The Wandering Poet of Edo

Lucien Stryk (Translation) (1985), On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London: Penguin Books, pp.92

‘Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.’

                                                      -Basho

This is the kind of poetry book that feels like treasure. It has verses in translation that is accessible without draining away too much across languages, a form of poetry that is short and unique, beautiful Taiga paintings as you move from one set of verses to another and an excellent introductory essay and reader-friendly notes at the end. Even though you are new to this form, you will not be lost here except in the Haiku themselves.

Philosophy of Haiku

Haiku, in its traditional seventeen syllable form, has two parts. The first part is often the depiction of a condition as found in nature and the second part is a feeling of sudden perception. These two parts are divided abruptly by a cutting-phrase in Japanese called kireji, rendered in the English translation as an emphatic punctuation like the hyphen. The philosophy behind Haiku was that a moment that was taken from a context, devoid of antecedence (past time, memory) or consequences (future time or anticipation) is capable of attaining transcendental unity. Haiku significantly differed from other forms of poetry by demanding active audience participation for the completion of its rendition. Every Haiku begins in the poet’s mind and ends in the reader’s.

Basho’s legacy

Matsuo Kinsake was the greatest Japanese Haiku poet of the Tokugawa period of the seventeenth century Japan. He wrote under the name Basho, in honour of the broad-leaved banana tree (originally called Basho in Japanese) that one of his disciples gifted him. He revolutionalized traditional Haiku that was originally practiced by scholarly poets, freeing it from the rigid orthodoxy of rules. He infused lightness (karumi), solitude (sabi) and sparseness (wabi) of Zen in his signature Shofu-style Haiku. In his lifetime, he is thought to have written at least 1000 Haikus, often tucked away in his much-loved travel sketches written in haibun style (haiku followed by prose). The central concern in his poetry is the appreciation and elevation of the mundane and the commonplace.

To capture Basho’s haiku in other languages is a daunting task and Lucien Stryk has done an amazing job rendering it in English. Some of his poems are poignant and some self-deprecatingly funny, but all of them leave you with lingering poignancy. Most of his poetry dwells on the movement of time, the cycle of seasons and the evolution of mind with the natural flow of life. His love for Edo (modern Tokyo), mountain Fuji, cherry blossoms and the landscape of Japan is equally matched by his friendship with fellow poets and philosophers and love for enigmatic women. He loves, lives, celebrates, complains and grieves, seventeen syllables at a time.

Reading this volume is having the privilege to roam around freely with him. Though separated in time and place, across language and form, Basho talks to you and thinks with you. He belongs to all of us and to all time and ages. In his own words,

House of fancy-

Dozing there, it

Was all mine.

And now, it is all ours too!

The ‘Prose’ and Cons of Being a Poet

Maps for a Mortal Moon (Aleph) &

 I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky (Hachette) 

Adil Jussawalla

No one can write about one book of the Indian poet Adil Jussawalla.  One must present a bunch of his collected works, both fiction and non-fiction like a bouquet of flowers. Only as assortment of melodies, this music makes sense. The reader must experience the world of Jussawalla as a wholesome experience of entertainment and alienation from comfort zones. You are in the presence of a nomad who is addicted to deracination, an architect who shapes poetry, a critic who births new languages and a wit who unwittingly is making and unmaking norms.

The two books that collect his fiction and non-fiction work in two very different ways equally well- as a one-stop preview for the uninitiated to get a taste of Jussawalla’s intense, dramatic and poignant world that begins and ends in South Mumbai (but traverses many worlds in between) and as a reflective piece for those who have followed him through his productive decades. Jussawalla’s essays on people, artists and writers, art works and literature, places and travelling document with tenderness and unfailing wit, what is erasure in this world that is adept in losing important things. Indeed, the able editor of Maps for a Mortal Moon, Jerry Pinto (author of a fine novel Em & the Big Hoom), remarks drily that the Adil Jussawalla has spent the best part of his life battling amnesia that results from things, people and landmarks disappearing. His essays are a collection of things fast receding, treasures that we should have held close to ourselves. What us poignant is that he displayed a unique penchant to collect some of these things from the verge of disappearance. Anecdotes have it that in his paper-lined flat in Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, some of the finest poets writing in English (Jeet Thayil, Eunice de Souza) would have their scribbled poetry collected, kept and published in anthologies later. In this sense, Adil was literally a keeper of literary conscience.

The most enduring contributions of Jussawalla however, were in the capacity of editor, teacher and a publisher. He had tenure at the national newspaper Indian Express where poets like Arvind Mehrotra were given two full broadsheets for book reviews and later in Debonair. As a teacher of literature at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, he held poetry reading called Dangerous Animals every Tuesday. As a founding member of poets co-operative Clearing House, he was setting up a modest but important clearing house for poetry manuscripts of the 1970s. Regrettably, in India today, we have only small publishers interested in discovering poets as big publishing houses are led by supra-literary concerns while selecting manuscripts.

From the vast expanse of his world to his intense scrutiny of the here and now is unsettling. Reading his poetry (The Right Kind of Dog & Trying to Say Goodbye) brings discomfort- he places the most disparate things close to one another, distorting expectations and creating strange experiences. His poems begin at the fissures of this disjunctive unsettling, it has many registers each resembling the many worlds of the poet and his many variations of a self over the years. For the deeply compassionate and engaging conversation with Adil Jussawalla, these edited works provide a good introduction.