Haiku shines brighter than tweet

In mid-July, former Belgian Prime Minister and former President of the Council of Europe Herman Van Rompuy, in his capacity as the Haiku Ambassador for Japan-EU Friendship, met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo and announced his intention on the matter. The 17-syllable Japanese poem is Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage if Japan wants it.

The digital boom has benefited haiku, but unlike these short texts on social networks, Japanese poetry captivates without fanfare and therefore frees the imagination. Herein lies the key to its millennial popularity, both among the inhabitants of the rising sun and the rest of the planet with its eruption in the 20th century.

Juan F. Rivero contextualizes everything there is to know about haiku in his preface to The Seed and the heart, and provides a comprehensive bibliography for those wishing to delve deeper into this popular literature that permeates all Japanese arts. Its purpose in the anthology and a brief introduction to Japanese poetry from its beginnings to 1945—where the book goes—makes it an enjoyable and necessary lesson for any reader who decides to approach Japanese poetry for the first time. .

-Roots of division of volume into five parts; “Classical poetry: Nara and Heian, Medieval times: Kamakura, Nambokuchö, Muromachi and Azuchi-Momoyama, Edo poetry and the Meiji period, and the 20th century until 1945 – correspond to the five major stages of the development of Japanese poetry. Besides the extensive list of authors great work incorporating a variety of styles and suggestions.With special emphasis on the essential role of women in the development of Japanese poetry since the first Japanese verses were written in Kanshi, Chinese was the language of prestige, and the male elite was educated in it, while courtiers were trained in it. careful training And as Rivero points out, the fact that women didn’t speak Chinese forced the men to communicate with them in Japanese.

a poetic revolution

As it is known, haiku is a short poem consisting of seventeen syllables written in three lines of five, seven and five syllables, initially containing contrasting images that speak of nature, popularized in its present form in the 17th century by the poet Matsuo Basho. and mention a word implying the season of the year.

Basho was born in 1644, and although he was not a Buddhist monk, he argued that poetic work was a source of spiritual choice and should reflect on the life and character of writers as well as poetry. Its suggestion that verses emerge spontaneously from the contemplation of living things and from the emotions of its author is the best summary of what a haiku is, an expression of daily surprise in which the importance of nature and the symbolism of its seasons point to aesthetics. ideals of poets.

The first anonymous haiku is from Susanoo: “Eight clouds guard / Izumo’s palace, / the eight fenced one; / eight fences that make my wife happy»; finally, Suzuki Shizuko: “The flower of the cosmos / if blown / does not die gently”; The seed and heart of the anthology Alba concentrates 1,300 years of poetry, a unique selection on the Spanish publishing scene.

Incidentally, the title is inspired by the heart/seed binomial of the poetic ideas of Ki no Tsurayuki, who is considered the first critical text of Japanese literature in his preface to Kokinsh at the beginning of the 10th century, comparing the country’s poetry. With the leaves of a plant whose seed is the human heart. “To affirm that Japan’s poems had the heart of the people as seeds meant connecting them to the spirit and will of an entire people who, with the voice of one poet or another, left texts in the collective memory.” explains.

The spring kimonos, the chorus of cicadas in summer, the color of hydrangeas in autumn, or the winter character of man, have more hearts than some poisonous nets, and are of course the nourishing seeds of the most beautiful feelings.