Shamrock No 19

Zugvögel / Migratory Birds / Oiseaux migrateurs / Aves migratorias – 150 Haiku

by Klaus-Dieter Wirth

Published by Hamburger Haiku Verlag, Hamburg, 2010

200 pp.; ISBN 978-3-937257-27-3

Available from Hamburger Haiku Verlag, Postfach 20 25 48 – 20218 Hamburg, Germany or via www.haiku.de

Priced at Euro 14.90

In this collection, 150 haiku are presented in four languages: the original German, English, French and Spanish. All the translations have been made by the author, Klaus-Dieter Wirth, a philologist, who has been known and well respected in the haiku community for many years. Haiku connoisseurs will surely remember excellent self-translations of his haiku edited/polished by David Cobb. Two of Klaus-Dieter Wirth's haiku were published in Shamrock No 14 in translations made by the author of this review; two more (not from the reviewed collection) are being published in this issue among the translated haiku (see above).

The first poem in the book was written as early as in 1967; the rest of them come from the 90s and 00s.

Not being able to fully enjoy the French and the Spanish translations because of language limitations, we have to limit ourselves to commenting on the English texts – and occasionally on the German originals.

There’s a lot to enjoy in the book. E.g. haiku like this:

the brighter the night
the lonelier the snowman
by the entrance path

It is interesting to see how the author contemplates the changing of the seasons in terms of changing emotional states. The reader will surely take pleasure in the poet’s close observation of the natural world:

wayward wind
playing with the insects
in the cobweb

in stagnant water
a pattern of whitish scum
forming a lotus

The following haiku – an excellent piece! – was written directly in English:

Poplar columns,
the dome of the sky
out of reach

Klaus-Dieter Wirth’s senryu are equally convincing:

artificial flowers
grandma puts them into water
to keep them fresh

archaeologist
more and more interested
in his own wife

customer’s complaint
after one hour’s wait
for his snails

The poet here is a satirist who has a keen eye and a sharp pen.

We didn’t really want to comment about translation issues in this review but we feel that we have to do so. The order of words in English is (or should be) completely different from what is has to be in German. Sometimes the word by word method of translation played a trick on the author. E.g. the following haiku:

Über
Tausenden Sonnenblumen
bleich nur ein Mond

was translated as

Above
thousands of sunflowers
pale just one moon

Same here:

Endlessly barking
a dog as evening falls.
louder and louder

In some of the translations the author tries to recreate the 5-7-5 pattern of the original. Despite the original haiku being convincing as a poem, the translation sometimes looks like this:

The solo flautist
is swaying like a rush, is
playing with the wind

Also, it isn’t clear what prevented the author from getting rid of all the forms of the verb ‘to be’ in this and some of the other translations.

The abundance of direct simile is a suspect, too. “Swaying like a rush”, “Night is closing in like an open question”, “A cloud like a knife cut the moon in two”... Isn’t it enough to juxtapose the two images, i.e. to put them next to each other, so the readers can figure out all those ‘like’ and ‘as’ for themselves?

Phrases like “a year full of flies”, or “telephone wires busy with little birds” sound a little puzzling, so the reader has to consult with the original texts – if he/she is lucky to understand German.

We have repeatedly warned our brothers and sisters in haiku about the perils of self-translation, especially where they translate themselves into English. Unfortunately, English is not particularly forgiving in cases like this.

Summing up, we must say that it is an impressive collection by one of the masters of the genre, with much admirable work included, and we recommend it without any reservation. A word of warning for those who have to rely on the English translations: not all of them work.

Anatoly Kudryavitsky

Haiku from Ireland and the rest of the world