Research work on the topic: “Poetic discoveries - haiku. Culture of Japan

Summary of the lesson in 7th grade.

Theme: Life and work of Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). Haiku.

Organizing time: check the availability of all items for the lesson (textbook, notebook, stationery), sit up straight.

Goals:

acquaintance with Japanese legends and customs, with some facts of the biography of M. Basho;

revealing the specific structure of haiku, the semantic load of lines, the principles of composition of haiku, the peculiar evolution of the genre;

formation of skills of expressive reading, work with the textbook and tables.

Cabinet equipment: book exhibition, illustrations for the lesson, presentationMicrosoft Power Point, multimedia projector.

Lesson type: combined.

Methods: verbal (explanation,work with a textbook and a book) and visual (illustrations, demonstrations).

During the classes:

Knowledge update.

Teacher's word:

Matsuo Basho (real name - Munefusa, 1644-1694) - a great Japanese poet who played a large role in the development of the haikai poetic genre.
Basho was born in the province of Iga, in the central part of the island of Honshu, in a poor samurai family, as a child he received a good education. In 1672 he left his native place and settled in Edo (modern Tokyo), where he joined one of the leading poetic schools of that time - Danrin. He enjoyed great prestige during his lifetime and had many students.
For a long time Basho lived on the outskirts of Edo - Furukawa, in a hut given to him by Sampu, one of his students. A banana (basho) was planted next to this hut, so the hut was named Banana (basho-an), hence the poet's pseudonym.

Basho traveled a lot around the country, but he received the greatest recognition as a master of three-verses (haiku), which by that time had become an independent poetic genre.
Basho's poetic heritage is represented by 7 anthologies created by him and his students: "Winter Days" (1684), " spring days"(1686), "Dead Field" (1689), "Gourd" (1690), "Straw Cape of the Monkey" (Book 1, 1691, Book 2, 1698), "Sack of Coal" (1694) , lyrical diaries written in prose combined with poetry (the most famous of them is "On the Paths of the North"), as well as prefaces to books and poems, letters containing thoughts about art and views on the process of poetic creativity.

Poetry and aesthetics of Matsuo Basho influenced the development of Japanese literature of the Middle Ages and modern timesand.

- Students take notes, write down the meaning of new wordsin.

1) Samurai memberprivileged feudal caste of Japan.

2) Haiku (haiku) - genre and form Japanese poetry; three-line, consisting of two encircling five-syllable verses and oneseven-syllable in the middle;of 17 syllables that make up one column of hieroglyphs.

3) Calligraphy is the art of writing in a clear, beautiful handwriting.

4) Anthology- selected works (literary, philosophical, musical) of various ;

5) Teza-position, assertion, put forward and then proved in some kind of reasoning .

6) Antithesis - in fiction a stylistic figure, a juxtaposition of sharply contrasting or opposite concepts and images to enhance the impression.

7) Catharsis -a strong emotional shock, which is caused not by real life events, but by their symbolic display.

2. Referring to the textbook article (pp. 263-268), after reading together, we answer the questions:

1) How do you imagine Basho?

2) What feelings did Basho's lifestyle and his attitude towards creativity evoke in you?

3. In 1680, Basho created the original version of the famous poem in the history of Japanese poetry:

On a bare branch

Raven sits alone.

Autumn evening.

The poet returned to work on it for several years until he created the final version. This speaks to how hard Basho worked on every word. Long years of searching ended, he found his way in art.

4. Referring to the textbook article on haiku. Filling in the table.

haiku structure

Three-line poetic miniatures of 17 syllables.

Three lines consisting of two encircling five-syllable verses and one seven-syllable in the middle

The first line is the thesis, the second is the antithesis, the third is catharsis (explain the terms to the students).

aesthetic principles of haiku addition.

"satori" - a state of enlightenment

"sabi" - loneliness, alienation from the whole outside world

"Karumi" - lightness and sublimity, ease of perception

"hosomi" - subtlety and fragility

"shuri" - sadness, sympathy

"fueki-ryuko" - the constant variability of the world, the unity of movement and rest

genre evolution

Hokku - comic genre (Arakida Morichike (1465-1549)

Hokku- lyrical genre (Matsuo Besho)

Expansion of the haiku theme (Tanigutti Buson (17160-1783)

Summing up the work.

Haiku- not poetry, but a way of life, immersion in the world of loneliness, sadness and happiness of inner insight, in the world of discoveries that surrounds and which you need to peer into.

Appeal to the illustrations of the textbook (p.264,265, 268, 269).

Expressive reading by haiku students: "The end of autumn days"

End of autumn days.

Already raising his hands

Shell chestnut.

Determine the content of the thesis, antithesis and catharsis.

thesis - "the end of autumn days"

antithesis - "already throws up his hands"

catharsis - "chestnut shell"

What image is recreated in haiku? (Opened chestnut leaves, like hands divorced in bewilderment before the inevitability of the onset of winter).

III. Lesson summary

Teacher's word:

Basho's poetry and prose reveal to us the Japan of that time. The poet hoped to continue his wanderings to the north in order to see the whole country, but death caught him in 1694 in the city of Osaka, where he died, surrounded by his students.

Basho founded his own school, which revolutionized Japanese poetry. After his death, the school gradually disintegrated.

In the XX century. haiku is called haiku.

IV. Homework.

Learn haiku by heart (optional).

Individual task:

prepare a message about Inuyama Castle;

about Japanese calligraphy;

about the hero Yoshitsune.

Material used:

http://www.tonnel.ru/?l=gzl&uid=1081&op=bio - Biographies. Life history of great people

Literature Grade 7: A textbook for general educational institutions: At 2 pm P 2 / Auth. Comp. G.S. Merkin.- 7th ed., M .: OOO TID Russkoe Slovo-RS, 2009.- 344s

Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. Edited by D. N. UshakovEdited by D.N. Ushakov. - M .: Astrel Publishing House LLC, AST Publishing House LLC, 2000. - 848s.

The image in Basho's poetry as a form of reflection of reality, transformed in the light of the artist's aesthetic ideal, is intended to show the spirit of things, a reality that is comprehended intuitively through the concrete phenomena of the surrounding world.
Images of nature acquired special significance for Basho, since the poet considered nature as a source of truth and beauty: “I see flowers and hear birds, and I get poems in which their lives, their souls and all the changes in the universe” . The everyday life of human life, refracted in the aesthetic consciousness of the poet, also resulted in images filled with a deep meaning of knowing the inner essence of phenomena. As V. N. Markova writes, Basho's poetry "depicts the life of nature and the life of man in their fused, indissoluble unity against the backdrop of the cycle of the seasons."
In creating the image and its presentation, Basho proceeds from the premise of the significance of everything and everything, therefore the image always allows you to feel the greatness of the world even in small things. The image is born as a result of the poet’s single feeling with the depicted (hosomi), it carries the motive of sadness and compassion (shiori) and leaves a feeling of an unexpressed “excessive feeling” (yojo):

