Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,
I love to share a new episode of our ''Distillation''-feature in which the goal is to ''distil'' haiku from another poem. This month I have chosen a poem written by Ezra Pound (1885-1972), a modern poet who also was interested in the Chinese and Japanese poetry. I will give a brief biography here-after.
Ezra
Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and
promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth
century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and
American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the
work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos
Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and especially T.
S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his
promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from
classical Chinese and Japanese poetry - stressing clarity, precision, and
economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in
Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the
sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years,
focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of
college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton
College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he traveled
abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the
scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry.
He married Dorothy Shakespeare in 1914 and became London editor of the Little
Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary
exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the
United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for
broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second
World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed
to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the
jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the
most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career
in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the
prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won
his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in
Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.
His poem ''The River-Merchant's Wife'' is a translation of a poem by Li Po (an ancient Chinese poet)
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| River Merchant's Wife - woodblock |
Well ... let us take a look at this poem by Ezra Pound:
While my
hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen
I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen
I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen
you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged
your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.
A wonderful poem I think and because it's a translation from a Chinese poem it's easy (I think) to distil from this poem a haiku, senryu, tanka or kyoka. I have given it a try and this is my haiku distilled from the poem by Ezra Pound.
youngsters playing
in the backyard garden -
cherry blossoms bloom
falling in love
feels like a waterfall of joy -
newly weds dreams
married youngsters
eyes blinded by their love -
weeping willows
love remains strong
she is turning grey without him -
leaves are falling
finally winter
once she was a young woman -
still waiting for him
I like these a lot, I think these haiku are telling in a short way what the poem tells, but that's how I see it of course. I like this feature it learns you new things ... for example ''looking towards other poetry forms can be fun too''.
Well .... it''s up to you now ... Share your distilled haiku, senryu, tanka or kyoka inspired on the poem by Ezra Pound with us all here at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai. This episode of "distillation'' will stay on until Decmeber 15th 11.59 AM (CET). This episode of ''distillation'' is now open for your submissions.
