Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I would first
like to express my sincere gratitude to your assembly for the
honor of being invited to today's gathering, and of being considered
worthy to take part in its reflection on haiku and the short
verse form in general. However, I would like you to be aware
of the fact that it is not without a feeling of inadequacy that
I thus approach the poetic experience of which your civilization
and its great poets are the undisputed masters. No people in
the world has ever equaled the Japanese in making the whole of
reality, both social and cosmic, echo in the consonance and dissonance
of a fewwords. You have married the infinite to the word in a
way that fascinates people far beyond your borders, and certainly
in France for a long time many of us have listened to your poets,
beginning with Basho, who, as I shall explain shortly, has counted
for much in my own life.
French poets like haiku, and it is with this observation and
a few reflections on its meaning that I would like to begin my
modest contribution to your investigation. French poets love
the haiku, and for
about fifty years they even have devoted particular attention
to it, making serious efforts to understand its spirit and draw
lessons from it for their own relation to the world, which means
that to a certain extent they are capable of penetrating at least
some of its major aspects.
However - and this is my first observation - it is, needless
to say, only through the medium of translations that we are acquainted
with these poems, and one would therefore be tempted to think
that what is most essential to haiku is thereby denied to us,
for a number of reasons that cannot be
lightly dismissed. First of all, there is the difference of language
between your poets and us, as a result of which major categories
of thought and many other less important notions, often present
in the poems, do not hold the same position within the whole
network of relations that our words
maintain with the world as they have constructed it. There may
be disparity between the connotations and the denotations that
characterize the Japanese and the French words that one wishes
to bring together, but it also happens, I imagine, that what
in your language may be expressed immediately and intuitively
in one single notion, can only be understood in French at the
cost of a process of analysis that is difficult of accomplishment,
and leading, in any case, to a number of ideas that we feel to
be distinct and whose hitherto unnoticed relationship we will
in any event have to try and understand. What a great problem
this becomes when this kind of situation occurs in the translation
of a short poem, where unfolding reflection is inconceivable!
Above all when these unfamiliar notions bear on fundamental aspects
of your poetic thought or your most basic perception of the world.
Closely related to this problem of the disparity of the vocabulary,
there is the disparity of the respective syntaxes, which are
further removed from one another than anything one can imagine.
What a distance separates the syntax of the Indo-European languages
and the way Japanese produces meaning from notions and specific
data! Now, it is through these relations between words that the
intuition which enables you to connect initially very distinct
impressions, can open up a path to haiku, leading, I imagine
more smoothly and more rapidly than our analytical phrases, to
the feeling of unity or nothingness which lies at the heart of
all real poetry. Perhaps it requires all the stanzas of Keats's
Ode to a Nightingale, perhaps it takes all the stanzas of
Le cimetiere marin by Paul Valery, to achieve the impression
of a melodious song in the night or of the deserted sea in the
sun, which a Basho or a Shiki could have evoked in seventeen
syllables. All this augurs ill for any attempt at translating
these seventeen syllables into French or English.
Moreover, in Japanese the graphic representation of words
is based on ideograms, on signs that often have preserved in
their appearance something of the shape of things, and the haiku
itself is short, which allows the reader to take in all its characters
at a glance, so that the poet is able to impart through his words
a vibration of their visible shape that will assist his discernment
of the most immediate, the most intimate in the situation that
he is evoking. That kind of poet is therefore a painter. He is
able to add to the actual knowledge of words the knowledge of
what lies beyond words, a knowledge that grants the painter a
regard deepened by silent meditation of the great aspects of
natural space. What will remain of that intuition in the words
of our translations, separated as they are from the sentient
aspect of the very things they denote by the fundamentally arbitrary
and abstract nature of alphabetical notation? The Western writing
system eliminates direct relations with the world, and it is
that which comprises its particular suitability for the physical
sciences, but which at the same time makes poetry so difficult,
and I confess that I envy you your ideograms. All the more so
because they seem to me to keep open, in the center of the lines
which make up each of them, a void signifying nothingness, the
experience of nothingness which is, as I have already said, a
major concern of all poetic thought, even when that thought seeks
out in lived existence whatever can provide us with a reason
to exist on earth. There is a mental clarity in the signs that
your writing
system uses, and that clarity is at the forefront of your poetic
works, while in the West it only comes in at the end, at least
if the poet has not lost his way in the process.