The spiritual unity of man and nature, the idea of ​​a single essence of the world are revealed in the image of a small living creature - a crab that touched its leg. This image also creates an additional feeling of transparency, freshness and interacts with the image. pure water. In the first two lines, the author's attention is focused on the image of a crab, and the space of the haiku is, as it were, compressed to a minimum. The last line pushes the boundaries of the depicted. The image contained in it speaks not only about the transparency of water, it also serves the purpose of removing the emotional content of haiku from the frame of the image of a single phenomenon into a plane that is not spatially limited.
A significant place in haiku was occupied by the figurative disclosure of the world of the poor. For Japanese poetry, this was not a new phenomenon; it is enough to recall the work of Yamanoue Okura (VIII century) with its social motives. Basho's acquaintance with Chinese poetry of the Tang era (618-906), marked by civic ideas in the work of a number of poets, also played its role. But most of all, the trends of the century, the development of urban culture and the general process of democratization of literature associated with it, had an effect here.
But at the same time, the image of a person in Basho's poetry, standing on Buddhist positions, is marked by originality. According to I. M. Reisner, “Buddhism does not recognize a person, as such, really existing.” Because of this, in the poet's work, social and civic motives are excluded, and democracy takes a specific form of refracted Zen democracy with its idea of ​​the involvement of the Buddha of all things. In connection with the work of Kawabata Yasunari, who was also influenced by Zen, K. Reho writes: “The Zen principle of the naturalness of the image, proceeding from the perception of nature as the main universal principle, does not assign any exclusive role to man. The world is not regarded as an arena of human actions, in which man is a hero and a creator. In Zen aesthetics, a person acts as one of the phenomena of nature and is in an indissoluble unity with it. In Zen art, nature takes on primarily aesthetic significance. Rejecting creative analysis, the art of Zen stands, as it were, above social battles ... ". At the same time, if in the literature of the Heian era deep psychological characteristics of a person were given and in waka poetry, his intimate world, love experiences were in the center of attention, then Basho's poetry is far from this sphere of human emotions. Here, a person does not appear in the totality of his passions and desires, but reveals his essence, purified from the earthly, one with the essence of nature, and turns out to be, as it were, elevated above the earth:

In the poem "Poor Man", the everyday background is moved away by the verb "stopped" ("kakeru"), and the person's gaze is directed to the high - the moon, which semantically includes the concepts of true, pure, sad, lonely. In the second verse, the opposite sequence is observed. Nature enters everyday life, introduced by the verb "to be alive" ("ikeru") - this is how they say about cut plants stored in a vessel with water. The unity of the two worlds, nature and man, is also expressed by a spatial detail - "under their shadow" - and the surrounding domestic environment is, as it were, obscured by azaleas.
Often in Basho's poems, the spiritual image of a person is expressed through a description of his life - meager, unpretentious:

Devastating everyday life, the poet elevates a person, since poverty in his system of ideas is synonymous with nobility. This was manifested in this poem due to its frankly humorous content, in which the very concept of everyday life is destroyed.
It is noteworthy that Basho's man is shown not statically, but in his work: a poor man threshes rice, pickers gather tea, an old man carries baskets of oysters, a peasant walks with an armful of hay. Poetry expresses penetrating sympathy for man.
One of the features of Basho's poetry is the organic combination of new images with traditional ones, which are often used in one poem and cause a rich emotional response:

The cicada is a traditional metaphor for the transience of life, its transience. This image, capacious in its content, is introduced in combination with images of a different kind, not associated with the poetic tradition (silence, rocks), and conveys the idea of ​​the eternal variability of the world. The unity of two images of opposite meanings - pure, unshakable silence and the ringing of cicadas - allows the poet to show the depth of centuries and the moment of life. The words of Hattori Doho fit this poem: "The haiku has the 'image of the eternal'." To this it should be added: and speaks of "transitory."
Haiku Basho reveal a new poetic world to the reader, therefore, “they are characterized by an “unconventional” use of traditional images, often the poet uses them in new situations and rethinks:

On the day of the feast of souls, smoke is seen rising over the field where the dead are cremated - and sadness penetrates the heart. Kenko-hoshi (1283 - 1350) wrote: “If our life continued without end, not evaporating like dew on the Adashi plain, and not blowing away like smoke over Mount Toribe, there would be no charm in anything. What is remarkable in the world is impermanence.” Mount Toribe was located in the vicinity of the Kiyomi-zu temple, and in the old days there was a cemetery. Smoke over Mount Toribe - smoke from the cremation of corpses - has become one of the figurative expressions that speak of the fragility of earthly existence. It gives a special coloring to the poem and forms its general atmosphere. Moreover, here it is used in a work written on a specific occasion, where its traditional associative overtones turned out to be the most appropriate.
Basho, using the traditional image, sort of "grounds" him in the sense that he brings him closer to a person, to everyday life:

Violets are a traditional subject of chanting in Japanese poetry. This tradition originates from the Manyoshu poems. For example, a poem by Yamabe Akahito (first half of the 8th century):

In Basho, this image is included in a different context: the poet sees violets in the mountains and only for a moment stops his gaze on them. Haiku conveys a state of carelessness, causeless joy, which is expressed by the words: "for some reason it's easy." The image, as it were, acquires tangibility, lightness instead of the traditional "elevation".
The traditional image can take on a new direction, be translated from a serious plane into a humorous plane:

The floating nest of the grebe, often sung in waka and renga, especially the nest of the grebe on Lake Biwa, served as an expression of indefinite sadness, as well as the frailty of being and the vanity of human existence, as, for example, in tanka Juntokuin (1197 - 1242):

In a haiku, Basho suggests going from Edo to Omi, to look at the grebe nest floating on Lake Biwa. The “Three Books” says: “The expression “let’s go see” contains the humor of this poem.” This was noticed not without reason, because the path from Edo to Omi is not a short one. unusual, and in connection with this, it changes its role, its color.The motive of sadness, traditionally accompanying it, is muffled in haiku, obscured by the humorous tone of the poem.
The image, being used in a similar context, acquires, however, a different sound, affects the reader in a different way.

The poet carefully looks at the sad, almost soundless rain, and in the picture he created, one feels "loneliness." The image of spring rain sliding on the roof was also found in waka:

Haiku differs from waka in its everydayness. Old wasp nests and a leaky roof add an element of "transitory" to the description of spring rain.
As can be seen from the above examples, each image with its traditional meaning allows you to expand the context of the haiku into the past. The role of the traditional image in each poem is different, depends on the orientation of the haiku and is determined by its style system.
Traditional images, combined with new ones reflecting the simple phenomena of everyday life, are modernized, brought closer to life, perceived as their own images of haiku.
In Basho's poetry, images are also found that can be called impressionistic. Sometimes the poet shows the outside world through color, sound, smell, conveying a momentary sensation. “There is only one truth,” says E. Manet, “that is to grab immediately, on the fly, what you see. The impressionist does not think about whether his presentation corresponds to the objective properties and qualities of an object or phenomenon. The “reality” of an impressionist is sometimes only the subjective truth of his perception.” With the help of such images, Basho presents reality as unreality, leaving a sense of hidden mystery.
A special role is played by white color as an expression of the innermost, incomprehensible - emptiness.

