Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024, 128 pp.
Three years before his impending death, Marcel Proust famously took to his bedroom at 44 rue Hamelin in 1919. Not so famous, at least in the US, is Masaoka Shiki’s five-year, pre-death vigil, lasting from 1897 to 1902. Unlike Proust’s, Shiki’s illness—tuberculosis—was blatant, worsened by Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the spine); by 1901, he was unable to leave his bed, let alone his house in the Ueno neighborhood of Tokyo. Fortunately for us, both men made the most of their involuntary downtime: Proust wrote his seven-volume tome In Search of Lost Time, and Shiki wrote haiku—tens of thousands of haiku—elevating himself to the immortal ranks of Bashō, Issa, and his personal hero, Buson.
However, Shiki did not want to go back to the past and its masters; he wanted to reinvent what he believed was a dying art. In fin de siècle Japan, he saw haiku as full of clichés and tired motifs. The powerful art form had become the kitchy realm of unoriginal dilettantes, and he was not going to stand for it. Instead, Shiki—soon to be Shiki and his followers—began publishing manifestos in the journal Nippon, calling for haiku that would no longer be connected to a string of verses (haikai no renga). The haiku poem must stand on its own, he declared, presenting reality as it is. This last stance, writes Abby Ryder-Huth in the notes on her new translation, was inspired by the critic Tsubouchi Shōyō, who had written that literature should copy reality “just as it is.”
The pieces in The Glass Clouding are meant to display Shiki’s practice of presenting reality as it is—through haiku, tanka, journal entries, and critical pieces— with haiku, rightfully, the star of the show. Much of these poems were written from his sick bed, where the glass windows of the book’s title provided him with garden views and, thus, subjects. Here, for instance, are the first and last stanzas of “Glass Window Tanka”:
sickroom
the glass door
I peer through—
can see sparrows
flying to the little pine
dawn, outside
I see the snow—
someone
wiped dew
from the glass
There is an obvious lack of sentimentality here: no romantic illusions. The author places himself indoors, sick—no pretense of being out in the garden—and presents reality as it is. And yet the poem retains the subtlety one would hope to find, with plants, animals, and the season coming together to set a scene and mood. Then there is that final stanza—the clarity of someone wiping dew from the window—a ripe metaphor for all sorts of connotations: enlightenment, specifically, or seeing, more generally.
Here, in another haiku, we see Shiki on the subject of snow:
do I see
armies leaving the gates
melting snow
Snow is shown as a force dispersing.t’s a significant image, and it certainly works to create images that resonate beyond the poem’s words. The snow is an army, a militant power, and yet the poem begins with the author’s uncertainty, just as the reader wonders if this is the end of a siege, with spring on the way—or is the snow’s melting an ominous moment, with floods destined for those down below, the army marching out to battle? Thus, we have the wonder of Shiki’s poetry, showing concrete reality while leaving readers with more mystery, more to ponder and see in each poem.
But one cannot talk about The Glass Clouding without discussing its translator, Ryder-Huth. Her presence and influence are blatant—she is even listed as one of the interior designers. To talk about her translations is tricky without simply showing what it is we’re dealing with:
If you look at this and wonder if Shiki’s haiku rules are different from what you know, trust me, they are not. His haiku, like the one above, were written in the standard 5-7-5 format. Here, for comparison, is a 1976 Shiki translation from Makoto Ueda:
A column of cloud—
onto my inkstone, an ant
has climbed.
In her notes on the translation, Ryder-Huth writes, “[t]his book is a series of experiments in how to look at looking—Shiki’s and my own.” In short, she means that Shiki was looking at a world that was alive, and these translations are her attempts to depict the vivid world of Shiki’s poetry.
So does it work? Yes, in the sense that these poems are alive and incredibly interesting. Reading poem #23697, above, I feel like I’m in my beloved Pacific Northwest rainforests, the pine needles literally piled atop each other, both in reality and in the poem—the hyperabundant fecundity of spring depicted here in words, but also in the very shape of those words. Here again, in #24026, the death of the peonies, snow piled atop them—it’s so easy to see:
In her notes, Ryder-Huth writes that Shiki wished he could have been a painter, as then he could have given up on haiku and really began depicting reality just as it is. Looking at this translation, one can imagine Shiki being pleased with the representation of reality through both language and its arrangement.
There is, however, an elephant in the room. How much liberty should a translator take? Ryder-Huth writes, “[t]o copy something exactly as it is sets an impossible horizon; Shiki’s work, a stream of this, this, this. All at a distance too far to reach.” Sure. However, to take his work, which was intentionally syllabically limited, and to do this with it, makes much of this book feel more like a very beautiful exercise in ekphrastic poetry than a translation. I kept imagining translating Georges Perec’s e-free Oulipo masterpiece, A Void, and including Es throughout—it feels like much of the point has been missed.
Ryder-Huth writes, “in translation, time splits apart … I want to bring the multiplicity and simultaneity of Shiki’s poems onto a new page’s surface … to interrupt the idea that we can see a thing whole.” It is a thoughtful approach, to be sure, but to liberally translate someone who followed strict rules for lines and syllables, especially someone who wanted to create a one-to-one correspondence between his poems and reality, feels like a lot of liberty on the part of the translator. I suppose much here rests on how much authorial intention matters, to say nothing of the various schools of thought about this issue in translation theory today. But I can’t help but feel more than a little uneasy about these wild lines in comparison to their strict origins.
To be fair, there are tankas and prose pieces in the book that are translated in a more standard manner. And Shiki is certainly one of those people from the modernist era who should be recognized and read more in places outside Japan, so it’s wonderful to see this book come out with Ugly Duckling Presse. I will add that, quite honestly, I absolutely loved reading this book and found it to be aesthetically beautiful and intellectually stimulating. It’s quite a treat to read, and to look at, too! If you would like to be introduced to a modern hero of haiku, you will appreciate this book, particularly if you enjoy the stylings of writers like Gertrude Stein or William Gass but wish they’d use fewer pages. If, however, you are looking for a translation that cleaves close to its source material, you may want to look elsewhere.
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Matt Martinson teaches honors courses at Central Washington University and regularly reviews books for Heavy Feather Review. Recent fiction and nonfiction appear in Lake Effect, 1 Hand Clapping, and Coffin Bell; his piece, “Trout and Trout Remain,” received a Notable mention in Best American Essays 2024.
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