Instructions on haiku

A clarification to begin with: like his entire generation, Paulhan first calls  haï-kaï the Japanese poems that we know under the invariable name of  haiku. His knowledge of Japanese poetry was precocious, attested in 1911 by the orientalist Gustave-Charles Toussaint, who thanked him in these terms: "Bashô and the red dragonfly enchanted me." _The Japanese poet Kikaku having proposed to his master the three verses: "The red dragonfly, / Take off its wings, / It's a pepper seed", he replied with the reciprocal text: "A red pepper grain, / Put wings on it, / It's a dragonfly!" In his anthology of Japanese poetry, which includes Kikaku's text, Michel Revon simply comments: "The master did not approve of this brilliant, but cruel, idea, and immediately corrected it with an ingenious reversal." _But Revon in 1910 refrained from translating Bashô's text, unlike Couchoud, who in 1917 gave them both in notes: a good example of the literary importance of footnotes. In 1947, André Breton assigned this haiku an exemplary value, in his conception of the ascending image.
In 1917, Paulhan in fact publicized a seminal book by Paul-Louis Couchoud,  Sages and poets of Asia, an entire chapter of which concerns "Lyrical Epigrams in Japan", from which Paulhan borrows the reference from Basil Hall Chamberlain. At the end of a stay in Japan financed by Albert Kahn, Paul-Louis Couchoud, dazzled by the poetry of Bashô and Buson, was the first, in 1903, to encourage the writing of French haiku, by boarding a barge, with the painter André Faure, the sculptor Albert Poncin and Hubert Morand, from Normale like Couchoud, along the canals of the Seine. A booklet keeps track of this journey: Au fil de l'eau, _printed in thirty copies. "Today, not one of these epigrams satisfies us", wrote Couchoud in 1917 (op.cit., p. 132).
In February 1917, Paulhan, however, made contact with Paul-Louis Couchoud, who was surprised to be so well known to him, but had already, reciprocally, heard of Paulhan from the Leblonds and the sculptor Bourdelle. Paulhan publishes in  La Vie a long note on this book. But as early as January 1917, Georges Sabiron received haiku from Jean Paulhan: "Jean wrote to me last week and sent me haï-kaï. I clumsily try to put on three lines what I think // This thin painter / is the only friend of my only friend / He draws a dead crow", he wrote to Albert Uriet. It is at this moment that the possibility of a unifying reading of Paulhan's work is triggered, in which the Japanese poem would join the Malagasy poems and reveal the most striking part of Paulhan's stories. By thanking him on February 27 for this "article so benevolent [...] and so penetrating for Japanese poetry", _Couchoud tries in fact to formulate a link between the Japanese haiku and the* Malagasy hain-teny*  : "And I cannot tell you the pleasure I took in your Malagasy hain-teny. It is Madagascar and all its perfumes. There in a which are real haï-kaï 'The fringe of my lamba is wet / In the water that I was going to drink / The frog jumped.'" Nine months later, Couchoud reads  The Applied Warrior: "The acute sincerity, the application to tighten the sensation and the feeling are marvelous in it. their strange precision and their conciseness full of intentions", he writes before continuing: "Do you know that there are two or three French 'haijin' who strive to perfect the French haikai and give it rules." Paulhan is invited to a meeting planned for December 1917 or January 1918 and which cannot take place: "The war disperses the lovers of little Japanese muses". In the meantime, Paulhan gave to  La Vie, which published them in March 1918, the haiku of his friend Georges Sabiron, who disappeared in combat on May 29, 1918. Couchoud found them "very Japanese, especially the rooster and his shadow, or tinged with a pretty sentiment, like the locomotive. I would be delighted to know the author. Perhaps an opportunity will come to bring together the French 'haijin' one day." _The opportunity presented itself on May 11, 1919, in Saint-Cloud, where Paul Éluard was also invited, as a friend of Paulhan. In August 1938, Couchoud still remembered "the happy times when we compared the 'hain-teny' merinas to the Japanese 'haï-kaï' in a garden at Versailles." He is then became the author of a resounding work on the person of Christ and contributed, with Roger Caillois and René Étiemble, to establishing contact between Jean Paulhan and Georges Dumézil. This is how Paulhan began to play his role in the dissemination of French haiku, after having made contact with a certain number of authors, first and foremost Julien Vocance, pseudonym of Joseph Seguin (1878-1954).
Julien Vocance is known to Paul-Louis Couchoud for his war haiku. Paulhan had already read the two series of poems published in La Grande Revue in May 1916 and May 1917 when Vocance, at his request, sent him the numbers. Conversely, Vocance reported to Paulhan, on April 2, 1919, about his reading of the hain-teny, in which he found analogies with the haiku whose form allowed him to translate his impressions of war. But it is difficult for him to specify these analogies, with the exception of the single _ flavor _ (a word that Paulhan will use in connection with Indian rhetoric). In a brief note intended to present nine haiku by Julien Vocance, Paulhan writes: "Julien Vocance published in La Grande Revue (May 1916) one hundred 'visions of war', submitted to the form of Japanese haï-kaï. This brief mode of expression is suitable for small surprises and for a more serious surprise, which we do not admit to ourselves." Later, he will seek to define the poetic object more closely: "this singular precision in irony, an irony that we feel coming from very far away, coming down from very high, these holes and these flashes under so many meticulous appearances." a little forgotten today, Julien Vocance is also the dedicatee of "Baigneuse du clair au sombre" in  The Necessities of Lifeby Paul Éluard And it was him that Paulhan first contacted to speak in*  The NRF_of another collection by Paul Éluard*  Les Animaux et ses hommes.
