I want to make a plea that may seem a little odd. It’s about haiku, the shortest form of poetry known to humanity. Here’s the thing. If you are writing haiku in English, your haiku are probably too long.
A haiku should be
Five, seven, five syllables
And la dee dah, dah.
Crazy, right? Haiku are only seventeen syllables. How can that be too long? I’m sorry, it just is. The Japanese language doesn’t work the same way as English, and in particular the Japanese syllable took a very different turn from the English syllable.
English syllables are dense and chaotic. English words string together a code of 26 letters into odd constructs. Japanese words use a set of glyphs and a more simplified syllabary. The basic unit of Japanese is a syllable: either a single vowel, a consonant-vowel combo, or the “n” sound alone. There are about 100 such syllables. English contains over 15,000 syllables and even today I don’t believe anyone has successfully delineated them all.
Because of this, English can encode information more densely than Japanese. Consider this, in English the word “strengths” is a single syllable. If this word were transliterated into Japanese it would require about seven Japanese syllables.
Beneath Trees
ki no moto ni / shiru mo namasu mo / sakura kana
Bashou wrote this poem about eating outside while watching the cherry blossoms blooming. This romanized transliteration may give you an idea how sparse and tiny a Japanese haiku really is.
Most translations of Japanese haiku end up inserting extraneous information in order to pad the translation to fit the seventeen-syllable structure that readers expect. The poem above is usually translated in such a way to explicitly portray that cherry blossoms have fallen into the food. This insight is not encoded directly in the poem. It is the reader’s insight. That insight is the payoff from reading the haiku and letting it knock around the phonological loop of short-term memory.
Here’s my own translation.
beneath trees
soup and salad and
cherry blossoms
Eleven to Twelve English Syllables
My suggested form for writing English form haiku follows a pattern of three syllables, five syllables and then three syllables with wiggle room for another syllable depending on the density of the words or the pacing of the lines.
Less is more. In twelve syllables the poet will need to find, refine and focus on the resonant image of the poem. A seventeen syllable haiku looks like a resonant image photobombed by an unctuous cousin.
raindrops patter
still falling down from
leaf to leaf
This poem was initiated by my momentary surprise as I noticed I could hear rain falling although the rain clouds had passed. The rain was still falling through the leaves in the trees where I had recently sheltered.
These twelve syllables capture that moment for me succinctly. I can’t imagine how five more syllables could say anything more worth saying in connection with my surprise and delight.
