Polish Poets Explore Haiku

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Agnieszka Warnke on Polish poets who explored Japanese haiku. Here are a couple pieces of it.

Poland, 1937, issue no. 46 of Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) dedicated to Japanese culture. Somewhere amidst an article on the erotic life of a Japanese man, practical advice on ‘Dziudo i dziudziutsu’ (Judo and Jujitsu), and an advertisement for Mitsubishi, there are references to haiku that inform the reader that they are ‘17-syllable poems’ and that ‘from the initial stanza of renga, another variation later developed, which was called hokku or haikai’.

The Polish Haiku Association was established nearly 80 years later. In the meantime, several volumes of Japanese poems (not necessarily translated from the original) were published, as well as Antologia polskiego haiku (Anthology of the Polish Haiku), in which Ewa Tomaszewska included works inspired – sometimes unconsciously – by the poetry and aesthetics of the Far East. How did the most popular Japanese poetic form come into being, and how has it evolved?

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Yamoto Dojū, an expert on the genre, argues that kigo [season words] is ‘the highest taste, the essence of poetry’. The most famous anthology of Japanese miniatures in Poland, translated by Żuławska-Umeda, is organised into four seasons. In 14th-century Japan, there were several indicators of the seasons, but by the 16th and 17th centuries, their number increased to 599, soon exceeding a thousand. There’s an extensive list of Polish kigo on the website of the Polish Haiku Association: spring is represented, for example, by molehills and hay fever, summer smells of chives and hay carts, the beginning of autumn is heralded by deer rutting and its end by a bent umbrella, while in winter the fur of mammals thickens and brightens, and flies become sluggish.

Numerous references to nature appear in the lyrics of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, and the topic of Orientalism in her poems has frequently been discussed by literary scholars. The poet does not restrict herself to a careful observation of nature. She animates and personifies it: in the volume Pocałunki (Kisses), the sky can become angry, and in Surowy jedwab (Raw Silk), the firmament freezes in terror. Comparisons to the masters of the genre are inevitable when reading her works. Take, for example, the frog glorified by Bashō (in Czesław Miłosz’s translation: ‘Stara sadzawka, / Żaba – skok – / Plusk’; in R. H. Blyth’s translation: ‘The old pond / A frog jumps in – The sound of the water’).