It is indeed very hard to translate haiku into our Western
languages. I even think that we have to resign ourselves to the
idea that it is impossible to translate them.
II
And yet, in France, for a long time, there has been and there
continues to be a great interest in haiku: why is that?
It may be, simply, because the translations of haiku, however
poor reflections of the original they may be, remain superb examples
of short verse, which, in the situation in which we find ourselves
in Europe, itself has tremendous value, both as an example and
an encouragement.
What is it in fact that typifies a short text? It is a heightened
capacity to open oneself up to a specifically poetic experience.
Let us for a while not limit our discussion to poems of only
seventeen syllables, as rich in graphic features as they are
in meaning, but let us consider all kinds of writings that have
endeavored to express in few words, either in French or in Japanese,
an emotion, an intuition, a feeling, a perception. It goes without
saying that in this narrow verbal space, that must perforce be
self-sufficient, there is no room for narrative, except by way
of allusions, that can only suggest indirectly and in a single
stroke. And the immediate consequence is that the words of the
short poem are freed from one particular approach to events and
things, meaning that approach which in stories links these events
and things in a sequence of causes and effects, with the danger
that one no longer knows these situations in life, except through
the kind of thinking that analyzes and generalizes: the kind
that only knows particular reality from the outside. The short
poem is preserved from the temptation to hold one aloof from
the immediate impression. Thus more than any other form it is
capable of coinciding with a lived moment.
And within that moment we are bound to consider only very
few things, since the poem contains only very few words: as a
result, in this moment of our existence, certain relations between
those things of the world may have formed within us, and they
will be enabled to unfold freely, with all their
vibrations, all the more audible as one is no longer a prisoner
of conceptual thinking. We are drawn back into that feeling of
unity of which a long discourse would deprive us. This experience
of unity, of unity lived and not simply thought, is clearly poetry.
We tend to forget this, in the West, because our religious traditions,
those of a personal God who transcends the world, have separated
the absolute from natural reality, yet even so, this drawing
near of the One in every single thing remains nonetheless the
principal feeling to which all poets are instinctively drawn.
Thus, more than any other form, the short verse form is capable
of being the threshold of a specifically poetical experience.
When a poem adopts a short form, by this simple fact it directs
itself toward that which may be poetry in our relation to the
world.
III
However, I have to point out that the short poetic form has
not often been present in the history of Western poetry. Precisely
because for a long time reality has been conceived of as the
mere creation of God rather than the divine itself, theological
and philosophical thought has occupied the
European mind to a much greater extent than listening to the
sound of thewind, or gazing at falling leaves, and our poems
therefore have to berather long for a thought to unfold. That
is true even for poems that seem to be comparatively short, like
the sonnet, which for centuries has played a major role in Western
history. The sonnet, though it has much more than seventeen syllables,
has only fourteen lines and in the West it is considered a short
poem, which does not mean that its effect is that of a short
verse form. It begins with two stanzas of a particular formal
structure, namely two groups of four lines, followed and concluded
by two other stanzas of three lines each, so that odd numbers
follow even numbers, and between the two parts there is something
like a rupture, which seems to signify and has often been used
to signify something, so much so that the sonnet, however restricted,
is a thought that unfolds, and is in that somehow akin to a syllogism,
with its premises and conclusion. Of course it is perfectly possible
to have a genuine poetic experience in a sonnet, just as much
as in any other form. One may even experience in one's mind,
at the transition from even numbers to odd ones in the ninth
line, a sort of awakening to the sense of passing time, which
is to say of existence, which is to say of the moment, which
is a potential experience of the immediate. But it is no accident
that the sonnet has for such a long time in its history been
associated with the current of Platonism, for it is at least
as much a discourse as a poem.