In this haiku, the sound appears colored, which enhances the feeling of twilight. The presence of an antonymous series suggests that if the cry of ducks is white, piercing, high, then the sound of the sea is dark, roaring, deaf. The two figurative layers of the poem are merged, united, but this is an internal connection, hidden, it is felt through the opposition of images.
White color is often synonymous with cold:

Haiku shows the unity of the visual image and the tactile: a white, washed onion creates a feeling of cold.
In the same sense, the cold - white - color becomes an epithet of the autumn wind, creating a traditional poetic image that originates from the Manyoshu poems, where the expression "white wind" is found in the meaning of "autumn wind":

The poet conveys the atmosphere of the evening in unexpected images: the sound of the bell has disappeared, but it is absorbed by the aroma of flowers that begin to exude this sound. In haiku, violation of phraseological units is used. The verb "ring" should refer to the bell, the verb "kieru" in the meaning of "disappear" - to the aroma. The constituent components of phraseological units are present, but rearranged and disconnected. The above poem, as it were, expresses Basho's thought: "Creating a haiku means dealing with reality while it is in the imagination."

Quoted from the publication: Breslavets T.I. Poetry Matsuo Basho, GRVL publishing house "NAUKA", 1981
Material preparation: kernell_panic

FOREWORD

The Japanese lyric poem haiku (haiku) is characterized by extreme brevity and peculiar poetics.

The people love and willingly create short songs - concise poetic formulas, where there is not a single superfluous word. From folk poetry, these songs pass into literary, continue to develop in it and give rise to new poetic forms.

This is how the national poetic forms were born in Japan: the five-line tanka and the three-line haiku.

Tanka (literally "short song") was originally a folk song and already in the seventh-eighth centuries, at the dawn of Japanese history, it became the legislator of literary poetry, pushing into the background, and then completely crowding out the so-called long verses "nagauta" (presented in the famous eighth-century poetic anthology Man'yoshu). Epic and lyrical songs of various lengths survive only in folklore. Hokku separated from tanka many centuries later, during the heyday of the urban culture of the "third estate". Historically, it is the first tanka stanza and has received from it a rich legacy of poetic images.

The ancient tanka and the younger haiku have a long history, in which periods of prosperity alternated with periods of decline. More than once these forms were on the verge of extinction, but they have withstood the test of time and continue to live and develop even today. This example of longevity is not the only one of its kind. The Greek epigram did not disappear even after the death of the Hellenic culture, but was adopted by Roman poets and is still preserved in world poetry. The Tajik-Persian poet Omar Khayyam created wonderful quatrains (rubai) back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but even in our era, folk singers in Tajikistan compose rubai, putting new ideas and images into them.

Obviously, short poetic forms are an urgent need for poetry. Such poems can be composed quickly, under the influence of direct feeling. You can aphoristically, concisely express your thought in them so that it is remembered and passed from mouth to mouth. They are easy to use for praise or, conversely, caustic mockery.

It is interesting to note in passing that the desire for laconicism, love for small forms are generally inherent in Japanese national art, although it is also excellent at creating monumental images.

Only haiku, an even shorter and more concise poem that originated among ordinary citizens who were alien to the traditions of old poetry, could push the tanka out and for a time snatch its championship from it. It was hockey that became the bearer of a new ideological content and was best able to respond to the demands of the growing "third estate".

Haiku is a lyric poem. It depicts the life of nature and the life of man in their fused, indissoluble unity against the backdrop of the cycle of the seasons.

Japanese poetry is syllabic, its rhythm is based on the alternation of a certain number of syllables. There is no rhyme, but the sound and rhythmic organization of the three-line is a matter of great concern for Japanese poets.

Hokku has a stable meter. Each verse has a certain number of syllables: five in the first, seven in the second, and five in the third, for a total of seventeen syllables. This does not preclude poetic liberties, especially among such bold and innovative poets as Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) was. He sometimes did not take into account the meter, trying to achieve the greatest poetic expressiveness.

The dimensions of the haiku are so small that in comparison with it, the European sonnet seems monumental. It contains only a few words, and yet its capacity is relatively large. The art of writing haiku is, above all, the ability to say a lot in a few words. Brevity is related to hockey with folk proverbs. Some three-verse lines have become popular in folk speech as proverbs, such as the poem by the poet Basho:

I'll say a word Lips freeze. Autumn whirlwind!

As a proverb, it means that "caution sometimes makes you keep silent."

But most often, haiku differs sharply from the proverb in its genre features. This is not an edifying saying, a short parable or a well-aimed joke, but a poetic picture sketched in one or two strokes. The task of the poet is to infect the reader with lyrical excitement, to awaken his imagination, and for this it is not necessary to paint a picture in all its details.

Chekhov wrote in one of his letters to his brother Alexander: "... you will get a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled like a ball..."

This way of depicting requires maximum activity from the reader, draws him into the creative process, gives impetus to his thoughts. A collection of haiku cannot be "skimmed through with the eyes", leafing through page after page. If the reader is passive and not attentive enough, he will not perceive the impulse sent to him by the poet. Japanese poetics takes into account the counter work of the reader's thought. So the blow of the bow and the reciprocal trembling of the string together give rise to music.

Haiku is miniature in size, but this does not detract from the poetic or philosophical meaning that a poet can give it, does not limit the scope of his thought. However, of course, he cannot give a multilateral image and develop his thought extensively, to the end, within the limits of the haiku port. In each phenomenon, he is looking only for its climax.

Some poets, and primarily Issa, whose poetry most fully reflected the people's worldview, lovingly depicted the small, the weak, asserting the right to life for him. When Issa stands up for a firefly, a fly, a frog, it is easy to understand that by doing so he stands up for a small, destitute man who could be wiped off the face of the earth by his lord feudal lord.

Thus, the poet's poems are filled with social sound.

Here comes the moon And every little bush Invited to the feast

says Issa, and we recognize in these words the dream of the equality of people.

Giving preference to the small, haiku sometimes painted a picture of a large scale:

Raging sea space! Far away, to the island of Sado, The Milky Way creeps.

This poem by Basho is a kind of peephole. If we close our eyes to it, we will see a large space. The Sea of ​​Japan will open before us on a windy but clear autumn night: the glitter of stars, white breakers, and in the distance, at the edge of the sky, the black silhouette of Sado Island.

Or take another poem by Basho:

On a high embankment - pines, And between them the cherries show through, and the palace In the depths of flowering trees...

In three lines - three perspective plans.

Haiku is akin to the art of painting. They were often written on the subjects of paintings and, in turn, inspired artists; sometimes they turned into a component of the picture in the form of a calligraphic inscription on it. Sometimes poets resorted to methods of depiction akin to the art of painting. Such, for example, is Buson's three line:

Colza flowers around. The sun is fading in the west. The moon is rising in the east.

Wide margins covered yellow flowers colza, they seem especially bright in the rays of sunset. The pale moon rising in the east contrasts with the fireball of the setting sun. The poet does not tell us in detail what kind of lighting effect this creates, what colors are on his palette. He only offers to take a fresh look at the picture that everyone has seen, maybe dozens of times ... Grouping and choosing picturesque details - this is the main task of the poet. He has only two or three arrows in his quiver: not one must fly past.

This laconic manner is sometimes very reminiscent of the generalized way of depiction used by the ukiyoe masters of color engraving. Different types art - haiku and color engraving - are marked by features of the general style of the era of urban culture in Japan of the seventeenth - eighteenth centuries, and this makes them related to each other.

The spring rain is pouring! They talk along the way Umbrella and mino.

This is Buson's three line - a genre scene in the spirit of ukiyoe woodcuts. Two passers-by are talking on the street under the net of spring rain. One is wearing a straw raincoat - mino, the other is covered with a large paper umbrella. That's all! But the breath of spring is felt in the poem, it has subtle humor, close to the grotesque.

