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, (2025). 9781405881180, Pearson Longman. ISBN 9781405881180 is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 morae (called on in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern;Lanoue, David G. Issa, Cup-of-tea Poems: Selected Haiku of Kobayashi Issa, Asian Humanities that include a kireji, or "cutting word"; and a kigo, or seasonal reference. However, haiku by classical Japanese poets, such as Matsuo Bashō, also deviate from the 17- on pattern and sometimes do not contain a kireji. Similar poems that do not adhere to these rules are generally classified as senryū. (2016). 9781107029033, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107029033
Haiku originated as an opening part of a larger Japanese genre of poetry called renga. These haiku written as an opening stanza were known as hokku and over time they began to be written as stand-alone poems. Haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century.
Originally from Japan, haiku today are written by authors worldwide. Haiku in English and haiku in other languages have different styles and traditions while still incorporating aspects of the traditional haiku form. Non-Japanese language haiku vary widely on how closely they follow traditional elements. Additionally, a minority movement within gendai-haiku, supported by Ogiwara Seisensui and his disciples, has varied from the tradition of 17 on as well as taking nature as their subject.
In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed as a single line, while haiku in English often appear as three lines, although variations exist. There are several other forms of Japanese poetry related to haiku, such as tanka, as well as other art forms that incorporate haiku, such as haibun and haiga.
/ref> A kireji helps mark rhythmic divisions.The kireji lends the verse structural support, Brief Notes on "Kire-ji" , Association of Japanese Classical Haiku. Retrieved 2008-10-16. allowing it to stand as an independent poem.Steven D. Carter. Three Poets at Yuyama. Sogi and Yuyama Sangin Hyakuin, 1491, in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Autumn, 1978), p.249Konishi Jin'ichi; Karen Brazell; Lewis Cook, The Art of Renga, in Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Autumn, 1975), p.39 The use of kireji distinguishes haiku and hokku from second and subsequent verses of renku; which may employ semantic and syntactic disjuncture, even to the point of occasionally end-stopping a phrase with a shūjoshi. However, renku typically employ kireji.Sato, Hiroaki. One Hundred Frogs: from renga to haiku to English, Weatherhill 1983,
In English, since kireji have no direct equivalent, poets sometimes use punctuation such as a dash or ellipsis, or an implied break to create a juxtaposition intended to prompt the reader to reflect on the relationship between the two parts.
The kireji in the Bashō examples "old pond" and "the wind of Mt Fuji" are both "ya" (). Neither the remaining Bashō example nor the Issa example contain a kireji. However, they do both balance a fragment in the first five on against a phrase in the remaining 12 on (it may not be apparent from the English translation of the Issa that the first five on mean "Edo's rain").
Although the word on is sometimes translated as "syllable", the true meaning is more nuanced. One on in Japanese is counted for a short syllable, two for an Vowel length or Gemination, and one for an "n" at the end of a syllable. Thus, the word "haibun", though counted as two syllables in English, is counted as four on in Japanese (ha-i-bu-n); and the word " on" itself, which English-speakers would view as a single syllable, comprises two on: the short vowel o and the n. This is illustrated by the Issa haiku below, which contains 17 on but only 15 syllables. Conversely, some sounds, such as "kyo" () may look like two syllables to English speakers but are in fact a single on (as well as a single syllable) in Japanese.
In 1973, the Haiku Society of America noted that the norm for writers of haiku in English was to use 17 syllables, but they also noted a trend toward shorter haiku. According to the society, about 12 syllables in English approximates the duration of 17 Japanese on.
Translated: Translated by William J. Higginson in Matsuo Bashō: Frog Haiku (Thirty Translations and One Commentary), including commentary from Robert Aitken's A Zen Wave: Bashô's Haiku and Zen (revised ed., Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003)
This separates into on as:
Another haiku by Bashō:
Translated:
As another example, this haiku by Bashō illustrates that he was not always constrained to a 5-7-5 on pattern. It contains 18 on in the pattern 6-7-5.
