary work here translated as to put down i think that stevens before is a

permissible permissionable interpretation as long as we don't take it as a temporal separation before the journey and during the journey

before the trip is wrong because tabi no kakioki are notes written during the journey it could be records from the previous day of the trip but that is not so

important in my interpretation the haiku gives the picture of a traveler who perhaps sits in front of his notes in the evening writes erases or crosses

out and re-writes the consonants present something present nothing else then the sound produced by the pencil on

the rough paper of the early 20th century it is exactly this material aspect of sound imitation that makes a haiku enduring

in german for example there are the words kritsen or kraken they mean among other things a shaky unclean writing but without

doubt also possess this on what opaque aspect and here comes my next example ame furu furusatova harashi de aluku

this haiku consists of 16 syllables but the structure is extremely complicated because the reason changes according to the reading before i get to that however i would

like to analyze the material aspects of sound again this in his book santokanomichi which belongs to the series i have mentioned

oyamasumita introduces the haiku according to him santoka came back to his old home for the first time after 14 years

he returned as a mandicant monk and since his draw sandals had worn through he had to go barefoot but that was not a problem since it was

still warm enough oyama then draws attention to the six ah vowels that dominate the haiku although santoko was a beggar he was not

embarrassed and oyama hears a joyful a pleasant walking from the bright r sounds since the ground in the area was very

sandy walking barefoot was not uncomfortable for the feet the wah ha in furuza oyama explains indicates the leisurely

pleasurable walking indeed looking at the volvos the dominance of clear and bright r sounds is striking but as you can see that's not all

because these light r sounds are in opposition to the dark u sounds oyama strangely does not mention them

although they also occur in six times the alternation of a and u sounds occurs frequently in santoka psycho and

incidentally was well known to basho ii another typical translation santoka combination is that of e and oo walls

in the book translated by william scott wilson oyama mentioned this haiku too in this book he introduces the haiku as follows

in wilson's translation after walking a while a gentle rain began to fall his straw head was a big one and so he

didn't get very wet the sandy earth of this southern area was as pure as sandy beach and as it was

dumb he was very happy to step on it with bare feet oyama put the haiku into a narrative framework that is nice but does not

match the entry in santoka's diary where the haiku first appears perhaps santoka told oyama a different story or oyama's narrative is based on a

so-called false memory be that as it may what is important is the assertion that santoka was very happy also important is the description of the

area around santoka's hometown where the soil is or was apparently very sandy santoka goes barefoot and apparently enjoys it

it is the childish pleasure of stepping barefoot into a puddle that can be heard in this hadashi aruku is something that is expressed in german clutch or patch

the sound of stepping with bare feet into warm into a warm paddle of water on sandy ground well if the joyful feeling is expressed

through the light are volts what do the dark uh bowl stand for here santoka's diaries letters to his friends or haiku may help

may help us because from these we know that he suffered from an ambivalent feeling when he was traveling he suffered from homesickness but when he was back home

he couldn't bear it very long and wanted to leave again as soon as possible it's a kind of good swearheads in my boost

two hearts dual alas in my breast i promised an interpretation well i read the dark vowels as expression of the depressive

while the light once expressed happiness but that alone is not enough of course therefore we still have to look for other clues to accomplish this i

approach the haiku from two direction first through other textual sources and second through the haiku itself

in 1936 four years later sandoka traveled in basho's footsteps and also visited hiraisumi this was another

most northernmost point on the pacific side in the okonozomichi journey and also the point of turning back for santoka he was very frustrated depressive which

i will talk about in the next lecture and at one stop on his return trip he wrote a letter to a friend in june 13

on june 13. the letters and other documents are included in the volume 11 of the santoka zenshu the complete

edition of santoka's works okay i'm going to quote from the letter there are two me's living inside me it's

rather so that i am disconnected into two me's that's the reason i wrote sometimes it's it's

or i am clear sometimes it's or i am muddy and in my clear times i try to live a truly pure life and write poems but in

my muddy times i become absolutely nihilistic and desperate i fall in something one can call a moral

paralysis a door tokoteki mahisho i have struggled with this contradiction

for many years and so on so we see that good and santoka suffered from a similar inner split even if the nature of the two parts were

completely different well in goodness case it is the literary character who lambs laments the two hearts

and here it is santoka okay this is going too far and i want to bring the focus back to the haiku the first thing that stands out here is a

repetition furufuru which is written entirely with hiragana phonograms we can read ame furu it rains or

ame furufuru it rains and rains expressing a continuity we can read the first eight syllables

amifuru and furusato it rains and home or we can read amifurufuru and furusato it rains and rains the homeland you can

