“Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves. It is in” our hearts “that the life of nature’s spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.” Jean Jacques Rousseau
During Covid19 there has been somewhat of a renaissance back towards nature. People are appreciating nature, understanding and wanting to preserve nature, needing to get out into it, sense it and bring it into their homes.
This week I attended a webinar SHARING STORIES FROM NATURE – A LISTENING SPACE co-hosted by Network of Wellbeing and The Heart Movement. Reflecting on our experiences around nature during this year common threads emerged. Many are taking more time to get to know the places where they are living. By slowing down we are noticing more through being in tune with the changing seasons. We are discovering new places and paths, also rediscovering old places and paths. Some are embracing new ways to be in nature alongside walking such as gardening, cycling and swimming. Connecting with others in nature is enhancing friendships and family bonds. Gratitude and respect is felt alongside an awareness of both the nurturing and destructive sides to nature. We are feeling uplifted by seeing resilience in nature.
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Traditional haiku embraces the natural world focusing on directness and intensity to create a vivid impact in 3 lines. Crucially it involves a Kigo or Season Word; alongside a Kire or Cutting Word that allows the shift from one contrasting image to another. Basho’s famous haiku, with notably numerous and contradictory translations, uses FROG as its Season Word (indicative of Spring) and POND as the Cutting Word.
The old pond; Furu ike ya
A frog jumps in — kawazu tobikomu
The sound of the water mizu no oto
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Modern haiku has taken on some of its traditional haiku roots but mirroring other literary forms has adapted with the times. On THE DAILY HAIKU after a suggestion to offer a SEASON WORD by Eric McLachlan and a poll to see how this might work we will now offer a Weekly Season Word. This will allow those who want to Kigo to do so whether as traditionalists or modernists and those who want to see the Season Word as another theme to also engage around a desire to engage in nature.
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Season words or Kigo once followed a strict format and there are whole dictionaries dedicated to terms that can be used. But of course our perceptions and experiences of nature are now very different compared to hundreds of years ago, or even a hundred years ago. Also we live in a global world where seasons shift at different times. Season words may now involve city life and living, climate change and personal, more senryu-like perspectives on seasons.
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A Season word can, no matter your approach, focus the mind on the nature around us and perhaps feel more in touch by expressing our thoughts condensed into writing haiku but also sketching, photographing and collecting natural items too. It can also allow us to recall experiences from other times or imagine places we might want to visit. In the SHARING STORIES FROM NATURE webinar we were encouraged to bring an item from nature into the session which we were able to talk about and these sensory touchstones initiated deeper reflections.
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It would be good to build up our own compendium of SEASON WORDS so do please include your suggestions here by connecting to your own observations of the seasons around you and wider details including weather conditions, plants, food, wildlife, traditions and celebrations.
HELPFUL LINKS:
ALAN SUMMERS: More Than One Fold in the Paper: Kire, Kigo, and the vertical axis of meaning in haiku
The British Haiku Society: Resource on How to Haiku ‘The Heart of Haiku’ Series The British Haiku Society
http://britishhaikusociety.org.uk/teaching-haiku/the-heart-of-a-haiku/
A Dictionary of Haiku Classified by Season Words with Traditional and Modern Methods by Jane Reichhold with haiku https://www.ahapoetry.com/aadoh/adofinde.htm
Season Word List https://yths.org/?page_id=98&fbclid=IwAR0_n9kqJGSZKndPeKUTCVuFuVVrrOs2UxNRz5cckvEQ_fMPyjyOIe4VxW4#Winter
Five Hundred Essential Season Words http://www.2hweb.net/haikai/renku/500ESWd.html?source=post_page—————————&fbclid=IwAR3ldyJRORX-NOF-Q5uPUiOtzgWctNtLqzKMue8LffBe0cSuvdiV1aLCzFA
Network of Wellbeing https://networkofwellbeing.org @NetwrkWellbeing
The Heart Movement https://theheartmovement.org https://theheartmovement.org/app @TheHeartMovUK
10 Comments on “Conversation 46: NATURE AND HAIKU – Season Words”
Looking at the translations there of Bashō’s classic: the dash in English versions is customarily used as the equivalent of the kire, so as rendered above the haiku has two ‘cuts’ which would be unusual. In the romaji version of the Japanese, the kire (ya) comes after the pond, as you say. So, in English if there is to be a dash it should come after ‘pond.’ And then the haiku reads differently as the second and third lines elide (and I remove the clunky second ‘the’ in the last line:
the old pond –
a frog jumps in
the sound of water
I never thought about it like that before – the haiku is become so widely quoted that it is almost a joke – but now, it makes sense to me.
Your version Keith should be added to all the other great translations.
古池や蛙飛び込む水の音
Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉)
1686 (when he was 43 years old)
Romanised Japanese:
furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto
or
furuike ya kawazu tondaru mizu no oto
English version (Alan Summers):
old pond the frog jumps into the sound of water
As the old Japanese word, kawazu, rarely used even in Bashō’s time, is both plural and singular:
old pond the frogs jump into its sound of water
And a partly fun version by myself:
sound of the universal pond jumping into a frog
or
sound of the universal pond jumping into all frogs
When I had a rented Queenslander house, with its plumbing exposed under the building, we’d have frogs all hanging about, and the place would reverberate with the sound of frogs in and around the water. There is something comfortably fascinating, calming and basic about the sound of water in the company of frogs.
I’d even have at least one frog pop up in the indoor toilet! It was like a greeting from the world’s past, and its origins.
Alan Summers
Call of the Page
Thank you for your wonderful translations to the Basho Frog Pond Haiku Alan, brilliant
Here are few links which are good to go through regarding kigo:
https://worldkigodatabase.blogspot.com/
https://poetrysociety.org.nz/affiliates/haiku-nz/haiku-poems-articles/archived-articles/seasoning-your-haiku/
http://www.2hweb.net/haikai/renku/500ESWd.html
https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/k/Kigo.htm
https://www.ahapoetry.com/aadoh/adofinde.htm
Many thanks Sébastien
Wow – I really enjoyed all this. And very educational. Thank you!
Wow – I really enjoyed all this. And very educational.
Here are a couple of season words and honorable mentions off the top of my head.
SPRING:
blossoms, melt, sprout, grow, migration, longer days, shorter nights, plum [trees], cherry blossom
SUMMER:
beach, heat, ice cream, surf, swim, sun, grass
AUTUMN:
acorns, fall, turn, fruit, store, migration, lengthening nights, shorter days, maple [tree], oak [tree], ginkgo [tree]
WINTER:
frost, snow, blizzard, cold, ice, barren, hail, dark, hibernation, hot springs, skiing, hot chocolate
OTHER words could be season words; despite not being necessarily fixed to the same season everywhere. For instance, both Cape Town and Japan have seasonal wind.
rain, wind, typhoon, hurricane, mist, fog, storm, whales, flood
SPECIAL OCCASIONS:
New Years, St Patricks, Easter, Halloween, Black Friday, Equinox, Solstice, Christmas
NATURE: Although perhaps not seasonal, they are certainly nature references worthy of an honorable mention:
Coffee, Tea, Dawn, Sunrise, Noon, Sunset, Dusk, Midnight, glaciers, aurora
I’ll try to think of a few more.
Thanks so much for this Eric, wonderful list to dip into.