Translated:
This separates into on as:
This haiku example was written by Kobayashi Issa:
Translated:
This separates into on as,
Bashō was deified by both the imperial government and Shinto religious headquarters one hundred years after his death because he raised the haikai genre from a playful game of wit to sublime poetry. He continues to be revered as a saint of poetry in Japan, and is the one name from classical Japanese literature that is familiar throughout the world.Rimer, J. Thomas. A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature, Kodansha International 1988, pp.69-70
Buson is recognized as one of the greatest masters of haiga (an art form where the painting is combined with haiku or haikai prose). His affection for painting can be seen in the painterly style of his haiku.Ross, Bruce. Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku, Tuttle Publishing, 1993, p.xv
Hokku up to the time of Shiki, even when appearing independently, were written in the context of renku.Hiroaki Sato. One Hundred Frogs, Weatherhill, 1983, p.113 Shiki formally separated his new style of verse from the context of collaborative poetry. Being Agnosticism,Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958, p.163 he also separated it from the influence of Buddhism. Further, he discarded the term "hokku" and proposed the term haiku as an abbreviation of the phrase " haikai no ku" meaning a verse of haikai,Earl Miner, Japanese Linked Poetry. Princeton University Press, 1980. pbk. although the term predates Shiki by some two centuries, when it was used to mean any verse of haikai. Since then, "haiku" has been the term usually applied in both Japanese and English to all independent haiku, irrespective of their date of composition. Shiki's revisionism dealt a severe blow to renku and surviving haikai schools. The term "hokku" is now used chiefly in its original sense of the opening verse of a renku, and rarely to distinguish haiku written before Shiki's time.
Although there were further attempts outside Japan to imitate the "hokku" in the early 20th century, there was little understanding of its principles. Early Western scholars such as Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) and William George Aston were mostly dismissive of hokku's poetic value.
Henderson translated every hokku and haiku into a rhyme scheme tercet (ABA), whereas the Japanese originals never used rhyme. Unlike Yasuda, however, he recognized that 17 syllables in English are generally longer than the 17 on of a traditional Japanese haiku. Because the normal modes of English poetry depend on accentual meter rather than on syllabics, Henderson chose to emphasize the order of events and images in the originals. Nevertheless, many of Henderson's translations were in the five-seven-five pattern.
In the early 20th century, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore composed haiku in Bengali language. He also translated some from Japanese. In Gujarati, Jhinabhai Desai 'Sneharashmi' popularized haiku Article on Sneh Rashmi on website of Gujarati Sahitya Parishad (Gujarati Literary Council). In it, we read: "જાપાની કાવ્યપ્રકાર હાઈકુને ગુજરાતીમાં સુપ્રતિષ્ઠિત કરી તેમણે ઐતિહાસિક પ્રદાન કર્યું છે" ("By pioneering and popularizing the famous form of Japanese poetry called Haiku in Gujarati, he has gained a place in history"). and remained a popular haiku writer.Ramanathan S. & Kothari R. (1998). Modern Gujarati Poetry: A Selection. Sahitya Akedami. , In February 2008, the World Haiku Festival was held in Bangalore, gathering haijin from all over India and Bangladesh, as well as from Europe and the United States. In South Asia, some other poets also write Haiku from time to time, most notably including the Pakistani poet Omer Tarin, who is also active in the movement for global nuclear disarmament and some of his 'Hiroshima Haiku' have been read at various peace conferences in Japan and the UK.See article by Yasuhiko Shigemoto, on Hiroshima Haiku and Omer Tarin, in The Mainichi daily, Tokyo, Japan, 15 August 1998, p 11 Indian writer in Malayalam language, Ashitha, wrote several Haiku poems which have been published as a book. Her poems helped popularise haiku among the readers of Malayalam literature.
In 1992 Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz published the volume Haiku in which he translated from English to Polish haiku of Japanese masters and American and Canadian contemporary haiku authors.
The former president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, is a haiku writer and known as "Haiku Herman". He published a book of haiku in April 2010.
One of the first advocates of English-language hokku was the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. In "A Proposal to American Poets," published in the Reader magazine in February 1904, Noguchi gave a brief outline of the hokku and some of his English efforts, ending with the exhortation, "Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets!" At about the same time the poet Sadakichi Hartmann was publishing original English-language hokku, as well as other Japanese forms in both English and French.