see that the translation by william scott wilson as rain reigning in my hometown considers santoka's technique this technique comes from the classical

rocker poetry and is called kake kotoba a word or a word component has a semantic relation to the preceding syllables and

at the same time to the syllables that follow by the way in the town of hofu where santoka was born there is a kuhi a stone with a haiku

inscribed on it and the haiku is uh the same is this amifuru haiku the inscription from 1945 is by oyama sumita

but santoka's furufuru was written with chinese characters thus of course the kake kotoba technique is lost but something else

also is lost at least oyema did not include this writing in his book for now that we are at the hiragana

phonograms and kakikotoba technique something else stands out since our ring i is now sufficiently sensitized to the materiality of the

writing the two syllables haha which read as one word haha meaning mother should be noticeable and now it is necessary to recall what

santoka experienced in his childhood and what probably shaped his whole life the suicide of his mother haha when he was just 10 years old

it is the same technique in as in furufuru and in it the high complexity of the poem is also evident of course all this is a matter of

interpretation but as long as one can prove one's interpretation by the text and other sources it is a permissible interpretation after all what

we are dealing with is literature and one characteristic of literature is its ambiguity it's a polysemi by the way this haiku is a good example

to apply nelson goodman's model of symbols symbolizing is for goodman the same as referring and donation

denotation and exemplification are the two fundamental forms of reference denotation is the relationship between a so-called label such as army or

furusato and what it labels here the rain and homeland exemplification on the other hand

requires possession exemplification is possession plus reference this position in this haiku is the state of falling and falling rain

and the sound when the bare feet hit the water of a puddle on sandy ground expression is the third important symbol in goodman's theory

i am not qualified enough to explain it here in the given shortness of time and i limit myself to an example

a dark and gray landscape painting denotes a dark and grey landscape exemplifies grey and possibly expresses

sadness of or loneliness our haiku denotes continuing rain in a place called homeland and someone walking barefoot on a sandy and wet ground

it exemplifies the state of the falling rain question mark and the sound of the bare feet stepping into a puddle german

blotch or patch and it it expresses an opposition of the depressive woes versus happiness in

our vocals next of course we would have to ask how these three types of symbols are realized in translation but that would be your homework so to

speak i have talked a lot about sound in santoka's poetry so far and i think that santoka can be understood as a mimino hygiene a poet of the ear

i would like to give another example of santoka's masterful handling of the level of sound and the use of kakikotoba but this haiku will also show how

complex santoka's poems can be even though they look very simple at first the haiku is included in the collection hachinoko the begging bowl which was a

santoka's first collection and the collection contains most of his famous haiku it was published in 1933

and is known to be a very rigorous selection by santoka and his mentor ogibara sesensui it contains a haiku that were considered

the best of the best haiku at the time the fact that all four translators tried their hand at this haiku shows a certain quality but the haiku is not necessarily always

understood this is shown by this quote from a book in which rajun takao tries to bring santoka's haiku closer to the japanese reader

the book contains many photographs made by nakazato kazuto i translate the japanese text also one of the characteristics of

santoka's poetry is is his sokkinai treatment of nature sokenai means a blunt cold short or brisk for example

if he looked at the leaves falling in a drunken mood he made a poem i am drunk and the leaves are falling that's all

or no more tonaru he had no connection to the beauty of the nature of the four seasons nature was not something to be praised

sun be to praise to glorified to admire or admired can show to enjoy a view for pleasure or to admire of course it

remains to be clarified what nature has to do with poetry but the statement tonaru dake that's all or nothing more

shows a deep non-understanding and in the rest of this lecture i will prove it it will take a couple of times please be patient

the poem consists of twelve syllables with the rhythm seven and five the first half can be split into four and three syllables but we have to see

the traditional seven five unit as an aside we can see that all translators but burton watson always use punctuation

this can be a big problem but i'll go to that in my next santoka lecture william scott wilson added a note to the word horohoro he explains the japanese

word horohoro as um mimesis implying pleasantly scatteringly or melodiously so the word refers on the one hand to the

drunken speaker and the haiku and on the other hand to the falling leaves therefore we can speak again of a kake kotoba technique as well except

that the two semantically different references involve words that both follow after the expression well concerning the leaves horohoro

doesn't just mean to fall to scatter but what john stephens translated as one by one as in horohoro this is also a repetition

and coincidentally a repetition of all walls in modern japanese the second part would be ki no hafuru but the traditional reading

in waka poetry is koh noah moreover ko ko fits much better with the other dark bowls and tea would almost

be almost distracting well then by the way includes the japanese text but this is only helpful for those who can read japanese translations of a