Often the poet creates not visual, but sound images. The howling of the wind, the chirping of cicadas, the cries of a pheasant, the singing of a nightingale and a lark, the voice of a cuckoo, each sound is filled with a special meaning, gives rise to certain moods and feelings.

A whole orchestra sounds in the forest. The lark leads the melody of the flute, the sharp cries of the pheasant are the percussion instrument.

The lark sings. With a ringing blow in the thicket The pheasant echoes him.

The Japanese poet does not unfold before the reader the entire panorama of possible ideas and associations that arise in connection with a given object or phenomenon. It only awakens the reader's thought, gives it a certain direction.

On a bare branch Raven sits alone. Autumn evening.

The poem looks like a monochrome ink drawing. Nothing superfluous, everything is extremely simple. With the help of a few skillfully chosen details, a picture of late autumn is created. There is a lack of wind, nature seems to freeze in sad immobility. The poetic image, it would seem, is a little outlined, but it has a large capacity and, bewitching, leads away. It seems that you are looking into the waters of the river, the bottom of which is very deep. At the same time, it is extremely specific. The poet depicted a real landscape near his hut and through it - his state of mind. He does not speak of the loneliness of the raven, but of his own.

The reader's imagination is left with a lot of scope. Together with the poet, he can experience a feeling of sadness inspired by autumn nature, or share with him the longing born of deeply personal experiences.

It is no wonder that over the centuries of its existence, ancient haiku have acquired layers of comments. The richer the subtext, the higher the poetic skill of haiku. It suggests rather than shows. Hint, hint, reticence become additional means of poetic expressiveness. Yearning for the dead child, the poet Issa said:

Our life is a dewdrop. Let only a drop of dew Our life is still...

Dew is a common metaphor for the transience of life, just like a flash of lightning, foam on water, or rapidly falling cherry blossoms. Buddhism teaches that human life is short and ephemeral, and therefore of no particular value. But it is not easy for a father to come to terms with the loss of a beloved child. Issa says "and yet..." and puts down her brush. But his very silence becomes more eloquent than words.

It is quite clear that there is a lack of agreement in haiku. The poem consists of only three verses. Each verse is very short, in contrast to the hexameter of the Greek epigram. A five-syllable word already occupies a whole verse: for example, hototogisu - a cuckoo, kirigirisu - a cricket. Most often in verse two meaningful words, not counting formal elements and exclamatory particles. Everything superfluous is squeezed out, eliminated; there is nothing left that serves only for decoration. Even the grammar in haiku is special: there are few grammatical forms, and each bears the ultimate load, sometimes combining several meanings. The means of poetic speech are selected extremely sparingly: haiku avoids epithet or metaphor, if it can do without them.

Sometimes the entire haiku is an extended metaphor, but its direct meaning is usually hidden in the subtext.

From the heart of a peony The bee slowly creeps out... Oh, with what reluctance!

Basho composed this poem when leaving the hospitable home of his friend.

It would be a mistake, however, in every haiku to look for such a double meaning. Most often, haiku is a concrete representation of the real world that does not require and does not allow any other interpretation.

Haiku poetry was an innovative art. If over time, tanka, moving away from folk origins, became a favorite form of aristocratic poetry, then haiku became the property of ordinary people: merchants, artisans, peasants, monks, beggars ... It brought with it common expressions and slang words. It introduces natural, colloquial intonations into poetry.

The scene in haiku was not the gardens and palaces of the aristocratic capital, but the poor streets of the city, rice fields, high roads, shops, taverns, inns ...

An "ideal" landscape freed from everything rough - this is how the old classical poetry painted nature. In haiku, poetry regained its Sight. A man in haiku is not static, he is given in motion: here a street peddler wanders through a snow whirlwind, but here a worker turns a grain mill. That abyss, which already in the tenth century lay between literary poetry and folk song, became less wide. A raven pecking a snail in a rice field with its nose - this image is found both in haiku and in a folk song.

The canonical images of old tanks could no longer evoke that immediate feeling of amazement at the beauty of the living world, which the poets of the "third estate" wanted to express. New images, new colors were needed. Poets, who for so long relied on only one literary tradition, are now turning to life, to the real world around them. The old front decorations have been removed. Hokku teaches to look for hidden beauty in the simple, inconspicuous, everyday. Beautiful are not only the glorified, many times sung cherry blossoms, but also the modest, imperceptible at first glance flowers of colza, shepherd's purse, a stalk of wild asparagus ...

Take a close look! Shepherd's purse flowers You will see under the fence.

Hokku teaches to appreciate the modest beauty of ordinary people. Here is a genre picture created by Basho:

Azaleas in a rough pot, And nearby crumbles dry cod A woman in their shadow.

This is probably a hostess or a servant somewhere in a poor tavern. The situation is the most miserable, but the brighter, the more unexpected, the beauty of a flower and the beauty of a woman stand out. In another poem by Basho, the face of a fisherman at dawn resembles a blooming poppy, and both are equally good. Beauty can strike like a lightning strike:

As soon as I got well, Exhausted, until the night ... And suddenly - wisteria flowers!

Beauty can be deeply hidden. In haiku verses we find a new, social rethinking of this truth - the affirmation of beauty in the inconspicuous, ordinary, and above all in a simple person from the people. This is the meaning of the poem by the poet Kikaku:

Cherries in spring blossom Not on distant mountain tops Only in the valleys with us.

Faithful to the truth of life, the poets could not but see the tragic contrasts in feudal Japan. They felt the discord between the beauty of nature and the living conditions of the common man. The haiku Basho speaks of this discord:

Next to blooming bindweed The thresher rests in suffering. How sad it is, our world!

And, like a sigh, escapes from Issa:

sad world! Even when the cherry blossoms... Even then…

The haiku echoed the anti-feudal sentiments of the townspeople. Seeing a samurai at the cherry blossom festival, Kyorai says:

How is it, friends? A man looks at cherry blossoms And on the belt is a long sword!

A folk poet, a peasant by birth, Issa asks the children:

Red Moon! Who owns it, kids? Give me an answer!

And the children will have to think about the fact that the moon in the sky, of course, is a draw and at the same time a common one, because its beauty belongs to all people.

In the book of selected haiku - the whole nature of Japan, the original way of life, customs and beliefs, work and holidays of the Japanese people in their most characteristic, living details.

That is why haiku is loved, known by heart and still being composed.

Some features of haiku can be understood only by getting acquainted with its history.

Over time, the tanka (five lines) began to be clearly divided into two stanzas: a three line and a couplet. It happened that one poet composed the first stanza, the second - the next. Later, in the twelfth century, chain verses appeared, consisting of alternating three-line and couplet lines. This form was called "renga" (literally "strung stanzas"); the first three-line was called the "initial stanza", in Japanese "haiku". The renga poem did not have a thematic unity, but its motives and images were most often associated with a description of nature, and with an obligatory indication of the season.