Scholar Richard Iadonisi writes in his article, "I Am Nobody" that novelist Richard Wright is considered, "the first noteworthy American minority writer" to produce haiku. There is much scholarly debate over why Wright became interested with the haiku form. It is known that he had begun to study haiku while battling dysentery. While Wright was purportedly an avid reader of Ezra Pound— whose Imagist poetry was based on the haiku form— Iadonisi suggests that Wright was not interested in American style haiku. Instead, Wright opted to study the techniques of British writer Reginald Horace Blyth. He also studied classical haiku poets such as Kobayashi Issa and Matsuo Bashō. Wright began writing a series of haiku in the summer of 1959, completing it in 1960. He had written thousands of haiku between that time span. Wright titled his work Haiku: This Other World and submitted it to William Targ of World Publishing, who rejected it. In 1998, thirty-eight years after Wright's death, This Other World was finally published.
In 1921 the magazine La Ronda published a negative critique of the Japanese "Hai-kai" fashion that was spreading in France and Spain, while in the following years many futurists appreciated the fast haiku style. In Italy, the national haiku association was founded in Rome in 1987 by Sono Uchida, the well-known Japanese haijin and the ambassador of Japan in Vatican. Soon after, the national association called Italian Friends of the haiku (Associazione Italiana Amici dell'Haiku) was established, and then the Italian Haiku Association. The poet Mario Chini (1876–1959) published the book of haiku titled "Moments" (Rome, 1960). Later, Edoardo Sanguineti published some of his haiku. The famed poet Andrea Zanzotto also published a collection of haiku in English, which he translated back into his native Italian (Haiku for a Season / Haiku per una stagione, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2021).
The Mexican poet José Juan Tablada is credited with popularising haiku in his country, reinforced by the publication of two collections composed entirely in that form: Un dia (1919),Entire collection online and El jarro de flores (1922).Entire collection online In the introduction to the latter, Tablada noted that two young Mexicans, Rafael Lozano and Carlos Gutiérrez Cruz, had also begun writing them. They were followed soon after by Carlos Pellicer, Xavier Villaurrutia, and by Jaime Torres Bodet in his collection Biombo (1925).Sonja Karsen, Selected poems of Jaime Torres Bodet, Indiana University 1964, p.27 Much later, Octavio Paz included many haiku in Piedras Sueltas (1955).Spanish text online; and some translations by Muriel Rukeyser in Selected Poems of Octaviao Paz, Indiana University 1963
Elsewhere the Ecuadorian poet and diplomat Jorge Carrera Andrade included haiku among the 31 poems contained in Microgramas (Tokio 1940) The Quarterly Conversation, March 2012 and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges in the collection La cifra (1981). Pequeños Universos
In socialist Yugoslavia, development of haiku poetry began during the 1960s, when the first haiku books were written, starting with Leptirova krila (The Butterfly's Wings) by Dubravko Ivančan in 1964. Other writers include Vladimir Zorčić (1941–1995), Milan Tokin's (1909–1962) unpublished collection Godišnja doba (Seasons), Desanka Maksimović, Alexander Neugebauer (1930–1989), and Zvonko Petrović (1925–2009). Vladimir Devide (1925–2010) published the first book on haiku theory in 1970, titled Japanese Poetry and its Cultural and Historical Context, with many translations of Japanese classics. Dejan Razić (1935–1985) published two books on haiku in 1979, The Development of Haikai Poetry from its Beginning to Basho, and The Peak of Haikai Poetry. The journal Haiku ran from 1977 to 1981.
The Haiku Marathon (1982) and the Yugoslav Haiku Competition (1985) were organised in the 1980s by Slavko Sedlar. The first Serbian haiku journal Paun started being published in 1988 with Milijan Despotović as an editor. The journal Kulture istoka (1983–1992) gave further impetus to the study of Japanese and other oriental cultures. In 1991, the Belgrade-based haiku club Šiki was formed, named after Masaoka Shiki. In 1999, Anakiev together with Serge Tome created the web site Haiku Association of Southeastern Europe.The site is offline, but can be accessed through the Internet Archive The Haiku Association of Yugoslavia was formed in 2000. The multilingual "Knots- The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku Poetry" was published in 1999 with poems from writers all over southeastern Europe. The 2000 conference of the World Haiku Federation was held in Slovenia.
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