Tanka Time

by Jeffrey Hillard

You have likely tried writing a haiku. Even disinterested readers know a haiku when they see one. The world itself is well aware of the exceptional compression and excitement of the haiku. Children write haiku in elementary school. Major poets advocate haiku for its compact delivery of line, image(s), and breath. It's good practice to write haiku.

The haiku is the world's most popular poetic form after the sonnet. There's no Western derivation of what the East has offered us in the haiku; it's a strict, 3-line, 5-7-5 sequence of syllables, usually with a focus on the interplay between the natural world and humanity. No missing those obligations.

But, wait. Why isn't the Japanese Tanka just as popular? It's only five lines and uses a line-by-line syllable sequence of 5-7-5-7-7 (31 total syllables). That's two lines and 14 syllables more than the haiku -- not a great deal of addition.

So, why? Perhaps the best reason is a historical one, a cultural study that involves ancient Japanese politics and hierarchy. The tanka originated as a "poem of the court" as early as 900. The holders of power solicited the tanka to symbolize that upper echelon. Thus the tanka never made its real way into the hands of Japanese peasants where the haiku was favored. (Bottom line: Japanese workers were responsible for the spreading of the haiku. Japanese aristocrats prevented the tanka from reaching an established working populace, and thus prevented its "spreading.")

The tanka was sequestered, more or less, within the realm of aristocracy. It was ignoble for the tanka to find a path into the peasantry. Those court members bathed in egalitarian collections of verse, and the tanka helped fill those collections. The year 1205 is regarded as the cornerstone of Japan's "golden" literary age. There was, indeed, a shift that saw the tanka move from the ruling to the middle class.

The other reason that the tanka has not been as popular as the haiku is simply that translations are not as good. It's a certainty that translations of tankas are not as readily available to readers as are haiku translations.

The wonders of Japanese poetry are grounded in mystery. Ambiguity. Shadowy images and metaphors. Never absolute directness of explicitness. Both the haiku and tanka show this. Japanese poetry suggests rather than states. This is a notion we should consider. Where the English language teaches us to be direct, Japanese language is more ambiguous. This has to do with the complicated use of syllables in their language. Their syllables proffer double-meanings in a radical way.

So these "suggested meanings" in each line of a tanka give it power. One major difference between the tanka and haiku: we tend to take in all three haiku lines at once, fairly quickly, whereas the tanka wants us to pay attention to each individual line. Each line is a phrase or sentence fragment calling great attention to itself.

The scholar Ki no Tsurayuki, in the 10th century, wrote: "The poetry of Japan has its seeds in the human heart and mind and grows into the myriad leaves of words…It is poetry which effortlessly moves the heavens and the earth, awakens the world of invisible spirits to deep feeling…."

The word here is "effortless." The tanka does look effortless, yet imagine the trimming and tweaking we must do to get the syllables and lines right. This takes effort. The end result, yes, should be a transparent feel of language, sound, and imagery.

The tanka awakens the reader to soulful vibrations of the natural world, thematically speaking. Here is a poem by Nakatsukasa, c. 950 (translated by Andrew J. Pekarik):

No visitor comes
along with the blowing
of this autumn wind.
If you were a reed grass,
you ought to produce some sound.

Here is a meditation on the aloneness of man versus the dominance of nature. Yet, the urging for a person to create his/her individual "path" in life means the path should complement and work closely with the power of the natural world.

Notice that in lines 2 and 4, there are six syllables. Ok, sure, this is a translation. In Japanese, the poem obeys the 5-7-5-7-7 form. Often translations take such liberty with the tanka; the same goes for most all translations.

Here is a tanka by Makoto Ueda:

cherry blossoms
cherry blossoms cherry blossoms
start blooming
end blooming and the park looks
as if nothing had happened

Now an interesting translation of Ueda's tanka by Jack Stamm:

As if in this park
Nothing at all has happened
The cherry blossoms
Have bloomed, blossomed, scattered:
Sakura sakura sakura

Again, some liberty has been taken in the syllabic arrangement, but the attention to mystery, sound, and line is intact.

Here is an original tanka by poet Matthew Heiss. It's called "Unconventional Romance."

Clear diamond will claim
romance for the jaded mind.
While blood-red ruby
shall make mockery of death
when on the hand of one so loved.

The lines lead up to a perfect ambiguity. There is a curious twist on "…of one so loved" in line 5. The word "so" becomes singularly powerful, ambiguous. It suggests that maybe a past love exists (as in "I loved her so"). Or, it could be the I-love-her-so-much-now notion. The fact is that one tiny word ("so") leaps out and tilts the poem uniquely.

In Japan today, the tanka is very popular, just as much as the haiku. There are local and national tanka contests and publications centered only on the tanka. The ancient restraint of the tanka to a political class has now been transformed into an international celebration.

A publication that does offer an English-language tanka contest each year can be found at http://www.faximum.com/aha!poetry. Isn't it time you try exploring a tanka?

-- JH
©2000 Jeffrey Hillard

A Contributing Editor for Writer Online, Jeffrey Hillard is the author of three books of poems, most recently Pieces of Fernald: Poems and Images of a Place. He is also a journalist, fiction writer, and screenwriter who teaches at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. Jeff was appointed by the Ohio Arts Council as a Summer 2000 writer-in-residence at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.