Renga reached its peak in the fourteenth century. For her, the exact boundaries of the seasons were developed and the seasonality of a particular natural phenomenon was clearly defined. Even standard "seasonal words" appeared, which conventionally always denoted the same season of the year and were no longer used in poems describing other seasons. It was enough, for example, to mention the word "haze", and everyone understood that we were talking about a foggy time in early spring. The number of such seasonal words reached three to four thousand. So, words and combinations of words: plum flowers, nightingale, gossamer, cherry and peach flowers, lark, butterfly, digging the field with a hoe and others - indicated that the action takes place in the spring. Summer was denoted by the words: rain, cuckoo, planting rice seedlings, blooming paulownia, peony, weeding rice, heat, coolness, midday rest, mosquito canopy, fireflies and others. Words indicated autumn: moon, stars, dew, the cry of cicadas, the harvest, the Bon holiday, red maple leaves, flowering hagi shrubs, chrysanthemums. Winter words are drizzling rain, snow, hoarfrost, ice, cold, warm clothes on cotton, hearth, brazier, end of the year.

"Long day" meant a spring day, because it seems especially long after the short winter days. "Moon" is an autumn word, because in autumn the air is especially transparent and the moon shines brighter than at other times of the year.

Sometimes, for clarity, the season was still called: "spring wind", "autumn wind", "summer moon", "winter sun" and so on.

The opening stanza (haiku) was often the best stanza in a rengi. Separate collections of exemplary haiku began to appear. This form has become a new popular variety of literary poetry, inheriting many of the features of rengi: strict confinement to a certain season and seasonal words. From comic rengi, haiku borrowed its wide vocabulary, puns, and simplicity of tone. But for a long time it did not yet differ in special ideological depth and artistic expressiveness.

The three-verse was firmly established in Japanese poetry and gained its true capacity in the second half of the seventeenth century. It was raised to an unsurpassed artistic height by the great Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the creator of not only haiku poetry, but also an entire aesthetic school of Japanese poetics. Even now, after three centuries, Basho's poems are known by heart by every cultured Japanese. A huge research literature has been created about them, testifying to the closest attention of the people to the work of their national poet.

Basho revolutionized haiku poetry. He breathed into her the truth of life, clearing her of the superficial comedy and the gibberish of the comic rengi. Seasonal words, which in renge were a formal, lifeless device, became in him poetic images full of deep meaning.

Basho's lyrics reveal to us the world of his poetic soul, his feelings and experiences, but in his verses there is no intimacy and isolation. The lyrical hero of Basho's poetry has specific signs. This is a poet and philosopher, in love with the nature of his native country, and at the same time - a poor man from the suburbs of a big city. And he is inseparable from his era and people. There is a breath in every little haiku of Basho vast world. These are the sparks of a large fire.

To understand Basho's poetry, one must be familiar with his era. The best period of his work falls on the years of Genroku (end of the seventeenth century). The Genroku period is considered the "golden age" of Japanese literature. At this time, Basho created his poetry, the wonderful novelist Ihara Saikaku wrote his stories, and the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote plays. All these writers, in one way or another, were spokesmen for the ideas and feelings of the "third estate". Their work is realistic, full-blooded and remarkable for its amazing concreteness. They depict the life of their time in its colorful details, but do not stoop to everyday life.

The Genroku years were, in general, favorable for literary creation. By this time, Japanese feudalism had entered the last phase of its development. After the bloody civil strife that tore apart Japan in the Middle Ages, there was relative peace. The Tokugawa dynasty (1603–1868) unified the country and established strict order in it. Relations between estates were regulated in the most precise way. At the top rung of the feudal ladder was the military class: large feudal lords - princes and small feudal lords - samurai. Merchants were officially politically disenfranchised, but in fact they were a great force due to the growth of commodity-money relations, and often princes, borrowing money from usurers, fell into dependence on them. Wealthy merchants competed in luxury with the feudal lords.

Large trading cities - Edo (Tokyo), Osaka, Kyoto became centers of culture. Crafts have reached a high level of development. The invention of printing from a wooden board (woodcut) reduced the cost of the book, many illustrations appeared in it, and such a democratic art form as color engraving became widespread. Books and engravings could now be bought even by poor people.

Government policy contributed to the growth of education. For young samurai, many schools were established, in which Chinese philosophy, history, and literature were mainly studied. Educated people from the military class joined the ranks of the urban intelligentsia. Many of them put their talents at the service of the "third estate". Ordinary people also began to join literature: merchants, artisans, sometimes even peasants.

It was the outer side of the era. But it also had its dark side.

The "appeasement" of feudal Japan was bought at a high price. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Japan was "closed" to foreigners, and cultural ties with outside world almost stopped. The peasantry literally suffocated in the grip of merciless feudal oppression and often raised sack banners as a sign of rebellion, despite the most severe punitive measures from the government. A system of police supervision and investigation was introduced, which was embarrassing for all classes.

Silver and gold rained down in the "merry quarters" of the big cities, and hungry people robbed on the roads; crowds of beggars roamed everywhere. Many parents were forced to abandon their young children, whom they could not feed, to the mercy of fate.

Basho has witnessed such terrible scenes more than once. The poetic arsenal of that time abounded with many conditional literary motifs. From Chinese classical poetry came the motif of autumn sadness, inspired by the cry of monkeys in the forest. Basho addresses the poets, urging them to descend from the sky-high heights of poetry and face the truth of life:

You are sad, listening to the cry of the monkeys. Do you know how a child cries Abandoned in the autumn wind?

Basho knew the life of the common people of Japan well. The son of a petty samurai, a teacher of calligraphy, from childhood he became a playmate of the prince's son, a great lover of poetry. Basho himself began to write poetry. After the early death of his young master, he went to the city and took the tonsure, thereby freeing himself from the service of his feudal lord. However, Basho did not become a real monk. He lived in a small house in the poor suburb of Fukagawa, near the city of Edo. This hut with all the modest landscape surrounding it - banana trees and a small pond in the yard - is described in his poems. Basho had a lover. He dedicated a laconic elegy to her memory:

Oh don't think you're one of those Who left no trace in the world! Day of Remembrance…

Basho followed the difficult path of creative search. His early poems are still written in the traditional manner. In search of a new creative method, Basho carefully studies the work of the Chinese classical poets Li Po and Du Fu, turns to the philosophy of the Chinese thinker Zhuang Tzu and the teachings of the Buddhist Zen sect, trying to give philosophical depth to his poetry.

Basho put the aesthetic principle of "sabi" into the basis of the poetics he created. This word does not lend itself to literal translation. Its original meaning is "sorrow of loneliness". Sabi, as a particular concept of beauty, defined the entire style of Japanese art in the Middle Ages. Beauty, according to this principle, had to express a complex content in simple, strict forms, conducive to contemplation. Calmness, dullness of colors, elegiac sadness, harmony achieved by meager means - such is the art of Sabi, calling for concentrated contemplation, for renunciation of everyday fuss.

The creative principle of sabi did not allow depicting the living beauty of the world in its entirety. An artist as great as Basho must inevitably feel this. The search for the hidden essence of each individual phenomenon became monotonously tedious. In addition, the philosophical lyrics of nature, according to the principle of sabi, assigned a person the role of only a passive contemplator.

In the last years of his life, Basho proclaimed a new guiding principle of poetics - "karumi" (lightness). He told his students: "From now on, I strive for poems that are shallow, like the Sunagawa River (Sandy River)."

