The delight in reading about Basho in Blyth by DeMott.
I found the first book of R. H. Blyth’s four volume set, Haiku, (originally published between 1949-1952) in a used book store on St. Mark’s Place. If haiku seems no more pertinent to you than, say, heraldry—one more subject about which even an informed person “need not be ashamed to know nothing”[1]—you may be mollified to hear I had an excuse to check Eastern Culture since I was Christmas shopping for a nephew who’s on his way to Japan this spring. The book’s cover—“Oriental brown simple rough peasant cloth”—got me to open “the Blyth Haiku bibles” (pace Allen Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg). I fell in…
“Plop!”
To quote the last line of “the most famous haiku” with frog-and-pond as translated by Blyth—scholar-gypsy who brought the East to Beats and Salinger (see J.D.’s bow to Blyth in “Seymour, An Introduction”: “…haiku, but senryu, too…can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth was on them. Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he’s a highhanded old poem himself, but he’s also sublime.”) Blyth’s scholarship began to come through to Americans in the post-WWII era—when Japan’s crown-prince was another of his tutees and Blyth helped draft Hirohito’s “Declaration of Humanity.”[2] (He prompted the Emperor to refuse divinity and come out as a mortal though not a Christer as General MacArthur—Japan’s “Supreme Public Administrator”—wished.)
Blyth grew up poor in England, the son of a railway clerk. An outlier from the outset, he was a scholarship boy who loved animals, adopted vegetarianism, and did time as a conscientious objector during World War I. He headed East with his first wife in 1924 after graduating from London University, where he’d been recruited to take a job as a professor of English Language and Literature in Korea. He moved on to Japan in 1939 (with his second wife, a Japanese woman he met in Seoul after his first marriage failed). Interned during the war as an enemy alien, he still managed to begin publishing books in English with a Japanese firm, The Hokuseido Press (who remained his publishers through the Sixties). He ended up working with Japanese and American authorities to help ease the transition to peace after 1945.
Let’s skip out of history and let “Mr. Time-less”—to borrow an honorific bestowed on Blyth by a Zen master.[3]—plump for “plop” in Bashô’s famous haiku, which has also been rendered as “A deep resonance” though Blyth skips over that translation even as he tells why other one-word shots won’t do…
The old pond/A frog jumps in—/Plop!
Against this translation it may be urged that “plop” is an un-poetical, rather humorous word. To this I would answer, “Read it over slowly, about a dozen times, and this association will disappear largely.” Further, it may be said the expression “plop” is utterly different in sound from “mizu no oto.” This is not quite correct. The English “sound of water” is too gentle, suggesting a running stream or brook. The Japanese word “oto” has an onomatopoeic value much nearer to “plop.” Other translations are wide of the mark. “Splash” sounds as if Bashô himself has fallen in. Yone Noguchi’s “List, the water sound,” shows Bashô in graceful pose with finger in air. “Plash,” by Henderson, is also a misuse of words. Anyway, it is lucky for Bashô that he was born a Japanese, because probably not even he could have said it in English. Now we come to the meaning. An English author writes as follows:
“Some scholars maintain that this haiku about the frog is a perfect philosophical comment on the littleness of human life in comparison with the infinite. Such poems are hints, suggestions, rather than full expressions of an idea.”
No haiku is a philosophical comment. Human life is not little: it is not to be compared with the infinite, whatever that is. Haiku are not hints; they suggest nothing whatever.[4]. https://www.firstofthemonth.org/on-the-road-with-r-h-blyth/
Poets are the ministers and zen masters of intimation and intimacy.
I'd rather be confused by poetry than assured by rhetoric or prose.
It cheers that life is so confusing, that opinion and certitude trip over lumps in rug, bang hip on corner of island in kitchen before hitting head on unforgiving floor.
When I fall I want to fall in love.
It is, after all, Valentine's Day.
Some reference has to be made to flowers.
When I'm knocked unconscious I'd prefer not to see relatives and former acquaintances hovering nearby waiting to greet me into some reunion not worth the time it takes to say near-death or reincarnation.
Enough, (say it), said.
