Issue 2
Shamrock
Haiku Journal
of the Irish Haiku Society
Focus on
SCANDINAVIA
We showcase here a selection of haiku from four Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. As we are planning to publish a special Swedish issue of Shamrock in the foreseeable future, this selection highlights work by only one Swedish poet, notably Tomas Tranströmer.
DENMARK
May Day dawning...
the letterbox clicks
in the dark
each stone
next to its shadow –
April sun!
misty morning
she walks her aged poodle
around the cherry tree
my neighbours' wind chimes
and mine...
same sound
spring breeze
the fields slightly tinged
with green
snowstorm
road signs
for whiteness
-- Allan Dystrup
Golden-brown roadside trees…
the felled ones
still green
Climbers
yet halfway up the wall –
orange roses
My wedding bouquet:
weeds of meadows and fields
mingled with roses
Half a chestnut on the path,
a spiny shell in my pocket
for arthritis
On the wall,
the vine and sunset glow –
indoors, only art
rotting leaves piling up
on the lake surface –
the current
-- Hanne Hansen
Special offer at Tesco:
gorgeous roses
in plastic pots
A rosebush, just purchased –
digging a deeper hole
for it
Plenty of green freckles
on rosebuds:
hungry plant-lice
Flying summer…
long threads in the air,
new-born spiders
Invisible aeroplanes…
white trails in the blue sky
form a cross
Bright moon
the last birds of summer
dissolve in the night
-- Sys Matthiesen
Winds go quiet –
leaves cling to the branches
averting autumn
Sun creeps into my room,
stays there
in eclipse
Quietness in the air –
they forgive each other
for a while
Man away from home –
dark girls in the moon
dance
The moon
too round to hide behind
these cypresses
The sky breathing –
we can see silver fillings,
stars
Rain falls –
no home for it
up aloft
-- Lone Munksgaard Nielsen
Translated from the Danish by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
FINLAND
Summer cycling –
keeping me company,
my shadow
-- Riita Rossilahti
snowstorm
a man waiting for a train
behind the pillar
morning bus
a procession of shadows
on book pages
in the park:
today a greener day
than yesterday
-- Jari Sutinen
English versions by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
NORWAY
the noise of a train
over a gaggle of geese
this morning
snowflakes...
craters
on new asphalt
cold draught –
through the open door,
winter stars
almost home…
a buzzard soaring
on spread wings
a colder day
the gibbous moon
on new ice
smog…
the faltering patter
of high heels
dull day
my neighbour’s gate
open
-- Odd Gurre Aksnes (English versions by Anatoly Kudryavitsky)
SWEDEN
Tomas Tranströmer
Haiku poems from
The Great Mystery
(2004)
The lamasery
with hanging gardens –
a battle-piece
Thoughts at a standstill:
mosaic-pieces
in the palace yard
Standing on the balcony
in a cage of sunbeams –
like a rainbow
Humming in the mist –
a fishing boat out there:
trophy on the waters
The wall of hopelessness –
arriving and departing,
faceless pigeons
A stag basks in the sun –
flies flit and sew the shadow
on the ground
Shaggy pines
in this tragic swamp –
for ever and ever
November sun –
my gigantic shadow drifts,
becomes blurry
Death bends over me –
I’m a chess problem, and he
has the solution
Afterglow –
looking at me, tugboats
with bulldog‘s faces
Rifts and troll-paths
on the ledges –
the dream, an iceberg
Climbing up a hill
in the full blaze of the sun –
goats devour fire
In the library of half-wits,
a sermon-book on the shelf
untouched
He writes on and on…
glue flowing in the canals;
the ferry across the Styx
Thick forest
the abode of the penniless god –
the walls shine
A black-and-white magpie
jumps stubbornly, zigzags
across the fields
Cringing shadows…
we're lost in this wood
among clans of morels
See me sitting calmly
like a beached skiff –
I'm happy here
The rising grass…
his face, a rune-stone
raised in memory
At a certain hour
the blind wind will rest
against the façades
Blazing sun here –
a mast with black sails
from the days of old
The roof cracks open
and a dead man sees me –
this face…
Hear the sough of rain…
I whisper a secret
so that I can get in
A scene on the platform –
such a strange calm
the inner voice
The sea is a wall –
I hear gulls scream
they wave to us
The divine tail-wind:
a soundless shot coming –
the prolonged dream
Ash-coloured silence –
the blue giant goes by,
cold breeze from the sea
Strong and slow wind
from the seaside library –
I’ll rest here
Translated from the Swedish by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
---------------------------<->----------------------------
Essay
Tranströmer and his Haikudikter
by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Tomas Tranströmer was born in 1931 and grew up in Stockholm. A former psychologist, he now is one of Sweden’s most important poets, with many published volumes of poetry and numerous translations of his work into most European languages.