The words of the poet should not be taken too literally, rather they sound a challenge to imitators who, blindly following ready samples, began to compose verses in a multitude with a claim to thoughtfulness. Basho's later poems are by no means shallow, they are distinguished by high simplicity, because they speak of simple human affairs and feelings. Poems become light, transparent, fluid. They show subtle, kind humor, warm sympathy for people who has seen a lot, experienced a lot. The great humanist poet could not shut himself up in the conventional world of the sublime poetry of nature. Here is a picture from a peasant life:

perched a boy On the saddle, and the horse is waiting. Collect radish.

Here are the preparations for New Year's Eve:

Sweep the soot. For myself this time The carpenter gets along well.

In the subtext of these poems there is a sympathetic smile, and not a mockery, as happened with other poets. Basho does not allow himself any grotesque that distorts the image.

Basho walked along the roads of Japan as an ambassador of poetry itself, kindling love for it in people and introducing them to genuine art. He knew how to find and awaken a creative gift even in a professional beggar. Basho sometimes penetrated into the very depths of the mountains, where "no one will pick up the fallen fruit of a wild chestnut from the ground," but, appreciating solitude, he was never a hermit. In his wanderings, he did not run away from people, but approached them. Peasants doing field work, horse drivers, fishermen, pickers of tea leaves pass in a long line in his poems.

Basho captured their keen love for beauty. The peasant straightens his back for a moment to admire the full moon or listen to the cry of the cuckoo, so beloved in Japan.

The images of nature in Basho's poetry very often have a secondary plan, speaking allegorically about a person and his life. A scarlet pepper, a green chestnut shell in autumn, a plum tree in winter are symbols of the invincibility of the human spirit. An octopus in a trap, a sleeping cicada on a leaf, carried away by a stream of water - in these images the poet expressed his sense of the fragility of being, his reflections on the tragedy of human fate.

As Basho's fame grew, students of all ranks began to flock to him. Basho passed on to them his teaching on poetry. From his school came such remarkable poets as Boncho, Kyorai, Kikaku, Joso, who adopted a new poetic style (Basho's style).

In 1682, Basho's hut burned down during a great fire. Since that time, he began his long-term wanderings around the country, the idea of ​​which had been born in him for a long time. Following the poetic tradition of China and Japan, Basho visits places famous for their beauty, gets acquainted with the life of the Japanese people. The poet left several lyrical travel diaries. During one of his travels, Basho died. Before his death, he created the "Dying Song":

On the way I got sick And everything is running, circling my dream Through scorched meadows.

Basho's poetry is distinguished by a sublime structure of feelings and at the same time by amazing simplicity and truth of life. For him there were no mean things. Poverty, hard work, the life of Japan with eo bazaars, taverns on the roads and beggars - all this was reflected in his poems. But the world remains beautiful for him.

In every beggar, perhaps, there is a wise man. The poet looks at the world with loving eyes, but the beauty of the world appears before his eyes covered with sadness.

Poetry for Basho was not a game, not fun, not a means of subsistence, as for many contemporary poets, but a high vocation throughout his life. He said that poetry elevates and ennobles a person.

Basho's students included a wide variety of poetic personalities.

Kikaku, an Edo townsman, a carefree reveler, sang of the streets and rich trading shops of his hometown:

With a crackle the silks are torn At the Echigoya shop... Summer time has come!

The poets Boncho, Joso belonged to the Basho school, each with their own special creative style, and many others. Kyorai of Nagasaki compiled, together with Boncho, the famous hokku anthology "Straw Cape of the Monkey" ("Saru-mino"). It was published in 1690.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the poetic genre of haiku fell into decline. Buson, a wonderful poet and landscape painter, breathed new life into him. During his lifetime, the poet was almost unknown, his poems became popular only in the nineteenth century.

Buson's poetry is romantic. Often in three lines of a poem, he was able to tell a whole story. So, in the verses "Change of clothes with the onset of summer" he writes:

Hiding from the master's sword ... Oh, how glad the young spouses Change the winter dress with a light dress!

According to feudal orders, the master could punish his servants with death for "sinful love." But the lovers managed to escape. The seasonal words "change of warm clothes" well convey the joyful feeling of liberation on the threshold of a new life.

In the poems of Buson, the world of fairy tales and legends comes to life:

young nobles The fox turned... Spring wind.

Foggy evening in spring. The moon shines dimly through the haze, cherry blossoms, and fairy-tale creatures appear among people in the half-darkness. Buson draws only the contours of the picture, but the reader is presented with a romantic image of a handsome young man in an old court outfit.

Buson often resurrected images of antiquity in poetry:

Hall for overseas guests The mascara smells… White plum blossoms.

This haiku takes us back into history, to the eighth century. Special buildings were then built to receive "overseas guests". One can imagine a poetry tournament in a beautiful old pavilion. Visitors from China write Chinese poems in fragrant ink, and Japanese poets compete with them in their native language. Before the eyes of the reader, it is as if a scroll with an ancient picture is unfolding.

Buson is a poet of a wide range. He willingly draws the unusual: a whale in the sea distance, a castle on a mountain, a robber at the turn of a high road, but he also knows how to warmly draw a picture of a child's intimate world. Here is the three-verse "At the Feast of the Dolls":

Short-nosed doll... It is true that in childhood her mother Pulled a little by the nose!

But in addition to "literary poems", rich in reminiscences, hints of antiquity, romantic images, Buson was able to create poems of amazing lyrical power using the simplest means:

They have passed, the days of spring, When the distant ones sounded Nightingale voices.

Issa, the most popular and democratic of all the poets of feudal Japan, wrote his poems at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, at the dawn of modern times. Issa was a native of the village. He spent most of his life among the urban poor, but retained a love for his native places and peasant labor, from which he was cut off:

With all my heart I honor Resting in the midday heat people in the fields.

In such words, Issa expressed both his reverent attitude towards the work of the peasant, and shame for his forced idleness.

The biography of Issa is tragic. All his life he struggled with poverty. His beloved child has died. The poet spoke about his fate in poems full of nagging mental pain, but a stream of folk humor also breaks through them. Issa was a man big heart: his poetry speaks of love for people, and not only for people, but for all small creatures, helpless and offended. Watching a funny fight between frogs, he exclaims:

Hey don't give in Skinny frog! Issa for you.

But at times the poet knew how to be sharp and merciless: any injustice disgusted him, and he created caustic, prickly epigrams.

Issa was the last major poet of feudal Japan. Haiku lost their importance for many decades. The revival of this form at the end of the nineteenth century belongs already to the history of modern poetry. The poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), who wrote many interesting works on the history and theory of hockey (or, according to his terminology now accepted in Japan - haiku), and his talented students Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigodo revived the art of hockey on a new, realistic basis .

Today, the popularity of three lines has increased even more. At one time after the Second World War, a dispute broke out in the literature about tanka and haiku. Some critics considered them secondary, obsolete, already unnecessary for the people, forms of the old art. Life has proved the unfairness of these statements. The increased literary activity of the masses after the war was also reflected in the fact that an increasing number of ordinary people compose tanks and haiku on the most acute, modern topics.

Haiku are constantly printed on the pages of magazines and newspapers. Such poems are living responses to the events of the day. They sound the voice of the Japanese people.

This collection includes only haiku of the late Middle Ages: from Basho to Issa.

The translator faced great difficulties. Ancient haiku is not always clear without comments even to a Japanese reader who is well acquainted with the nature and life of his native country. Brevity and reticence lie at the very foundation of haiku poetics.

