Silkworms and Silverfish: Creeping Things in Haiku

By James Hoyt

Here we have over one hundred and fifty translations
of haiku verses, largely composed by the five most famous of haiku poets. All use insects as seasonal topics to set the scene in spring, summer or autumn. But the definition of insects in complicated because in the
Sino-Japanese tradition the insect genus includes frogs as well as bees, spiders as well as silverfish, angleworms as well as gnats, and snakes as well as ants. This expanded category is here called creeping things, reflecting a similar division of fauna in the Bible. It seems appropriate
that the Japanese would use what is surely the world's shortest poetic form consisting of a mere seventeen syllables arranged in lines of 5,7,5 to describe the miniscule world of creeping things. In so doing, they expressed kernels of poetic inspiration in a few simple words, eschewing the doggerel that so often has followed a brilliant line and leaving to the imagination place and time, for the beauty of the haiku often lies in what is only hunted and left unsaid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462886180

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Copyright © 2011 by James Hoyt.

Insect illustrations are courtesy of the Department of Entomology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4628-8617-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-8618-0

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CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

SILKWORMS AND SILVERFISH

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

NOTES TO SILKWORMS AND SILVERFISH

To Hakashi Tanaka, my friend from classes in the

Department of Japanese Literature at Tôkyô University,

who first introduced me to the world of creepers in haiku

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James Hoyt is a graduate of the Oriental Language Department of the University of Michigan. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and also did graduate work at the University of Paris, France, and Tôkyô University, Japan, where he specialized in Japanese literature. He resided in Japan for some ten years as an army officer, translator/interpreter, professor and diplomat. From 1989-1972, he was Special Assistant for Cultural Affairs to the American Ambassador in Tôkyô and concurrently Chairman of the Board of the United States Educational Commission in Japan (Fulbright Program). He retired from the University of Hawaii in 2001 and resides on San Juan Island, where, in addition to part-time teaching, he devotes his time to his moss garden and the breeding of Japanese koi (carp).

Foreword

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Accepting nature as it is in all its intricacy, ephemeral yet eternal, the Japanese see truth and beauty where we Westerners are too often blinded by our dichotomous attitudes, viewing the scene with arbitrary discrimination between good and evil, ugly and beautiful, friendly and loathsome.

Nature worship is a basic and essential part of the Japanese psyche. It has enabled them to see the charm and the beauty of rocks (which to us may be but an impediment to gardening), of the croaking of frogs (which to us is an intrusion on our solitude), and especially of insects (which to us are usually pestiferous and annoying aliens).

Another characteristic of Japanese culture has been its fascination with the miniature—from tray landscapes to transistor radios. It is in the haiku, surely the shortest of all poetic genres, that the Japanese have focused on the world of insects (along with other minute aspects of natural and human existence) that made it a microcosm that can teach us much about a wider universe and the nature of nature itself.

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The God Kheperā

INTRODUCTION

The most common of the forms of Japanese poetry is the tanka, or short poem, of thirty-one syllables, arranged in five lines with the syllable-count 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. From the earliest times there has existed variation in which the first three lines are composed by the first and the last two lines by a second participant in a kind of refined literary game. Verses so composed are known as renga, or linked verses, and have an important place in the history of the development of Japanese poetical forms.1

In the last years of the Heian period (794-1186 A.D.), kusari-renga, or chains of linked verses, came into vogue; and subsequently there developed a complex set of rules for their composition.2 As the name suggests, this form consists of a long series of linked verses, running often to fifty or one-hundred hemistichs. Twenty volumes of kusari-renga appeared in the Tsukubashû (preface dated 1356).3 Nijô Yoshimoto (1320-1388), one of the compilers, made many rules for linked verses, which were later, however, often revised.4 And it became a requirement that the initial hemistick, the hokku, have a kidai, or seasonal topic. This was the outcome of a long development: because of the importance of the hokku in setting the stage for the poetic creation to follow, and, because of the place of the seasons in the traditional classification of poems,5 seasonal topics were prominent in the renga tradition long before their inclusion was established as a requirement of the form.

The nature of the renga, in which more than one poet of uneven ability matched their wits, made it inevitable that the linked verse should give way in both content and language to a new freedom of expression. Resisting this tendency were those who wished to preserve the classical tradition, feeling that there should be no place for humorous reparté. The result was that linked versification was split