What on earth is a tanka? Martin Underwood tries to answer.
Between high rise blocks,
The verticals of glass and concrete-
Below, the city centre –
An undulating skein of geese goes through
non-stop
flying level towards the low sun.
Martin Underwood
[Written earlier this year, not with the tanka form specifically in mind]
The tanka is not so well known in western literature as the haiku but fifty years ago very few had heard of the haiku either. It was the Beat Poets [in particular Jack Kerouac] who really stirred interest in that form.
The tanka [literally ‘short poem’] is in fact a much older verse form than the haiku and can be defined as a self-contained syllabic verse of five lines consisting of 5, 7, 5, 7 & 7 syllables. As can be seen, the haiku form is already buried in the tanka. In fact the haiku sort of ‘floated off’ and became a form in its own right in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries [western calendar]. This was perhaps aided by the fact that at the Japanese court [where everyone was literate, including the ladies] a little literary game played there was ‘verse capping’ whereby one person wrote the first three lines of a tanka and then challenged another to round it off with a ‘couplet’.
The tanka was popular from the 6th to the 13th centuries and was often used as a note from one lover to another. The most famous collection is the Hyakunin Isshu, issued about A.D.1235 [there are in all 21 Imperial Anthologies]. The tanka is also well represented in the oldest collection of Japanese poetry, the Manyoshu which dates from the 700’s [A.D.]
Japanese verse is strongly influenced by the Buddhist view of life, that is, a very strong awareness of ‘the now’, what has been described as the ‘is-ness’ of things. Someone observed [Tolstoy?] that [western] man is always looking at the past or the future but doesn’t take a lot of notice of the present, though, of course, Jesus remarked, ‘Take no heed of the morrow…..’. But I digress.
Whereas western religions might be described as seeking happiness or fulfilment in the Next Life, Buddhism has a tension between a deep love of the world and yet the yearning to give up all such fleeting attachments. The priest Saigyo wrote in the 1100’s:
Even thus detached
my body cannot but know
how wrenching to see:
Snipe rising from the marshes
in the autumn nightfall.
Buddhism [like Hinduism] also holds all life as equally valuable, hence poems with references to fishing [for example] include a tension in Buddhist minds which are lost in the west – fishermen are often seen as very ‘poetic’ in their surroundings but yet are engaged on a dreadful trade. Tanka at first concentrated on descriptions of nature but developed to include human concerns. They were also used as renga ’linked verses’ – bouncing back and forwards between correspondents.
Something else which is lost on western readers, reading in translation, is that in Japanese there are many homonyms which are often used in subtle ways to echo or contrast ideas. In English we tend to use same-sounding words as puns – but not always. [indifferent]
So what relevance does this have for our competition? Perhaps not a lot. There are no themes prescribed, it is only the form which is specified. But to write small – and well, on that little piece of ivory, is not at all easy.
“Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience. It is true that it concentrates practically exclusively on this function. The poetry of other peoples usually serves other functions too, some of them not particularly germane to poetic experience. It is possible to claim Japanese poetry is purer, more essentially poetic. Certainly it is less distracted by non-poetic considerations…” wrote Kenneth Rexroth.
Some examples of the tanka form [roughly based on translations of the originals] are printed on the following pages – to spark the imagination.
Page(s) 48-49
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