Word: haiku
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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...Well," said Harrison, "right now I'm working on a haiku about English sparrows. I've got a great first line but I don't know where to go from there. 'Gray sparrows sing in gray gutters...
...Professor MacLeish's third lecture on poetry that saved him. Like the Renaissance discovering the Greeks, like Goethe discovering Shakespeare, like the nineteenth century discovering nature, Harrison discovered Oriental poetry. He had run across the cryptic, ordered verses of the haiku before in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums; but since he had read the novel for sex (it was disappointing) their beauty had escaped him. Now, however, he was fascinated with the idea of three line verses which did not require grammar, meter, rhyme, or even logical progression. As Harrison told his roommate after the lecture, "All you gotta...
Harrison muttered an unhappy obscenity and proceeded to his room. Once there, he began grinding out haiku after haiku in an attempt to produce the Oriental poetry equivalent of three thousand words of fiction. "Window panes are crying raindrops/Bicycles skid on slippery streets/Who will sunbathe with me?" "Japanese beetles crawl on rose bushes...
Unimpaired Spirit. Henderson's book not only introduces haiku in the clear accompanying text, but is the first really successful attempt at haiku translation. Through it, haiku may well become a fad on U.S. campuses. A professor of Japanese at Columbia University before his retirement four years ago, Henderson inherited from his father a love of Japanese art and literature, nourished by several long visits to the country. Existing haiku translations dismayed him. Most of his 375 translations rhyme, on the very reasonable premise that Japanese haiku might rhyme too but for the limitations of a language in which...
Above all, Henderson's patient translations (one took him 25 years) capture, unimpaired, the evanescent haiku spirit, which has enchanted Japan for untold centuries...