For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santoka

By Columbia University Press

Taneda Santoka's poetry attracted limited notice during his lifetime (1882--1940), but there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in his life and writings. Including 245 poems and selected diary excerpts, For All My Walking makes Santoka's work available to English-speaking readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780231500630

Book preview

FOR ALL MY WALKING

Modern Asian Literature

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Translated by Burton Watson

Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka

with Excerpts from His Diaries

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

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Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York     Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2003 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50063-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taneda, Santoka, 1882–1940.

[Poems. English. Selections]

For all my walking : free-verse haiku of

Taneda Santoka with excerpts from his diaries /

translated by Burton Watson.

    p. cm.—(Modern Asian literature series)

ISBN 0–231–12516–X (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0–231–12517–8 (paper : alk. paper)

I. Watson, Burton, 1925–II. Taneda,

Santoka, 1882–1940. Nikki. English. Selections.

III. Title. IV. Series.

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Contents

Chronology of the Life of Taneda Santōka

Introduction

Poems and Diary Entries

Bibliography of Works in English

Introduction

The brief poetic form known today as haiku enjoyed immense popularity in Japan during the Edo period (1600–1867), when poets such as Bashō and Buson produced superlative works in the genre and a craze for haiku writing spread through many sectors of the population. But by the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the beginning of Japan’s modern era, the form had sunk to a very low level of literary worth, being marked mainly by stale imitations of the past or facile wordplay or satire, often of a vulgar nature.

In the early years of the Meiji period, the poet and critic Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) succeeded in injecting new life into the form and restoring it as a vehicle for serious artistic expression. Since his time, the writing of haiku has constituted an integral part of the Japanese literary scene, and in recent years the form has been taken up by poets in many other countries and languages as well.

Although Shiki greatly broadened the subject matter of the haiku and employed a more colloquial diction, he continued to write in the traditional form, which uses seventeen syllables or sound symbols arranged in a 5–7–5 pattern and invariably includes a kigo (season word) that indicates the particular season in which the poem is set.

Shiki had two outstanding disciples in the art of haiku composition: Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959) and Kawahigashi Hekigotō (1873–1937). Kyoshi, writing in the traditional haiku form as Shiki had, produced during his long life a large body of works that has been highly esteemed by Japanese critics. Hekigotō, on the contrary, in time grew dissatisfied with the formal requirements of the traditional haiku and began experimenting with the writing of what are now known as free-verse or free-style haiku, brief poems that do not adhere to the 5–7–5 sound pattern and do not regularly include a season word.

This new free-style haiku form was originated by one of Hekigotō’s disciples, Ogiwara Seisensui (1884–1976). And Taneda Santōka, whose free-style haiku are the subject of this volume, was a disciple of Seisensui. Thus, in the kinship terms so beloved by Japanese critics, Taneda Santōka was a literary grandson of Kawahigashi Hekigotō and a great-grandson of Masaoka Shiki.

Although Santōka wrote conventional-style haiku in his youth, the vast majority of his works, and those for which he is most admired, are in free-verse form. He also left a number of diaries in which he frequently records the circumstances that led to the composition of a particular poem or group of poems. His poetry attracted only limited notice during his lifetime, but in recent years in Japan there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in his life and writings. His complete works were published in seven large volumes in 1972 and 1973,¹ and Japanese bookstores now customarily display an impressive array of Santōka’s poems, letters, and diaries, as well as critical studies and memoirs by persons who knew him.

As Ivan Morris noted some years ago in The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan, the Japanese have a marked fondness for people who in one way or another have made a mess of their lives. And, as we will see when we come to a discussion of Santōka’s biography, he was a prime example of the messy type. Much of the popularity that his works now enjoy is due to their undoubted literary worth, but much of it is also attributable to the highly unconventional and in some ways tragic life he led. His poetry and his life demand to be taken together.

Taneda Santōka, whose