Original subtitles

An old pond.

A frog jumps in.

The sound of water.

This is a haiku composed in 1686 by Matsuo Basho.

Such a simple prosaic observation, only 17 syllables long in Japanese.

As Nobel Literature laureate Octavio Paz says, The pond, the frogs jumping, the

sound of water.

Nothing is less poetic.

Common words and an insignificant fact.

In this small, constrictive form, there's barely enough room to get a

idea across, hardly any space for detail or decadence.

Yet, that first line, read in Japanese as furuike -ya, touches something deep

many people's hearts.

Paz himself went on to write that this haiku, this poem that is barely a poem,

contains a world of resonances, echoes, and correspondences.

The pond, the frog, the sound of water seem to speak to each other, and to you.

Out of these simple statements comes an expansive and illuminating

understanding.

It can be hard to see.

I think to many, the haiku is more of a meme than a legitimate form of

expression. But there's a reason it's so well -known, so beloved.

What Paz describes, what Matsuo Bakuro captures so succinctly in so few words,

is truth.

The kind of truth that can only be told concisely.

To really understand the beauty of haiku, this elusive, bizarre form of art

difficult for us to understand in the West, I think it best we look to the

master.

Though the details of his early life are unclear, we can gather that Matsuo

Basho was born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644 in the Iga province of Japan, one of six

children in a minor samurai family.

Later, he took the pen name Basho.

And I love that, because it translates to banana tree, which he chose to honor

the tree outside his hut that his disciples gifted him.

He even wrote a poem about it.

A night listening to the rain leaking into the tub, the banana plant blown by

the gust.

A glimpse of how poetry wound its way through his life.

But Bashio's road to the art began far earlier than that.

At just eight years old, he entered the service of a samurai lord, becoming a

page to the lord's son, Todo Yoshitada.

known by the pen name Sengin.

Lord Sengin was only two years older than Basho, and the boys got along well,

more like friends or brothers than lord and servant.

They studied poetry under the same master and shared a love for haikai no

a form of collaborative linked verse in which participants would spontaneously

compose a verse in response to the one that came before.

The opening stanza was called a hoku and always involved a 575 mora format.

Mora being a Japanese sound unit similar to an English syllable.

The standalone haiku, as it later became known, evolved from this opening stanza

of the Haikai no Renga form.

In 1665, Basho, Sengin, and some other acquaintances composed a 100 -verse

Haikai no Renga together in honor of the 13 -year death anniversary of their

poetry master's master.

Just one year later, Lord Sengin suddenly died at the age of 25.

This undoubtedly came as a shock to Bashur.

His friend and companion throughout life had gone.

His path had frayed.

He gave up his aspirations as a samurai, left Iga, and began on a new path that

would lead him to become the master poet we know now.

His time with Lord Sangin left a deep impression on him.

Twenty years later, he went back to Iga in the spring.

As he stood under the cherry trees where the two of them had worked and played

together in their youth, the following poem came to mind.

Oh, many, many things are brought to mind by cherry blossoms.

Basho was one of the earliest and greatest of the Japanese haikuists,

even the greatest poet of the entire Edo period.

His poems are still used as a model by haikuists today. You already heard one

from him, Furuike -ya, An Old Pond.

But in the century after Basho, Another master emerged, Yosa Buson, who made

Basho a personal idol, traveling to the same places Basho had and using the same

poems of Basho's disciples as models for his pupils.

One well -known haiku he wrote reads,

The winter wind slings pebbles at the temple bell.

A couple generations after Buson, another master, Kobayashi Isa, wrote his

distinctive haiku, notable for their empathetic attentiveness toward the

creatures of the world.

Oh, snail, ever so slowly climb Mount Fuji.

In the 19th century, a fourth master poet, Masuoka Shiki, popularized the

haiku as the modern name of the independent 575 hoku -like poem.

Flutteringly, floating in the breeze, a single butterfly.

