The following article appeared in Winter 2007 newsletter of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) American Psychological Assn and appears here with all requisite rights and petitions. Henry M. Seiden. He does a regular quarterly column on poetry and psychoanalysis there.
Old Pond, Frog Jump In. . . .
Henry M. Seiden, Ph.D. ABPP
I’d venture to guess that no poetic form is at once so widely admired and so little understood as haiku. The brevity seems to invite imitation–as if short should make it easy to do. And the minimalism lends itself in popular imagination to corny one-line jokes. But even when taken seriously, the seventeen syllable, 5-7-5, arrangement of lines, which has an organic relevance in Japanese (having to do with Japanese writing, speaking and even breathing patterns), has little meaning or relevance in English.
In fact, the brief haiku form disguises enormous complexity. And the larger intention is far more interesting than the syllable count. The aim is to capture the tension between the timeless and the momentary, between the big picture and the distilled and clarified instance. (I rely on a number of translators and commentators for my analysis here, including Robert Hass, 1994 and Kenneth Rexroth, 1955 and Hiroaki Sato, 1995). Haiku evolved out of a feudal Japanese Buddhist consciousness–out of a view of the universe (then and now still) in which all of time, and cyclical time (usually represented by reference to the seasons of the year), and no-time-at-all are understood as one and the same. The poetry is an effort to express, embrace and illuminate that view.
Interestingly psychoanalysis has its own concern with the way in which the timeless and the lived moment come together. We are ever mindful of the timelessness of the unconscious, the big picture, the long story, but, as therapists, we want to address the experiential moment with maximal clarity. Our recurring clinical challenge is to address the two together. Which is to say that in our best interpretations we want to do much of what a haiku does! Of course I do not mean that we want to sound like oracles. I mean that we want to address, in a minimum of words and with a minimum of fuss, both the big picture and the small–this moment in the context of many such moments. And we want to do it pithily, in a word, a phase, and in common speech.
Here are some little examples of addressing the big picture in a word, a phrase, and in common speech: Readers might recognize my title as two-thirds of what is perhaps the best known classical haiku. This by the 17th Century poet, Basho. (There are literally hundreds of translations of this poem into English–which gives some idea of the degree to which complex ideas and extended references and resonances have been compressed into a few words. See, for example Sato’s 1995, One Hundred Frogs.) Here’s a translation which I like:
Old pond,
frog jump in:
water sound!
So many evocations packed into one distilled statement! The natural world, summertime, the image of an old pond (lilly pads, vines hanging down, the deep silence of the woods) the slightly comic, homely frog, this moment, all moments, all of this in one kerplunk!
Here’s another lovely haiku by Buson, a somewhat later poet, in Robert Hass’s translation:
Coolness–
the sound of the temple bell
as it leaves the temple bell
“Coolness” is a kigo, a traditional seasonal phrase, here a metaphor for autumn–and of course for that season in a person’s life. (The original audience for haiku was a learned one–mostly other poets–who could and would appreciate such references.)
And another of my favorites by a third great classical haiku master, Issa.
One bath
after another–
How stupid!
Haiku (especially Issa’s) can be wonderfully funny. But dark too–in this one, a Western reader might not understand that there’s a reference to the bath one gets on the day of one’s birth and the bath one’s body gets on the day one dies.
Reading these little poems as a group it becomes clear that central to haiku there is an expression of surprise. As I understand it (from Hass), this sense of surprise is built in structurally: typically, there are “pivot words”, kake-kotoba, which function to change the direction or meaning of a thought. And there are “cutting words”, kireji, a kind of voiced punctuation with no exact equivalent in English–variously rendered as a dash, a colon, or an exclamation point, and sometimes as an “Ah!” or an “Oh!”.
So surprise, a freshness, is of the essence–and, I think, the source of the haiku’s delight. But note: it’s freshness in the context of the already (deeply) known. This tension too should have a resonance for psychoanalysts. Clinically (as Stern, 1997 will have taught us) we want to be fresh, ready to be surprised, ready to express surprise–even in the context of old familiar stories and of truths we take to be inevitable.
References
Hass, Robert (1994) The Essential Haiku: versions of Basho, Buson & Issa.
HarperCollins, NY
Rexroth, Kenneth (1964) One Hundred Poems From the Japanese New Directions, NY
Sato, Hiroaki (1995) One Hundred Frogs Weatherhill, NY
Stern, Donnell (1997) Unformulated Experience: from dissociation to imagination in psychoanalysis Hillsdale, NJ
(10//18/06)