← All the haiku

The original

ikutabi mo / yuki no fukasa wo / tazunekeri

That is the source, in romaji. It is printed here rather than kept in a footnote because the English above is machine-made, not a scholar’s, and you should be able to check it against something rather than take it on trust.

The rendering follows the sense rather than forcing 5-7-5. Japanese counts on rather than syllables, and the two do not line up; padding a translation out to fit the English shape is how you end up with a poem the poet did not write.

Masaoka Shiki 1867–1902

The reason the form is called haiku at all: he separated the standalone verse from its linked-verse origins and named it. He argued for shasei, sketching directly from life, against what he saw as inherited poetic convention. He wrote much of his best-known work bedridden with tuberculosis, and died at thirty-four.

5 more from Shiki

• I bite into a persimmon / and the bell begins / at Hōryū-ji.
• The autumn wind — / and everything my eye falls on / is haiku.
• The cockscombs — / there must be fourteen / of them, or fifteen.
• Snow is falling. / I lie here and watch / the hole in the paper screen.
• Nobody there — / and on the chair in the tree shade, / fallen cherry petals.

Why this is here at all

HaikuMail is a Chrome extension that hides your inbox behind a search-only reader, and holds the first thirty seconds with a poem. This is one of the 157 it draws from. That is the rest of the story.