Let us not dwell on those decidedly short forms that have
been found in Western literature, such as the epigram. For in
this case the aim is simply to highlight a brilliant idea, and
we do not find ourselves in a relation to the reality outside
ourselves, with nature, but within the margins of a
conversation, among talkers who are only interested in ideas
and the beautiful language in which these ideas take form. Here,
brevity is used to create surprise, to show off clever wit, but
for this variety of brevity real poets can only feel repulsion,
and rightly consider it futile, for in these cases they have
not encountered an authentic short form.
The unfortunate outcome of all this has been that poets who,
in the nineteenth century, wrote short verses for no other purpose
than to express a fleeting impression, have been themselves considered
as worthless poets, or at least as minor poets, inferior to those
who wrote much longer works. All the more so since the poets
who were labeled minor, allowed themselves be persuaded that
that indeed was what they seemed to be. A case in point is the
poet Toulet, certainly not a great poet, yet in whose Contre-rimes
sounds of great subtlety vibrate. Borges, who knew what poetry
is about, had a
great admiration for Toulet, but in France he has not so far
been accorded much importance. Almost the same thing could be
said of Verlaine. In his case nobody would deny that he is indeed
a great poet, yet most readings of his work reduce it to the
reckless moments of his darkest days, instead of
recognizing that his poetry is capable of the greatest perceptiveness
or even, as in Crimen Amoris, of posing, this time with
great force, the problems of being-in-the-world in a most eloquent
discourse. Speaking of Verlaine, I might observe in passing that,
if I was asked to cite a few poems in French that are akin to
haiku, I would immediately think of several of his. Is there
not something recognizable to you in a fragment like:
The shadow of trees on the surface of the foggy river
Fades like smoke,
While up in the air among the real boughs
Turtledoves coo plaintively.
I have to add, however, that these lines by Verlaine do not
in themselves constitute a poem, but are part of a longer text,
and that if we are to find brevity in the history of French poetry,
we have to plunge into long works, like a cormorant into a lake,
to discover moments where the poet has briefly paused, raising
his eyes from his discourse to look about him. In those instances
brevity was for him an unforeseen happening, not something planned
beforehand. Surely, however, this did not prevent him from feeling
often that these were the very moments when his poetic project
was at its best.
In the age of Romanticism, French society and religious belief
had begun to change in a way that was favorable to the poetic
understanding of reality. Together with a certain decline in
the Christian conception of the world, the idea of a nature brimming
with mysterious life stimulated poets to cling to the impressions
they drew from it, so that the essentially poetic experience
could assert itself against the more discursive elements in poems,
and this created the conditions for a better understanding of
the value and potential of poetic brevity, and even for making
conscious use of
it, by considering that it could be the very heart of poetic
exploration. That is precisely what happened in the case of Rimbaud,
who started by writing long poems brimming with ideas, and who
quite rapidly turned to the incandescent notations of his 1872
poems and his Illuminations. One can say that these poems
of Rimbaud's are the first great creations of the short form
in French, in the work of a poet whom one might compare, it seems
to me, to certain poets of Japan on account of his way of life.
While Rimbaud's poems offered a great model for the modern age,
they remained
nonetheless an exception, and, for those among us in France who
know better today than yesterday that the perception of the sentient
world lies at the heart of poetry, more and other poetic testimonies
were needed.
That is why the interest in haiku spread in France in the
second half of the twentieth century, and remains strong today.
