Author Description

I admire and immensely enjoy the traditional Japanese 'haiku' verse form. I speak not a word of Japanese (much less can I write or read it!), hence am restricted to English translations, which often seem somehow strained. In their translations (or in their English-language original contributions) many an author prefaces a dose of haiku with laments about the difficulty of fitting a given Japanese haiku's delicate wordsmithery into English - the big bugaboos being first, to find English words to properly express the "Japanese" thoughts, and second, to fit those words into the tight metrical structure imposed on haiku when they are in Japanese.This structure is described, usually, as being three lines, of (sequentially) 5, 7, and 5 syllables. From my reading about haiku, however, it seems obvious that that is incorrect. Japanese haiku verse structure is NOT measured in what are called 'syllables' in English. Rather, the count to which the 5-7-5 structure refers is a count of SOUNDS. Although not much considered in English, this is not a difficult concept. In some languages (probably Japanese included) most English-style 'syllables' contain but one sound (the linguist's 'phoneme'). That is not the case in English. The simple English "A" (meaning 'an', 'one each') is a two-count item under proper Japanese 'poetic-accounting principles'. All this causes difficulties in both composition and translation.I have tried to write haiku in English, using as the counting unit sounds rather than syllables: English does not lend itself well to that exercise. And, like most English-speakers, I do not hear or think in 'sound-bits'. English routinely combines a great many sounds into a single polysyllabic word, which make the exercise difficult and frustrating. Plenty of highly expressive English words simply outrun the available counts (5-7-5) under Japanese rules. Nonetheless, one can write short poems in English which embody most of the underlying principles of Japanese haiku - but