japanese haiku however must and this should have be have become clear so far necessarily also have a transliteration

as we can see from this slide horohoro means much more these explanations are again from the standard dictionary kojian i'm going to

read them and to explain them number one the leaves of a tree are falling down or something else is falling down number two

people who were together before now are getting a part everyone is going it's his own way number three kimono naruto

clothings are getting old and falling apart number four so it's a it's a the tears rolling down

or falling down also expressed as a border bottle number five mononoku otto potty body

the sound of eating something also polypory number six kiji yamadori no nakigoy kiji the pheasant or

other birds from the mountains uh the cry of the feastend or other birds of the mountain for

santoka's personal life points two and three also may be important but horohoro is a word from traditional waka and haiku poetry

these aspects are expressed in points four and five there is for example a well-known haiku by basho that begins with horohoro santoka's haiku

and we can only understand santoka's work in his engagement engagement with basho's poetry i think it would be very interesting to read the

poetry of pasho and santoka in the sense of harold broome's book the anxiety of influence

because both poems quotes are what blooms the bloom calls a stronghold in any case it is certain that santoka had an excellent knowledge of

traditional waka and taiko poetry after all he did not only study literature it was at a university even if only briefly it is known from his diaries and other sources that he

spent a lot of time reading paschal's psycho is from the travel writing oi the translation by stephen decata interesting for us now is only the

material level of the sound we see that bashful's haiku also begin begins with a dark o holes and ends with them as well

i have shown elsewhere that paschal's haiku must be read in the context of the travel writing oinokobumi since basho changes the traditional reference of

namely he dissolves the traditional reference to the call of the season the kiji the season appears shortly after the horohorohaiku in another haiku and

bashor thematize the feasens cry the expression no longer appears they are only shrill e sounds

and santoka is doing something very similar he takes up paschal's haiku and again assigns different contents to the ingredients

on this slide we can see that santoka could spend a long time on one subject it comes from his diary of november 7 1939

i think it is very well done but it was never included in the collection however it is an example of the opposition of ooh and e-wolves

i have mentioned earlier it is interesting that this opposition is contained in the second half and at the same time connecting masterfully both parts

the dark o sounds are exclusively within the first six syllables important is that the combination with

horribly yoki horubiyouki gives horohoro in classical japanese means go to ruin fall into ruin perish

and yuku expresses a process of uh or continuity now we have to remember that furu in the haiku uh horohoro

konoha furu also is a kakikota from classical japanese literature one meaning is getting old or being old

means i and aki is autumn so together they mean my autumn standing for the the end of my life it is essential to see that what

is written with hiragana in fact the chinese character for i can also be read watashi but in the haiku the repetition

of and e is crucial introduced now we know that horohoro is a very complex word we also know that santoka was a friend

of saki so it may also be interesting to know what is meant by horohoro as a description of a state under the influence of alcohol

here again the diaries help us and there is a very nice entry from the summer of 1935.

i am going to read it and then explain it is something you are saying in not very deep content while you are drunken

so one glass and there is no more east and west there is no more space nihi two glasses and there's no

old and new there's no more time senpai three glasses and there's no more difference between me the self and the other

sake i have some alcohol i have something to drink i don't know how to read this name i think it's shigeyaki

so i i invented i invited and then so we see that here in this description [Music]

is the first phase of getting drunk but there's one more meaning to consider and i'll stop here horohoro appears in several dialects

with different meanings but in the prefecture of yamaguchi it means to complain rambling to mata santoka was born in yamaguchi

i would like to summarize my observations with a haiku written by a well-known poet who studied santoka for a long time and who wrote several

several books about him kanekotota sake okay my translation

is not particularly poetic especially the somehow ugly word alcohol which has nothing to do with poetry but

we see immediately that this haiku is dominated by dark or walls the picture of the poem is that the speaker was advised

possibly by the doctor to stop drinking alcohol and the dark or sounds nicely reflect the discon the discontented grumbling of the speaker

presumably the grumbling of an old man the haiku has no seasonal world and the structure is also not in accordance with uh tradition

however i think that there is no one who would call this one free haiku we can see that kaneko chose the haiku as the title of a book his autobiography

of course the connection of the two haiku is purely speculative but i think it is a nice and creative connection

and that concludes the first part of this lecture thank you very much actually there's something i would like to say because i realize that the this time

my voice is a little strange because there's always a little echo to hear but i couldn't find the reason for for this technical problem

but now i realize that uh while speaking i have to switch out of the computer sound the computer speaker

but and please do understand that i don't want to do all this recording again so please be patient and next time i will fix this problem thank you very

much