I thought I’d share with you my first dream of the year – a tradition in Japan. But although I knew I had been dreaming on the night of December 31, I couldn’t remember what on earth it was when I woke! So I’ve been scratching my head ever since, trying to come up with something momentous, portentous or just plain interesting for my first post of 2016 …
Why do we treat one day (January 1) as being different from the day before or the day after? As being a day of significance? For those of us in the southern hemisphere the undercurrents of the pagan celebration to mark ‘the light coming back’ are lost in translation – we’re in the middle of summer.
This year I have promised myself, quietly and out loud, to focus more on my writing. What I have learned from the past couple of years is that I need a certain amount of calm in my life to do that and at times in 2015 I couldn’t write a single decent line, let alone a complete haiku.
To help re-immerse me in the world of haiku, I bought two books before Christmas – A Vast Sky, an anthology of contemporary world haiku (all published between 2000 and 2014), edited by Bruce Ross, Koko Kato, Dietmar Tauchner and Patricia Prime; and John Carley’s Renku Reckoner, the distillation of his writing and thinking on this ancient verse form.
I’m dipping in and out of them both so don’t have much to report yet, except that as I already know several of Carley’s essays, I know he is a delight to read. A Vast Sky includes a good selection from Japan, so that’s interesting, while the other ‘interesting’ thing is that the editors have more haiku included – 3 each – than most other writers. Only Richard von Sturmer of New Zealand is accorded equal status. Most poets are represented by a single haiku, while a few have 2. There is no information in the General Introduction by Bruce Ross as to how the selections were made.
The anthology is ambitious in scope but, sadly, there is no mention of who has translated the various haiku from their original languages (presumably Kato for the Japanese section, but only one translator is acknowledged for one haiku in the Europe section). So let me give my personal thanks to the translators for allowing me to read haiku from such diverse sources.
tussen regenschermen
wandelt een natte hoed
eenzam door de straat
between umbrellas
a wet hat walks the street
all by itself
– Willy Cuvelier, Belgium
itanoma ni cho no utsureru gokusho kana
on the wooden floor
a butterfly reflected –
so terribly hot
– Masako Yamanishi, Japan
vintersolverv
tyngden
av gamle argumenter
winter solstice
the weight
of old arguments
– O. G. Aksnes, Norway
year’s end
her skipping rope
too short
– Maria Steyn, South Africa
breath, a collection of haiku 