Author: Harold Henderson
Date: 1958
Publisher: Anchor Books
ISBN: none
Length: 190 pages
Quote: “I have found that the best any translator can even hope for is to reproduce the effect that the originals have had on him.”
Harold Henderson was “decorated” by the Japanese government for his success in translating the more than 300 classical haiku in this book. Success is never perfect. To illustrate exactly how hard it is to translate poetry, each haiku is printed along with a phonetic approximation of the Japanese original and a literal translation; sometimes the literal translations make sense in English, sometimes we have to take Professor Henderson’s word that the rules of Japanese grammar make it likely that the Japanese words mean something like the translation he’s given them.
Some Japanese words have no true translation into English. Some translate well, but have different connotations in different cultures; after reading a few of the many haiku that refer to the Japanese cuckoo, hototogisu, you’ll remember that audiences hearing hototogisu did not think “amusing oldfashioned clocks.” Several words used in these haiku identify species of birds, flowers, and insects that had no widely understood English names because, even in 1958, they didn’t exist in English-speaking countries. The unfamiliarity of the kiri tree, later sold in the United States as “paulownia” or “Empress’ tree” or “Imperial Japanese Medicine-Bark Tree,” seems ironic now that some parts of the United States are classifying this ornamental tree as an invasive nuisance. The haiku in Henderson’s Introduction mention several insects; a few years earlier Lafcadio Hearn had published a detailed discussion of these insects, what they looked like and what qualities made them prized pets; Henderson calls them “locusts” although most of them seem more like crickets; they were kept as domestic pets, not dreaded as agricultural pests. Sadly, the yujo, a word Henderson can only bring himself to translate as “courtesans,” were a lowlier and less liberated group of women than the geisha, the word more accurately translated as "courtesans." Henderson explains many details of this kind, not always in as much detail as readers may remember from other books.
Henderson also explains that he had read, and translated, hundreds of haiku that either didn’t mean anything to him, or else had needed to be explained to him at such length that he didn’t try to explain them to anyone else in this small book. It’s possible that some readers’ favorites, already translated and published by either more ambitious or less poetically demanding authors, will be missing from An Introduction to Haiku, although most of the easily translated classics are in here.
An Introduction to Haiku was used as a college textbook in its day, and could still be used as one, but it’s not the kind of ponderous, committee-authored book we think of as a textbook. It’s easy to carry around, and a fun read. If you would rather get into a conversation than read a long prose narrative on a train trip, this is the kind of book you might use to start the conversation.
To buy it here, send $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address. At least three, possibly more, books of the same size can be added to the $5 package.
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