He started writing haiku quite early, in 1959, after visiting a fellow psychologist who worked in the Hällby Youth Custody Centre. Tranströmer then composed a short selection of haiku that contained these:
Extracting chanterelles
from his pockets:
caught fugitive
Night lorry rolling by,
making inmates’ dreams
shake
Years later, Tranströmer’s “prison haiku” were published in book-form as Fängelse / Prison (2001).
The poet’s next collection entitled Den stora gåtan / The Great Mystery (2004) contained forty-five haiku written over the course of more than forty years. Tranströmer called these poems Haikudikter, however the readers won’t fail to notice that he writes haiku in his own way. The Swedish haiku poet Helga Härle asserts that Tranströmer 's Haikudikter “hardly could be called haiku or senryu”, as they are “rich in metaphors, sometimes also reclining on an abstraction..” On the other hand, some of the Haikudikter were first published (in another translation) in "Blithe Spirit", the magazine of the British Haiku Society. Indeed, many of these pieces are nothing short of the qualities we admire in haiku, and the author undoubtedly experienced what we call a "haiku moment". In the following piece Tranströmer uses the technique of the sketch, or Shiki's shasei:
November sun –
my gigantic shadow drifts,
becomes blurry
The imagery in Haikudikter is extremely rich, and these poems are highly "visual". The following haiku is hard to forget once you've read it, as it contains a striking image:
Afterglow –
looking at me, tugboats
with bulldog‘s faces
If we take a look at the usage of season words in Haikudikter, we’ll see that it is quite sporadic. Of course, some of these texts have little in common with haiku. The author every so often employs a “non-haiku” technique; e.g. he sometimes writes about abstract things (“the wall of hopelessness”) and uses a direct metaphor, as well as a simile without dropping the word “like” (“like a rainbow”). There are some other things quite unusual for haiku poetry here, e.g. the mentioning of 'the penniless god' and, in another poem, “the ferry across the Styx”. But again, we may not deny an author who would write haiku about, say, the flying Pope the right to call himself a haijin.
In Haikudikter , Tranströmer mostly uses the 5-7-5 form. We have to say that Swedish is far more suitable for writing 5-7-5 haiku than English. Compare one of Tranströmer's original poems to a 5-7-5 English version of it:
Taket rämnade
och den döda kan se mig.
Detta ansikte.
(From: Tranströmer, T. Den stora gåtan. Albert Bonniers Förlag, Sweden, 2004)
The roof broke apart
and the dead man can see me
can see me. That face.
(transl. by Robin Fulton. From: Tranströmer, T. Den stora gåtan / The Great Enigma. Radjhani Publications. Kolkata, India, 2006)
This is the reason why the translations of Haikudikter on these pages are free-form haiku. A new translation of 28 haiku from this book was made especially for this publication.
Overall, we would describe Haikudikter as an experiment in haiku, all the more interesting because it was performed by one of the best-loved European writers of today. "We can hear the poet’s inner voice in his haiku," the Swedish critic Torsten Rönerstrand wrote about Tranströmer's Haikudikter. Indeed, the initial silence in these short poems transforms itself into a very unusual language, which really is the language of the poet’s soul.
The Northern Moon
by Tatyana Golovina (St. Petersburg, Russia)
---------------------------<->----------------------------
Haiku & Senryu
on St Patrick’s Day
shamrock confetti showers
she thinks of her home
-- Barbara A Taylor (Australia)
St. Patrick‘s Day –
not knowing any better,
lambs dance a set
the moon globe
hanging on the horizon…
an unshed tear
low autumn sun
crimsoning the mountain –
rutting stags roar
-- Paddy Bushe (Ireland – transl. from the Irish by the author and Anatoly Kudryavitsky)
winter sunrise
rust on an unused
stretch of track
sharp blue sky
the strangeness of a stile
without its fence
rising tide
all the wigeon
backsliding upriver
-- Martin Lucas (England)
more hammering –
one way and another
April wind
uncertain sky
the edge of a rose petal
curling back
noon sun
above the vineyard –
a cluster of friends
iced in –
the puppet show
slowed by a knot
"Rhapsody in Blue"
fogged windows holding
winter out
-- Peggy Willis Lyles (USA)
long shadows
the pochard's bill
tucked into his breast
flood debris
the flexing legs
of the spring dipper
a stonechat lands
on the highest bramble
evening sunlight
morning haze . . .