This interest took root when both texts and a certain idea about
Japanese poets began to circulate, thanks to translations or
commentaries, and that is how Blyth's book Haiku came
to play a major role for some among us. In order to interest
the French reader the translations did not need to preserve the
richness of the original, because the simple fact of being concise,
of being limited to a single glance, concentrating a few great
realities of the natural or social world into one impression,
had by now become something that people could understand as of
specifically poetic value. And nothing, moreover, prevented the
reader of these poems from studying their authors, taking cognizance
of the Zen monks, and from imbuing themselves with a spirituality
that answers powerfully to the spiritual needs of modern society,
which has come to understand that many of its religious or metaphysical
beliefs are mere myths. The idea that there is nothing behind
the phenomena, that the human individual must not consider himself
superior to nature: that is what we must henceforth accept, and
what enables us to listen to the voice of haiku. I have no hesitation
in saying that the best French poets since the fifties have given
thought to this form of poetry. It is not a kind of "haiku
fashion" that we have witnessed, but an awakening to a necessary
and fundamental reference, which can only remain at the center
of Western poetic thought.
IV
Now I must tell you what specific form this influence has
assumed. It goes without saying that we do not need to imitate
haiku, to write poems that are as short as possible, and correspond
more or less to the number of words in a haiku when it is translated
into French. A few poets have attempted this, in a naive way,
but that is to be misled. Unlike Japanese, the French language
does not have the visible aspect of signs to carry over the intuition
of the poet, and the conceptual aspects of vocabulary continue
to predominate in the words we use, even when their number is
restricted, so that, if we are to reach the depth and limpidity
of writing by the haiku masters, we will have to fight a long
battle in our reliance on adjectives and nouns, and the signs
of this struggle will have to be
sufficiently present in the poem for the reader to recognize
it, relive it, and thus learn and observe how the poet managed
to compose the poem. As it was in the past in French poetry,
so it is still today, that brevity is a passing state that one
occasionally happens to attain, but nothing more. The only thing
that we can do is to move gradually towards this state, within
texts that remain long, and which are in the end a record of
our search, the arduous and never ending attempt to reach transparency
in our relationship to ourselves and the world.
Here I want to add that the French poet still has a strong
sense of himself as an individual, despite the quality of evidence
offered by the lessons in non-individuality, in self-detachment,
that he encounters in a Japanese poetry deeply imbued with Buddhism.
In the West, it is hard to forget the
teachings of Christianity, which used to claim that the human
individual has a reality of his own and absolute value. For us,
poetic sensibility remains absorbed in the reflection of the
poet upon himself, and the great poems therefore remain caught
in a kind of ambiguity, divided between the concern for individual
destiny and a need to plunge into the depths of the natural and
cosmic world, where this destiny no longer has any meaning. Representative
of this ambiguity is the frequently admirable work of Pierre-Albert
Jourdan, who died prematurely about ten years ago. Works such
as l'Entree dans le jardin (Entry into the Garden), or
les Sandales de paille (Straw Sandals) - in the latter
title you will no doubt recognize an allusion to the life of
wandering poet-priests in Japan - embody simultaneously the heritage
of St. Francis of Assissi and of the great travelogues of Basho.
But perhaps you expect a more personal testimony from me.
I can tell you that this interest in the short verse, and especially
in haiku, is something I have experienced myself. First, it was
a way of reading the authors of our French past. I remember my
emotion when, in a collection of mediaeval texts, I came across
what was nothing more than a fragment, the only remainder of
a manuscript that was lost forever, but for me that fragment
embodied in a single stroke poetry as such. It was these simple
words: "Helas, Olivier Bachelin". Just three
words, and two out of the three constituting a single proper
name, that of Olivier Bachelin. But what a flash of intensity
in an utterance so short! On the one hand, one man called Olivier
Bachelin, someone who has lived, perhaps has loved, who has
known pleasure and pain, but about whom nothing is known, yet
who, precisely for this reason, may represent the condition of
each and every one of us in its most fundamental meaning. And
on the other hand, this "alas", which suggests that
some misfortune had befallen him, which reminds us of the vicissitudes
of life, of the risk inherent in it, and of the void that gapes
beneath it, the two poles of our concern on earth, with this
abrupt reconciliation between them that reveals the identity
of being and of nothingness. Then one turns back upon the world
a gaze freed of illusions, a gaze without recoil, a gaze which
takes in everything which is, or rather which is not, with a
silent immediacy. That "Helas, Olivier Bachelin",
in its extreme laconism, embodied poetry for me in a much more
direct and powerful way than many long poems, and I would be
tempted to compare these words to a haiku if I were not aware
that they are still haunted by that Western dream that the individual
as such is an
absolute reality.