The small anthology of haiku which appeared in The NRF on September 1, 1920 is an excellent example of the collective game of the magazine. In his letter to Jean-Richard Bloch dated May 5, 1920, Jacques Rivière attributes authorship to Paulhan, after Jean-Richard Bloch sent Jacques Rivière his own haï-kaï. The texts of Jean-Richard Bloch only seduced Jacques Rivière in their relationship to other poems. But in front of Julien Vocance, Jean Paulhan takes care to quote Jacques Rivière: "Rivière, hesitating between Bloch's haï-kaï, yours, those also sent to him from Santiago by a Japanese writer, suggests that I compose for one of the next issues of the nrf a small anthology containing 6 or 7 poems from each haijin. Will you accept it? I am writing to Maublanc in this sense. But above all I would like your advice and your help." _Because the production threatens. At the last moment, Albert Poncin sent other poems, which Paulhan judges "much inferior" to those that the review will produce. Poems that Georges-Armand Masson hides in  For pleasure under the pseudonym Olivier-Réaltor do not find favor in his eyes either. As of Monday, March 15, it seems that the decision has been made, for September It is reaffirmed on August 4, when Paulhan specifies the composition of the summary: 1 introductory page on. the hai-kai. / 11 haï-kaïs of P.-L. Couchoud (along the water) / 11 a.m.-k. from you (will you allow me to choose "at the circus" which I particularly like) / and, in alphabetical order: / 4 h-k by P. A. Birot (_poems to measure) / 11 h-k by Jean-Richard Bloch (maison en Poitou) / 5 h-k by Jean Breton (C. Bouglé) / 11 h-k by Paul Éluard (for live here) / 2 h-k from M. Gobin / 11 h-k from René Maublanc (landscapes) / 5 h-k from J. Paulhan (found objects) / The "presentation" phase would be: [ten] / eight / haï-kaï makers, who are discovered here gathered around Couchoud, trying to develop an instrument of analysis. They do not know what adventures, they at least suppose that adventures await the French haï-kaï - which could meet, for example, the kind of success which came in other times to the madrigal, or to the sonnet - and thereby form a common taste." Paulhan peppers his letters with haiku, for example to the address of the publisher Ker-Frank-Houx, who responds to him on November 4, 1920  : "This hai-kai that you recite to me is perfectly graceful, but I especially like it to be followed by this episode of the bat. Here is a beautiful youth and this cheerfulness which must last for relaxation and only intelligence knows how to keep intelligence from tarnishing. This reflection that you gave me was helpful to me. The bell tower of Flavigny, Jean Paulhan and the bat, and the trees looking down on him; therefore not all things are ugly.”
For Paulhan, Couchoud's reading reflects the reflection on short poetry that he had encountered, before the war, with his friend Georges Sabiron, who saw in it the possibility of methodologically resolving the contradiction that he observed in himself, between analytical taste and plastic feeling: "An image built too quickly prevents me from getting down to the idea or else the idea developed in abstract terms remains dry and would only result in a dull poem." _A fan of Jules Laforgue, Georges Sabiron had experimented with verses of thirteen syllables (in imitation of Father Keller: 4-3-3-3), and poems in which each stanza was structured like a sonnet. The essential thing is that Paulhan was the interlocutor of such weariness, faced with the great forms of the poem: "I momentarily let go of the big one. I must first forget it" _concluded Sabiron, reluctant in the face of new images, capable of imitating the Chinese style, also careful to avoid cunning and preciousness.
But after the time of craze, there already comes, for haiku, that of literary history. René Maublanc, professor of philosophy "in the ruins of Reims", who is preparing a bibliography of haiku, at the same time as a conference at the Guimet museum, on Saturday March 11, 1922 at 2:30 p.m. at the Friends of the Orient, addresses Paulhan to ask him for information on "the haijin of the NRF". He also wants Paulhan to send him, as Paulhan seems to have promised him, “some unpublished haï-kaï”. A meeting took place on Sunday February 19, 1922 at Julien Vocance's house, with Marcel Pareau, Jean Paulhan, Albert Poncin and René Maublanc. Maublanc's bibliography appeared in  Le Pamprein 1923, Paulhan subsequently seemed to have abandoned poetic writing and only rarely returned to a summary which was nonetheless one of his first notable interventions, as editor, in La NRF. A further step towards the oblivion of the Orient will be taken in 1949, when Julien Vocance will only want to speak of tercets ("there is no longer any question, is there? of haï-kaï"). But let there be no mistake about the supposed lightness of these Japanese poems: this inspiration, supported by the memory of the three-line short stories by Félix Fénéon, and that of Jules Renard, will be found in the epigrams - sometimes called precisely "haï-kaï", which Jean Paulhan composed at the start of the Second World War.
Others writers are engaged in this French discovery of Japanese poetry. These are Fernand Gregh in  La Revue de Parisin 1906, and Max Jacob in his "Preface of 1916" for the  Cornet à dice. _The situation is changed when French writers practice writing _  haiku in times of war. There are naturally modern-inspired haiku in Japan. but with Julien Vocance's collection, the haiku underwent the test of fire. If Paulhan did not quite succeed in bringing hain-teny into French poetic creation, he contributed powerfully, for better and for worse and through a single summary from  The NRF, to the diffusion of French haiku.

Note by Bernard Baillaud, in Jean Paulhan, Complete Works, Volume 2 "The Art of Contradiction", with the kind authorization of the author.

© Bernard Baillaud