Tag Archives: haiku

Haikus for explaneedfuls

monk-tea

Some people (I call them explaneedfuls) need an explanation for everything and often an explanation of the explanation as well. A long time ago I met one of them. I was asked to go to a TV studio in Italy to assist the host of a programme covering the Oscar awards ceremony. I thought I was going to be there to interpret, which is what I usually do, but it turned out that the core of my job was to make sure the Italian host understood the jokes people made during the ceremony.

Jokes are definitely one of the hardest things to translate but in this case the real problem was that the person was devoid  of any sense of humour and the more one took the pieces of the witticisms apart and described how they were supposed to interact the more bewilderment descended on his features. I began to wonder whether he was actually an alien from a race with no jokes who had infiltrated our society to spy on us. They had managed to copy all our bodily components perfectly but they had no idea on how to instil humour into a fake human.

I’m sure you’ve met at least one explaneedful person. I sometimes think about them when I read haikus.

For example,

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

(Issa)

Read more…

Smiles in my pockets

Very often I find stuff in my pockets. Usually it’s receipts or old tickets. Sometimes I extract a crumpled piece of paper I can no longer decipher but which I know is a now unidentifiable idea which I tried to jot down while tripping over a dog or avoiding a motorcycle.

There are pockets in my  mind as well. Mostly I find junk there too, but every now and then I come across something which makes me smile mysteriously while I am waiting to cross the road or just as they announce that my flight has been delayed again.

For example there are three or four haikus by Kobayashi Issa which I keep on coming across again and again:

Pissing in the snow

outside my door–

it makes a very straight hole.


The holes in the wall

play the flute

this autumn evening.



In a dream

my daughter lifts a melon

to her soft cheek

 


Visiting the graves

the old dog

leads the way

I first encountered Issa’s poems while reading an anthology of Haiku  edited by Robert Hass (The Essential Haiku), so when I noticed a clip of him reading some of his translations of Issa I thought I would share it with you. Perhaps some of them will end up in your minds’ pockets too.


(here’s a link to the video in case you can’t see the embedded version.)

If you want to read more Issa, there is a website with all of his poems http://haikuguy.com/issa/