That dream existed likewise in me, and when I began writing
seriously myself, writing from the outset short, very short verses,
the ones that make up the first part of my first book Du mouvement
et de l'immobilite de Douve (On the movement and immobility
of Douve), published in 1953, I was forced to admit that these
texts too were burdened by that preoccupation with individual
destiny, and this prevented them from genuinely encountering
reality in its unity, and prompted me, in short, to embark upon
a long work of inner clarification, where the ego that stubbornly
clings to its illusions would be forced to disperse in the evidence
of the world. Obviously an impossible task, or at any rate a
never ending one, at least for me, but it opened up a path that
I believe to be of specific relevance for modern poetry in the
West, and it showed how from our own perspectives we may encounter
haiku, encounter that teaching where poetry and wisdom are combined.
That encounter will take place at moments whenever, in the midst
of our writing, where the ego continues its soliloquy, we should
succeed, because of something that happens in our lives, in seeing
silent reality raise itself before us, a reality which is quite
alien to our concerns and at the same time mysteriously hospitable.
One of these moments appears in the book I have already cited,
at least that is how I understand it, and so it is for me the
first thing I ever wrote that is sufficiently akin to haiku for
me to allow myself to quote it. It consists simply of two lines,
but in my view they constitute a whole poem, which I have presented
separately from others, on a page by itself. It runs:
Tu as pris une lampe et tu ouvres la porte.
Que faire d'une lampe, il pleut, le jour se leve.
(You have taken a lamp and you open the door.
What use is a lamp, it's raining, the day breaks.)
You will see what is at issue here: the discovery in the morning
of the rain that veils the countryside, the ego which in that
great silent manifestation suddenly detaches itself from the
self, so that there is no longer any need for the lamp which
would have served the pursuit of one of his ordinary activities,
and a new light appears, or rather the light of every day appears
in a new way. In that moment on the threshold of the house, perhaps
after a tormented night, conciseness was necessary if I was to
remain true to my experience. Adding anything to these few words
would only have had the effect of making me forget the experience.
Since that time I have found myself very often far away from
that clarity, from that quality of evidence, but at least I could
no longer deny what poetry was, and this prepared me better than
before for the reading of haiku, and so I was ready to appreciate
Basho when, in the sixties, a French translation of The Narrow
Road to the Interior was published. I still remember my excitement
when I read the first lines of the book. "The months and
days are eternal travellers ... In which year it was I do not
recall, but, like a wisp of cloud borne upon the wind, I too
have been carried away by wanderlust." With this translation
of Basho, with the anthology of haiku compiled later by Roger
Munier, it was the great Japanese poetry that took the stage
in France. I have no doubt that it will continue to speak to
our most intimate preoccupations. I even dare to think that there
will be in French poetry a spate of experimentation with short
verse forms which will be the direct result of haiku, of what
they have of universal, of international value: not a precise
form, but a spirit, an immense capacity for spiritual experience.
Thank you once again. I also owe it to the attention you have
so graciously accorded me that I have become better acquainted
with the work of the poets of Matsuyama, in particular Masaoka
Shiki. It is desirable that these poets become better known in
France, and I am happy that, thanks to you, I am in a position
to talk about them in my country. It is also to be hoped that
your project for an international reflection on haiku and short
verse will develop particularly with the European nations, and
I hope that I will be able to take back home from these days
spent among you, precise programs
that will allow for new exchanges, for the greater good of poetry,
which is our common good and one of the few means that remain
for preserving society from the dangers that beset it.
Yves Bonnefoy
(translated from the French by W. F. Vande Walle with D. Burleigh)
Memorial Lecture by Yves Bonnefoy
