Italian newspaper "Il Piccolo", 25 September 2008
The personage. Meeting the great Japanese poet
Natsuishi, the prophet of Haiku in Trieste
He travelled around the world in the name of poetry. The last stay, yesterday, in Trieste, Café San Marco. The “Prophet of Haiku”, Ban’ya Natsuishi, made here a stop over, in order to introduce to the Triestinians his last book “Earth Pilgrimage” (Albalibri, 146 pages, 10 Euro). He bewitched the audience with his short and foudroyant lyrics consisting of three sole verses and devoted to the places ha visited during his travels around the word. Pilgrimages, so he called them, because they were intended to spread the “poetic word” through the five continents. The poet, who is also president of the World Haiku Association and professor at Meij University in Tokyo, was invited to Trieste by the Cultural Association “Friedrich Schiller”, who organised an afternoon entirely devoted to that particular kind of Japanese lyric, known as “haiku”.
What means “haiku” to Ban’ya Natsuishi?
It is the poetic form I chose when I was 15 to express myself. Departing from the age at which I was a boy, I was impressed by its shortness, its capability of transmitting strong emotions with few words, being like a puzzle waiting for solution. Haiku is a kind of short poetry, which moved its first steps in Japan in the 17th century and consists of three verses, of respectively 5-7-5 syllables. Originally, it was a form suitable for depicting emotions from nature and season’s changes, to which Japanese are particularly sensitive. With time, also in Japan haiku assumed a less specific form and now it simply stays for a very short poetical form, with a well-defined root.
How can you explain the success in the western world of such a peculiar form of poetry?
This process initiated in the 19th century, when the western understanding of art and literature was subject to influences of oriental thinking. At this regard, I think for instance of the Impressionists, of Van Gogh, who were inspired by the Japanese art for their paintings. But I thing also of poets of the avant-garde, of T.S.Eliots “Wasteland”, of Ezra Pound, who was among the first poets to use haiku, although he wrote in English. With the Dadaists and the Surrealists, the short poems reached also France and landed in the 20th century also in Mexico and Greece. Western poets were undoubtedly attracted by the concision of haiku, its spotted expression, the sense of mystery pervading such a short lyric, the possibility of describing an entire world in drops of words. For western writers it was a great change, since they had previously preferred long poems, the stanzas, and the sonnets.
Translating haiku into a western language is not a way to waste some nuances of the Japanese original?
Each translation keeps only some meanings of the original, whilst others get lost and others are added. I like to read my poems translated into other languages because they are not completely equal to the Japanese originals. It is important to be open-minded concerning contamination and not to stick to fixed schemes.
But your masters, those who inspired you, they are all Japanese…
Sorry, here you are wrong. I have surely learned a lot from the absolute master of classical haiku, Matsuo Basho, but also from some French and English poets who have detached themselves from the classical topics and have described travels, situations, characters, such widening the semantic scope of this poetical genre.
Which are your next commitments?
After various stopovers in Slovenia and Italy, Trieste is the last of them; I shall return to Japan, in order to manage, from October 31st to November 2nd the Tokyo Poetry Festival, which will gather in the Capital poets from 21 countries.
Did you like Trieste?
I like it very much; I am here for the second time. I like Miramare Castle, the narrow streets of the Old Town, the fascination of the Adriatic Sea. I have also devoted a haiku to Trieste, and it is contained in “Earth Pilgrimages”: “Light up by the sunset/stirred by the wind/cypresses in Trieste”.
Giulia Basso
English translation by Julius Franzot
参照
2 interviews--From Trieste (2)
https://banyaarchives.seesaa.net/article/200809article_29.html
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俳句を絵のように翻訳すれば、わかる人が世界に広がるのかな？