For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda
Santôka with Excerpts from His Diary.
Translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003). viii + 102 pages, 81ž2
x 51ž2 , perfectbound. ISBN 0-231-12517-8. $17.50
at bookstores.
This is the third translation of Santôka
to appear in English, a signal honor for a modern
haiku poet: so far as I am aware, no other twentieth-century
haiku poet has yet been the subject of a second
volume, let alone a third. Curiously, though, Santôka
is omitted from all the major anthologies of Japanese
haiku and poetry in translation, though literary
scholars, like R.H. Blyth and Donald Keene, mention
him in passing.
The reason for the omission may be historical in
part, since the wave of current interest in Taneda
Santôka (1882–1940) in Japan essentially
began with the seven-volume edition of his works
edited by Murakami Mamoru in 1972–73. This
would explain his absence from Makoto Ueda’s
1974 volume, Modern Japanese Haiku. Of the
twenty poets in that book, only four or five have
been retranslated in separate collections. Other
anthologies may have been too small or early to
incorporate the growing interest in Santôka
in the 1970s, but even The Penguin Book of Japanese
Verse by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite,
revised in 1998, does not contain him. Nor does
Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson’s compendious
and prize-winning 1980 volume, From the Country
of Eight Islands. It may be that Sato and Watson
have recently turned their attention to the poet
to remedy this situation.
John Stevens was the first to make use of the volumes
of poems and diaries that Murakami edited and the
study of the poet he went on to write. The result
was Mountain Tasting: Zen Haiku by Taneda
Santôka which appeared in 1980. With a declared
interest in Zen Buddhism, Stevens emphasized the
“walking Zen” aspect of Santôka’s
work. He selected 372 verses for translation, and
gave the originals in roman letters. The facts of
the poet’s life—his birth in Yamaguchi,
the trauma of his mother’s suicide when he
was ten, his dropping out of Waseda University,
then the ruin of the family business and the suicide
of his younger brother, alcoholism, marriage and
divorce—are given their first airing here.
Santôka attempted to resolve his problems
by devotion to haiku, and by taking Buddhist vows
and becoming a mendicant priest. He continued wandering
for most of his later years, settling only once
or twice, until he eventually died in Shikoku.
The next important selection was made by Hiroaki
Sato, who drew entirely from the book the poet had
compiled himself near the end of his life. Sato
took the title of this collection for his own 2002
volume, Grass and Tree Cairn, which was reviewed
in this journal by Jon LaCure (MH 34:1).
In his introduction Sato deals particularly with
the background to free-verse haiku, and the influence
of Santôka’s teacher, Ogiwara Seisensui
(1884–1976). He stresses the liberation that
Santôka found when he abandoned the regular
form with which he started. The selection of almost
230 poems in Sato’s familiar one-line form
offers only part of the original collection, Sômokutô,
but follows the original order and includes the
headnotes that Stevens overlooked.
Burton Watson’s new collection, For All
My Walking, is the fullest representation yet.
Though the number of poems, 242, is less than Stevens’s,
it draws on the poet’s diaries too and thus
presents a fuller picture. We are already accustomed
to the terse, broken utterances of this poet. After
rehearsing the outline of Santôka’s life,
Watson comments: “His poems, for all their
naturalistic imagery, are first of all portrayals
of the poet’s constantly shifting moods and
emotional states.” It is these fluctuating
moods that provide the drama and the draw for the
reader in a life of torment so nakedly and honestly
recounted.
The appeal of Santôka also comes, surely,
from the fact that the poetry and the life are really
one. There are few literary complexities, and not
much development once the style has taken form.
“Santôka made little effort to broaden
his haiku style,” observes Watson. The use
of ellipsis is a regular and constant feature of
the poems, “fragmenting the syntax and creating
gaps in meaning.” Since Watson’s approach
is very similar to Stevens’s, except that he
has abandoned initial capitals, it is very admirable
that he “has tried as much as possible to avoid
duplicating Stevens’s work.” This book
enhances, rather than replaces, what has gone before.
There are light and happy moments with the poet
on the road:
As we follow the wanderer on his way, there are
beautifully frank and innocent encounters, with
children, with traveling salesmen (often from other
countries), and with prostitutes. He drinks a great
deal and is always solitary but has true sympathy
for the unalleviated hardships of others’ lives.
All this happens, too, on the edge of a changing
world, one in which new means of transport will
make walking unnecessary, even problematic. In that
sense the poet’s experience is now unrepeatable,
which may be another part of its appeal.
In an NHK television drama on the poet (starring
the late Frankie Sakai) a number of years ago, it
was abundantly clear that the governing force of
his life was much less Eros than Thanatos. As with
the poet Sylvia Plath (“Dying ... I do it exceptionally
well”), this can become oppressive. Wisely
Watson has been sparing with the later diary entries,
where the death-wish is most repeated.
At the end of this attractive and readable volume,
we are left with the image of the poet perpetually
on his way, black-robed, begging-bowl in hand:
