Japanese hai-kaïs

(text published in La Vie, 6th year, no. 2, February 1917)

Where the little Frenchman draws, in his notebook, the tree and the man, the little Japanese draws the leaf of the tree and the nail of a finger. The popular poetry of the haï-kaïs is based on the same inclination to dissociate, to seek out and capture the detail, the small, the brief. These haï-kaïs have seventeen syllables, and a single emotion:

The emotion is, most often, surprise with some tenderness. One day, the student Kikaku brought his master Bashô this hai-kai that he had just composed:

But Bashô, a fervent Buddhist, was indignant at such cruelty, and corrected the hai-kai:

A short astonishment is the essence of haï-kaï: poetry reduced to pure sensation, and refusing to give it a sequel; skylight open for a moment on a small natural fact, muffled lantern. — It is difficult not to think here of Jules Renard. Furthermore, the haï-kaï charmed Stéphane Mallarmé, who denounced the eloquence invading lyricism among us. “Poetry,” he said with a smile, “has gone astray since the great Homeric deviation.”

While the classical poets admire, in Japan, only a small number of consecrated landscapes, responding to the Chinese canon of perfection, the haijin, maker of hai-kaïs, goes out over hill and dale: April finds him in front of the cherry trees of Yoshino, June in front of the peonies of Hasedera. Being poor, he chats with the mandarins, and sometimes converts them to poetry:

In winter, he looks for shelter, with his little lantern:

He travels at night:

Thus, in her verses, the housewife trots out:

the penitent pilgrim, whose face is hidden under a straw hat, the arched bridges, the butterflies:

and the embarrassed bather:

and these strange scenes that we see in the fields:

Or :

"May your haï-kaïs, Bashô told his students, resemble a willow branch wet by a light rain and stirred by the breeze". He thus gave to understand that emotion must take all the cost: an accomplished mystic himself, he realized the doctrine of ecstasy, and as an instrument of conversion he used poetry. When his disciples transgressed the rules of poverty, humility, patience, he reprimanded them by saying: “This is not hai-kai”.

Here we are only sketching, following the very terms used by Paul-Louis Couchoud, a chapter of this harmonious, equal, marvelous work: Sages and Poets of Asia. The neighboring chapters deal with the "Japanese Atmosphere", "Japan at Arms" - notes taken during the Russo-Japanese War -, Confucius: the entire work was thought of, undoubtedly written before the present war; she did not suffer its influence, she did not have to suffer it. However, this war is still betrayed, from time to time, by a word - such a sentence from "Japan in arms", or such haï-kaïs, composed in the style of Japanese poems by Julien Vocance, fighter.

and not so much unequal to their models. The question that can be asked about them is also more delicate.

The most surprising thing about haï-kaïs is, undoubtedly, that we are not confused when reading them. We understand them; understanding is little: they make us remember something, they seem to come to us from within and, to put it all in one word, they seem "easy to do". I gave the book to a section comrade, who said to me: "Famous, these haï-kaïs; they remind me of a guy who spoke slang, but clear slang, a Parisian." After that, P.-L. Couchoud comes to tell us that they are vulgar poetry and despised by Japanese scholars. No doubt, they may as well remain close, rather than to the learned poem, to the cry, to the expression, to the word.

Here is the naked cry. Elsewhere the simplicity, linguist so to speak, of the haï-kaï, is no less. Why does the feeling, yet so varied, so difficult to grasp in its unity, which we call goodness, or vanity, have its name, and not this other very clear feeling that the poem reveals, represents, defines:

“World of dew” is the expression the priests use to designate our lower world, vanishing faster than the morning dew.

Thus, as soon as we want to detach ourselves from the charm of these translated poems, we must think of the probable difficulty of their choice. Let the grace and ease of the story not hide it from us. It was nothing less than creating a language of emotions common to Europeans and Japanese. Does Paul-Louis Couchoud retain one haikai out of ten, out of a hundred, out of a thousand "tried", I'm not looking for it. The main thing, the delicious thing, is that we adopted those selected, without hesitation. It is from them, elementary language, that we will subsequently better understand "Japan at Arms", or the "Japanese Atmosphere". It is also through them that Paul-Louis Couchoud, if it is true that a common life is taking shape, in which all humanity will participate, will remain, alongside Lafcadio Hearn, one of the passionate and subtle workers of this work.

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“Japanese hai-kai”, La Vie, 6th grade, no. 2, February 1917, p. 58-60 [on a chapter by Paul-Louis Couchoud, “The lyrical epigrams of Japan”, in Sages and Poets of Asia, Calmann-Lévy, 1917, I-301 p., p. 51-137; text signed: “Jean Paulhan”.

Jean Paulhan wrote to Marcel Pareau: “I wrote in the last Life, which I am sending you, the draft of a magnificent book, on haï-kaï. It’s “Sages and Poets of Asia”. Try to read it, or better, as soon as my book is back, I will send it to you. » (“adjutant / Malagasy detachment / Ste Mesme by Dourdan (S. & Oise)”). Leaving the Saint-Mesme camp, Jean Paulhan wrote to Albert Uriet: “new letter from Couchoud, full of somewhat easy “compliments” and, it seems to me, not very sincere. »]

(Bibliography of the works of Jean Paulhan, by Bernard Baillaud)