So, We've seen what haiku looks like at this point, the work of the masters

themselves, we know where it comes from, but it doesn't mean we know what it is.

The answer to that question is actually surprisingly hard to piece together.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, haiku is an unrhymed poetic

consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables

respectively.

American poet Harold G. Henderson adds on to these conditions, prescribing that

a haiku must contain nature, must refer to a specific event, not a

generalization, and must be set in the present.

Still others say that a haiku should contain a season word, a kigo, and a

cutting word, a kireji.

A season word is a word with Japanese seasonal connotations that contribute to

the setting and atmosphere of the poem. For example, in Tsururike -ya, The frog

could be read as a seasonal symbol implying springtime. A cutting word is a

trickier concept to explain.

It's like a sisura, or verbal punctuation of sorts, which divides the

two parts and prompts the reader to reflect on the relationship between the

juxtaposed elements.

For example, in furuike ya, the ya, an untranslatable utterance of

interest, or awe, forms a division between the venerable stillness of the

and the jump of the frog that broke the quiet.

Its function is often replaced by a dash in English.

Another major consideration for haiku is its auditory quality.

A certain euphony to the roll of the valve is important in the effect of the

poem. An old pond, a frog jumps in, the sound of water.

Season word, cutting word, nature, immediacy, specificity.

Auditory considerations.

It seems like three lines and seventeen syllables is hardly enough to contain

all these prescriptions.

Fortunately, I don't really think it's any of these features which make a haiku

a haiku.

As Japanese writer Kaneko Toda writes, everything that can be written down

haiku fails to explain its true nature.

We say that haiku has three lines, yet in Japan...

They're traditionally written in one line.

American poet Ezra Pound famously wrote, in a station of the metro, a haiku in

two lines, and Basio himself has been known to write furuike ya in four.

We say that a haiku has 17 syllables, arranged in a pattern of 5 -7 -5, yet

English syllable and Japanese mora are different.

For example, the word haiku has two syllables in English, but three mora.

haiku in Japanese.

About twelve English syllables approximate the duration of seventeen

moras. Even within Japanese, poets have often disposed with the mora guidelines

completely.

Haiku can be vastly different from one another. It's a form, not a template.

It is not perfectly distinct.

But there is something at the heart, something they all share.

They are all short.

Basho once traveled to see the famous pine of Shogoshi.

Experiencing the view of the pine and the entire beauty of the place, he

recalled a poem by the twelfth -century poet Saigyo.

Inviting the wind to carry Salt waves of the sea The pine tree of Shogoshi

Trickles all night long Shiny drops of moonlight

Basho believed that Saigyo's poem on the pine was so clear, so succinct, so

perfect that, in his own words, should anyone dare to write another poem on

pine tree, it would be like trying to add a sixth finger to his hand.

In a few lines, Saigyo conveyed everything materially, sensorily, and

emotionally important about the pine.

There was nothing more to say.

I think that the core identity, the fundamental feature of haiku, It's the

thing that Basho admired about Saigyo's poem.

Absolute conciseness.

A haiku is so unforgivingly, brutally short because beauty and value can come

out of restriction.

Not the kind of restriction that keeps you from thinking outside the box. Not

the kind that involves cramping and squashing an expansive idea into a box

small for it so that it loses all its shape.

but the kind that involves having a box so small that only the most essential,

most valuable, most basic things can fit into it. A box that necessitates honing

your rough idea to a fine, hard, lustrous stone.

Kaneko Tota likens a haiku to a diamond cut to a precise pattern maximizing the

transmission of white light.

In his words, It is the crystallization under pressure from restricted form and

the internal nature of the crystal so created that together constitute the

unique quality of haiku.

It may, perhaps, seem somewhat precious to symbolize in the image of a crystal

that essential quality of the world's shortest poetic form, but the fact

that the haiku does produce a feeling of intensely hard substance.