the shades of twigs added
to the magpies’ nest
-- John Barlow (England)
returning home…
towering sunflowers
hunched into their leaves
winter solstice
steam rising
from the gutter
-- Helen Buckingham (England)
snowfall...
the dying dog hears something
i can't
home forclosure...
a jehova's witness comes
peddling paradise
St. Patrick's day...
in our pot
a watery broth
-- Ed Markowski (USA)
sunlight shifts
with the cumulus--
flight of a curlew
shifting currents…
a coot scrambles
to stay mid-river
snow whirls
through climbing-frame bars
the squirrel's leap
-- Matthew Paul (England)
golden leaves
she opens a bag
of lemon drops
old headstone
cobwebs fill a cracked
flowerpot
sunlit mason jar
Grandma and Grandpa
exchange fingerprints
-- Dustin Neal (USA)
a few spring flakes
the old birdhouse nailed
to a dead tree
cool morning
the pond's stillness
after the duck
-- Bruce Ross (USA)
man with a limp…
his arthritic dog
keeps pace
museum –
a dead beetle
in the armour
-- Quendryth Young (Australia)
the mountaintop...
only here do I see
its many sides
snow
higher than the fence post
I know is there
-- J.D. Heskin (USA)
flutters with the wind
four eyes evanescing
web trapped butterfly
encircled by my fingers
the crescent moon
sails lakes of tea
-- Jenni Meredith (England)
one exhalation
among many in the bus
fogs up the window
in the shower’s steam
a rope of hair twists and coils
as I clear the drain
-- Ivy Alvarez (Wales/Australia)
new town
the sound of the house
settling
old lover...
letting her fingers run through
what's left
-- Robert Lucky (Thailand/USA)
pearl moon
at twilight –
wet footprints glisten
-- Sian Evans (England)
home late
a rotting flower
blocks the doorway
-- Matt Hetherington (Australia)
inside
after the neighbour’s wife
on a hot day
-- Jeffrey Woodward (USA)
wedding cake
for breakfast
hungry still
-- Jo McInerney (Australia)
alone this cold night
knock knock
of the radiator
-- Philip Miller (USA)
clouds begin to clot --
shorn lawn suddenly
a deeper green
-- Richard Stevenson (Canada)
gardenias –
a butterfly zigzags
through their perfume
-- Nathalie Buckland (Australia/Wales)
---------------------------<->----------------------------
Haibun
The Day That Elvis Died
Northern Ireland, August 16, 1977
by Barbara A Taylor (Australia)
crows’ calls in elms
wet earth on timber
remembering them
My mother bravely waves her king farewell. I cry tears for words not said. Pallbearers carry his open casket past us, through the great hall onto the porch between Doric pillars, down wide gray steps, as he had wished, to slowly pace the winding white-fenced avenue towards copper beeches and grand spreading chestnut trees. It was my father’s favourite, to walk there with his faithful hounds. A Bunuel scene this gloomy Irish day with its drizzly rain, the bowler hats, chequered caps and bobbing black umbrellas. Aside the white-fenced driveway the snorting stallion canters close by the crawling hearse. A line behind, of mourners, shuffles steady steps on pebbles towards the old stone gate-lodge. Armoured tanks with bullet-proofed British soldiers stop, search me on my way to the cemetery. I stand stooped in soaking rain to see his coffin slowly lowered. Steely, long faces mutter blessings. At home that night, after the grievers leave our house of death, when my mother, still distressed, pulls apart the heavy velvet curtains (no longer is my family home to be so sombre as a funeral parlour subsumed with sympathies), to take my mind away from sorrow I watch the news, learn that The King is dead. Death follows us all day. All week. All month. Each time the lounge-door handle turns we raise our heads, look expectantly for daddy. More silence, only acceptance that he won’t be back. My grief, my fear, is strangely transposed to that “Gracelands” mansion, gripped in Memphis-fever-swallowed tears. I cry. Two idols are gone.
Today, another year is over. Another anniversary comes. The media, in Elvis frenzy, asks: Where were you the day that Elvis Died? It’s thirty years since they both departed. Oh, my papa, to me you are so wonderful. We sang these words together. We are still here, we are still singing There will be peace in the valley one day.
sparkles in signals
on speckled tree trunks
after the rain
