On Form and Season

>>Bekku Sadanori, in his book "nihon-go no rizumu", states that the idea of doing "5-syllables, 7-syllables, 5-syllables" in English is absolute nonsense. i agree with that.

 >There might be very good reasons for not doing 5-7-5 in English. What in the world are they? Those same reasons must apply to other languages too. Is 5-7-5 intrinsically *better* in Japanese? Why or why not?

 Shimpei's answer:

 Well, one thing is for sure: haiku in Japanese and haiku in English are different forms of art. You can express a lot more ideas with 17 English syllables than with 17 Japanese moras (on average, of course). Take the haiku in discussion, for example:

 Japanese: Furuike ya/Kawazu tobikomu/mizo no oto (17 moras)

 Direct English Translation: An old pond/A frog jumps in/sound of water (10 syllables)

 This difference isn't present only in haiku; from what I hear, this discrepancy drives people who translate Western musicals to Japanese crazy. The example quoted in the article I read was one of the opening lines of _Les Miserables_ in which Javert sings: "Your time is up; your parole has begun". The best the translator could do was "Omae, shakukou sareta" (You! You've been released.) A large part of the art of haiku is expressing an idea in the limited environment. Since the English Haikaishi are allowed more degrees of freedom than their Japanese counterpart, they're playing a different game. In Japanese, one noun and a connective phrase will easily take up five syllables; in English, short sentences using common words often fits in five syllables.

 Not being a poet, I won't be so bold as to denounce it. It's true that the English haikus that I've read in the past haven't really impressed me, but then the Japanese haikaishi have had 200+ years of head start. Perhaps the medium hasn't matured yet among English-speaking poets.

 Also, in spoken Japanese each mora is more or less the same length--the same is hardly true for English syllables. (Try reading my English translation above out loud, as naturally as possible. Does it take you the same amount of time to pronounce "an" and "pond"?) English also has more prominent accents than Japanese, which really gets in the way sometimes when you just try to make the syllables match-- simply put, English words are such that you don't necessarily get rhythmical smoothness just by having five syllables. This makes a 5-7-5 division that makes no provisions for accented and unaccented syllables less natural for the English language. (If you look at the traditional meters in English, on the other hand, they usually have strict specifications for strong and weak syllables.)

 One last thing I noticed is that the English introductions to haiku (I haven't gotten around to reading anything deeper than that) never mention the existence of kigo (seasonal words) that is so important in the Japanese haiku world. Kigo archives (Saijiki) has been in development for a long time in Japan; I don't know what the situation is in in the English world, but looking at the state of the introductory materials, it doesn't look like it has as much importance. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Naturally, a lot of the kigo in Japanese won't be as relevant outside of Japan--Satsuki-bare, a word to describe a brief sunshine during the rainy season in June (May in lunar calendar, in which Japanese haiku traditionally operates), doesn't mean the same thing to English speakers what it means to residents of Japan; insect behaviors are different, which may skew the meanings of the insects as far as season is concerned. In essence, a new archive has to be built and agreed upon; has this been done?

 --
Shimpei Yamashita