The translator tried to keep haiku concise and at the same time make them understandable. It must be remembered, however, that the Japanese tercet necessarily requires the reader to work with the imagination, to participate in the creative work of the poet. In that main feature haiku. To explain everything to the end means not only to sin against Japanese poetry, but also to deprive the reader of the great joy of growing flowers from a handful of seeds generously scattered by Japanese poets.

Matsuo Basho. Engraving by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi from the 101 Views of the Moon series. 1891 The Library of Congress

Genre haiku originated from another classical genre - five-line tank in 31 syllables, known since the 8th century. There was a caesura in the tanka, at this point it “broke” into two parts, resulting in a three-line with 17 syllables and a couplet with 14 syllables - a kind of dialogue that was often composed by two authors. This original three-verse was called haiku, which literally means "initial stanzas". Then, when the tercet received an independent meaning, became a genre with its own complex laws, they began to call it haiku.

The Japanese genius finds itself in brevity. Three-verse haiku is the most concise genre of Japanese poetry: only 17 syllables of 5-7-5 mor mora- a unit of measure for the number (longitude) of a foot. Mora is the time required to pronounce a short syllable. in line. There are only three or four significant words in a 17-complex poem. In Japanese, haiku is written in one line from top to bottom. In European languages, haiku is written in three lines. Japanese poetry does not know rhymes; by the 9th century, the phonetics of the Japanese language had developed, including only 5 vowels (a, i, y, e, o) and 10 consonants (except for voiced ones). With such phonetic poverty, no interesting rhyme is possible. Formally, the poem is based on the count of syllables.

Until the 17th century, haiku writing was viewed as a game. Hai-ku became a serious genre with the appearance of the poet Matsuo Basho on the literary scene. In 1681, he wrote the famous poem about the crow and completely changed the world of haiku:

On a dead branch
Raven blackens.
Autumn evening. Translation by Konstantin Balmont.

Note that the Russian symbolist of the older generation Konstantin Balmont in this translation replaced the “dry” branch with a “dead” one, unnecessarily, according to the laws of Japanese versification, dramatizing this poem. In translation, it turns out that the rule of avoiding evaluative words, definitions in general, except for the most ordinary ones, is violated. "Haiku Words" ( haigo) should be distinguished by deliberate, precisely adjusted simplicity, difficult to achieve, but clearly felt insipidity. Nevertheless, this translation correctly conveys the atmosphere created by Basho in this haiku, which has become a classic, the longing of loneliness, the universal sadness.

There is another translation of this poem:

Here the translator added the word "lonely", which is not in the Japanese text, but its inclusion is justified, since "sad loneliness on an autumn evening" is the main theme of this haiku. Both translations are highly acclaimed by critics.

However, it is obvious that the poem is even simpler than it was presented by the translators. If you give it a literal translation and place it in one line, as the Japanese write haiku, then you get the following extremely brief statement:

枯れ枝にからすのとまりけるや秋の暮れ

On a dry branch / a raven sits / autumn twilight

As we can see, the word "black" is missing in the original, it is only implied. The image of a “frozen raven on a bare tree” is Chinese in origin. "Autumn Twilight" aki no kure) can be interpreted both as “late autumn” and as “autumn evening”. Monochrome is a quality highly valued in the art of haiku; the time of day and year is depicted, erasing all colors.

Haiku is least of all a description. It is necessary not to describe, the classics said, but to name things (literally “give names to things” - down the hole) limit in simple words and so, as if calling them for the first time.

Raven on a winter branch. Engraving by Watanabe Seitei. Around 1900 ukiyo-e.org

Haiku are not miniatures, as they have long been called in Europe. The greatest haiku poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who died early from tuberculosis, Masaoka Shiki, wrote that haiku contains the whole world: the raging ocean, earthquakes, typhoons, the sky and stars - the whole earth with the highest peaks and the deepest sea depressions. The haiku space is immeasurable, infinite. In addition, haiku tends to be combined into cycles, into poetic diaries - and often life-long, so that brevity of haiku can turn into its opposite: into the longest works - collections of poems (albeit of a discrete, interrupted nature ).

But the passage of time, past and future X aiku does not depict, haiku is a brief moment of the present - and nothing more. Here is an example of Issa's haiku, perhaps the most beloved poet in Japan:

How the cherry blossoms!
She drove off the horse
And the proud prince.

Transience is an immanent property of life in the understanding of the Japanese; without it, life has no value and meaning. Transience is so beautiful and sad because its nature is impermanent, changeable.

An important place in haiku poetry is associated with the four seasons - autumn, winter, spring and summer. The sages said: "He who has seen the seasons has seen everything." That is, I saw birth, growing up, love, new birth and death. Therefore, in classical haiku, the necessary element is the “seasonal word” ( kigo), which connects the poem with the seasons. Sometimes these words are hard to recognize by foreigners, but the Japanese know them all. Detailed databases of kigo are now being searched on Japanese networks, some with thousands of words.

In the above haiku about the crow, the seasonal word is very simple - "autumn". The coloring of this poem is very dark, accentuated by the atmosphere of an autumn evening, literally “autumn twilight,” that is, black against the background of gathering twilight.

See how gracefully Basho introduces the obligatory sign of the season into the parting poem:

For a spike of barley
I grabbed, looking for support ...
How difficult is the moment of separation!

"Spikelet of barley" directly indicates the end of summer.

Or in a tragic poem by the poetess Chiyo-ni on the death of her little son:

O my dragonfly hunter!
Where in an unknown country
Are you running today?

"Dragonfly" is a seasonal word for summer.

Another "summer" poem by Basho:

Summer herbs!
Here they are, the fallen warriors
Dreams of fame...

Basho is called the poet of wanderings: he wandered around Japan a lot in search of true haiku, and, going on a journey, he did not care about food, lodging for the night, vagabonds, and the vicissitudes of the journey in the remote mountains. On the way he was accompanied by the fear of death. The sign of this fear was the image of "Bones Whitening in the Field" - that was the title of the first book of his poetic diary, written in the genre haibun("haiku-style prose"):

Maybe my bones
The wind will whiten ... He is in the heart
I breathed cold.

After Basho, the theme of "death on the way" became canonical. Here is his last poem, "The Death Song":

On the way I got sick
And everything is running, circling my dream
Through the scorched fields.

Imitating Basho, haiku poets always composed "the last stanzas" before they died.

"True" ( makoto no) the poems of Basho, Buson, Issa are close to our contemporaries. The historical distance seems to be removed in them due to the immutability of the haiku language, its formulaic nature, which has been preserved throughout the history of the genre from the 15th century to the present day.

The main thing in the worldview of a haikaist is a keen personal interest in the form of things, their essence, connections. Let's remember the words of Basho: "Learn from the pine, what is the pine, learn from the bamboo, what is the bamboo." Japanese poets cultivated a meditative contemplation of nature, peering into the objects surrounding a person in the world, into the endless cycle of things in nature, into its bodily, sensual features. The goal of the poet is to observe nature and intuitively perceive its connections with the human world; Haikaists rejected ugliness, non-objectivity, utilitarianism, abstraction.