Basho was a great haikuist.

because he required his poems to be crystalline, so perfectly hard that they

neither lose nor gain another word.

Basho's student, Kikaku, writes about his teacher.

Now, in his old age, his poetic style has become so hard and dry that his

naturally remind us of the best of Saigyo's works.

Hard and dry are not the usual compliments I would expect for a poem.

I would think that a poem should be fluid, graceful, romantic, and, well,

poetic. Yet, Kikaku did mean this as a compliment.

In the same breath, he compares Basho to Du Fu, a deified figure long before

their time, frequently said to be the greatest Chinese poet.

Anyone can write a short poem.

Brevity on its own is not conciseness. It doesn't produce a crystalline

structure.

Conciseness is about brevity without compromise, without losing a single part

the original illumination that prompted the writing of the poem. A poet needs to

choose their few precious words with extreme deliberation so that an

intellectual and emotional image which a thousand words couldn't express is

evoked in their seventeen syllables so that a whole scene, a deep

is made complete by their tiny poem.

This is the process of pressure which creates a diamond.

I mentioned the poem In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound earlier.

Here's what he had to say about the process of writing that strange little

haiku. I wrote a thirty -line poem and destroyed it because it was what we call

work of second intensity.

Six months later, I wrote a poem half that length. A year later, I wrote the

following Hokulek sentence.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd.

petals on a wet black bough.

And that is the poem in a station of the metro in its entirety.

The Japanese poet Yone Noguchi writes that a haiku is like a tiny star

the whole sky at its back.

As the Chinese saying goes, from one leaf we know the whole autumn.

This is the crystallization and hardness that Tota and Kikaku mean.

The small handful of words within a haiku need to form the star through

know the whole sky, the leaf through which we know the whole autumn, the leap

a frog that sends ripples over the surface of an entire pond.

But how do you find such a star? How do you choose the words?

Well, that is beyond my ability to describe.

That is the eternally elusive part.

Basio says, Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the

if you want to learn about the bamboo.

Your poetry issues when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see

something like a hidden glimmering there.

A good haiku comes from someone who has thought deeply, plunged deeply, crossed

out, erased, and rewritten until they discovered a diamond of pure, compressed

understanding.

The concise 17 sound units, the shortcut to illumination.

American poet Robert Epstein writes, The pond is old, even ancient, as some have

translated the Japanese.

An ordinary amphibian jumps into that old pond, and the sound awakens in the

poet and reader a truth that transcends time, culture, nationality, and

religious tradition.

An instantaneous bond is formed among pond, frog, poet, and reader, which is

nothing less than extraordinary.

We are family.

We are friends.

Forevermore. This is why I love haiku, and why I will continue to read and

until I draw my last breath.

In the later part of his life, Basho went on a series of extensive travels,

producing some of his best works in the last eight years.

In 1694, while on a journey to his birthplace, he became sick from a

illness. His last poem was recorded by his disciple, Kikaku.

Upon reciting it, he asked his disciples whether

or not a small grammatical change might make the poem better.

As Kikaku writes, His strong attachment to his art and his determination to

dedicate himself to poetry moved everyone to deep sorrow.

Bashio's disciples buried him in his chosen place, and Hikaku placed the

following poem below his memorial tablet.

A hat to cover the body of our master withered silver grass.

A hard loss for the world of poetry, but there's no need to feel sad for Bashio.

That was what he wanted to do.

Live and die immersed in the poetry, a life distilled into the simplicity of a

single crystalline form.

The poet Katsushika Hokusai, better known as the painter of the great wave

Kanagawa, expressed this sentiment perhaps better than anyone else, in the

of his very own haiku.

I write, erase, rewrite, erase again, and

then... A poppy blooms.

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living.

Fear not the eraser.

As always, keep making stuff up, but also don't be afraid to pare it back

as well.

Sometimes fewer words hold more truth.

Until next time, thanks for watching.

Bye!