Basho created not only haiku poetry and haibun prose, but also the image of a wandering poet - a noble man, outwardly ascetic, in a poor dress, far from everything worldly, but also aware of the sad involvement in everything that happens in the world, preaching conscious "simplification". The haiku poet is characterized by an obsession with wanderings, the Zen Buddhist ability to embody the great in the small, awareness of the frailty of the world, the fragility and variability of life, the loneliness of man in the universe, the astringent bitterness of being, the feeling of the inseparability of nature and man, hypersensitivity to all natural phenomena and the change of seasons. .

The ideal of such a person is poverty, simplicity, sincerity, a state of spiritual concentration necessary to comprehend things, but also lightness, transparency of verse, the ability to depict the eternal in the current.

At the end of these notes, we will cite two poems by Issa, a poet who tenderly treated everything small, fragile, defenseless:

Quietly, quietly crawl
Snail, on the slope of Fuji,
Up to the very heights!

Hiding under the bridge
Sleeping on a snowy winter night
Homeless child.

(analysis of three lines by Basho)

The best literary heritage of the peoples of the world has enduring artistic value and enters our modernity as a living source of thoughts and feelings, enriching the treasury of world culture.

Japanese poetry refers to this literary heritage along with other monuments. Poetry organically flowed into the life and way of life of the Japanese people. Its spokesmen were not only gifted poets, but also ordinary people.

Therefore, short poetic forms have become an urgent need for national poetry. .I'm Japanese lyrical poems tankai haiku (haiku) are distinguished by their utmost brevity and peculiar poetics. Such poems can be composed quickly, under the influence of direct feeling. You can aphoristically, concisely express your thought in them so that it is remembered and passed from mouth to mouth. In ancient Japan, haiku was a simple folk poem, like, say, in Russia - a ditty. It was democratic art, not only in the sense that it was the art of the third estate - artisans, townspeople, merchants, partly the village elite, but also in the sense of the widest coverage of these strata, in the sense of the number of consumers and creators of this art. From folk poetry, these concise oral poetic formulas pass into literary, continue to develop in it and give rise to new poetic forms.

This is how national poetic forms were born in Japan: a five-line tanka and a three-line haiku.

The ancient tanka and the younger haiku have a long history, in which periods of prosperity alternated with periods of decline. More than once these forms were on the verge of extinction, but they withstood the test and continue to live and develop today.

Tanka ("short song") already in the 7th - 8th centuries, at the dawn of Japanese poetry, displacing the so-called. long poems "nagauta" (presented in the famous poetic anthology of the 8th century "Manyoshu"). It is important to note that the desire for laconicism, love for small forms is generally inherent in Japanese art.Haikuseparated from the tank many centuries later, during the heyday of the urban culture of the "third estate". Historically, haiku is the first tanka stanza.

The verse became firmly established in Japanese poetry and acquired its true capacity in the second half of the seventeenth century. He was raised to an unsurpassed artistic height by the great poet of Japan Matsuo Basho.

Perhaps one of the most difficult phenomena of Japanese art for Europeans to understand is precisely the poetry of Basho, a classic of Japanese literature. The reason for this is that the very genre that Basho represents - "haikai" - is a specifically Japanese phenomenon.

haikai, as a genre concept, strictly speaking, includes both poetry and prose (haibun), but in a narrow sense, haikai is usually understood as the former. In haikai poetry, two forms are distinguished: haiku, or in its strophic form - haiku, is an unrhymed three-liner of five, seven, five syllables (since in Japanese the stress is not forceful, but musical, the question of meter in the European sense is removed); the second - renku - is a combination of a series of haiku, supplemented with couplets of seven syllables per verse (ageku);

Haiku is a lyrical poem depicting the life of nature and the life of man in their indissoluble unity against the backdrop of the cycle of the seasons.

Before considering the structure of haiku, it is necessary to mention that Japanese poetry is syllabic, its rhythm is based on alternation of a certain the number of syllables. The sound and rhythmic organization of the three lines is a matter of great concern for Japanese poets and one of the most difficult moments for translators. That ,what some translations have a rhyme, while others do not, others have a sliding rhyme, and the five-line tanka are translated in different cases in different sizes, due to the following considerations: in Japanese poetry there is no rhyme as a poetic device, but due to the syllabic nature of versification and the properties of the language itself in poetry there are both ordinary and anaphoric, and internal and external sliding rhymes and assonances. Rhyme in Japanese poetry is a concomitant phenomenon and is conditioned by linguistic patterns.

Hokku has a stable meter. Each verse has a certain number of syllables: 5 in the first, 7 in the second and 5 in the third - a total of 17. This does not exclude poetic liberties, especially among bold innovative poets, such as Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). He often did not take into account the meter, striving to achieve the greatest poetic expressiveness.The size of the haiku is so small that compared to it, the European sonnet seems like a big poem. It contains only a few words, and yet its capacity is relatively large. The art of writing haiku is, above all, the ability to say a lot in a few words.

Brevity makes haiku related to folk proverbs. Some three-verses have become popular in folk speech as proverbs, such as Basho's poem:

I'll say the word

Lips freeze.

Autumn whirlwind!

As a proverb, it means that "caution sometimes makes you keep silent." But most often, haiku differs from the proverb in its genre.

signs. This is not an edifying saying, a short parable or apt

sharpness, but a poetic picture sketched in one or two strokes. A task

poet - to infect the reader with lyrical excitement, to awaken his imagination, and for this it is not necessary to draw a picture in all its details. Vladimir Sokolov, in his short essay on Haiku, wrote:

haikuit is necessary to imagine sadness, the play of loneliness, a little raid

antiquities, a lot of subtext, few words - only five syllables in the first line,

seven in the second and five in the third. Haiku consists of three lines, but

includes the whole world around and requires in return only a little fantasy, inner freedom and imagination. The size of the haiku is so small that compared to it, the European sonnet seems like a big poem. It contains only a few words, and yet its capacity is relatively large. The art of writing haiku is, above all, the ability to say a lot in a few words.

In the era of late Japanese feudalism, the so-called Tokugawa era, embracing a period of two and a half centuries - from the beginning of the 17th to the middle of the 19th - the years of Genroku (1688-1703) stand out as a period of the highest flowering of culture, as a page of special cultural splendor. It was during this era of the heyday of Japanese culture that he created Matsuo Basho. It was Basho who developed and passed on to his martyrs many of the aesthetic principles of haiku composition, which are deeply rooted in Japanese philosophy. This is "satori" - a state of insight, when things that are inaccessible to other people are revealed to the eye, "sabi" - a word that cannot be literally translated, originally meaning "sadness of loneliness", alienation from everythingthe outside world, memories that evoke bright sadness. Sabi, as a particular concept of beauty, defined the entire style of Japanese art in the Middle Ages. Beauty, according to this principle, had to express a complex content in simple, strict forms, conducive to contemplation. Peace, dullness of colors, elegiac sadness, harmony achieved by mean means - such is the art of sabi.

In the last years of his life, Basyo proclaimed a new guiding principle of poetics - " karumi" (lightness). He told his students, "From now on, I strive for verses that are chalk like Sunagawa (Sandy River)." These words of his should be understood as a challenge to imitators who, blindly following ready-made models, began to compose poetry in large numbers with a claim to thoughtfulness. Basho's poems are by no means shallow, they are distinguished by high simplicity, because they speak of simple human affairs and feelings. Poems become light, transparent, fluid. They are imbued with warm sympathy for people who have seen a lot, experienced a lot. Pictures from peasant life appear:

perched a boy

On the saddle, and the horse is waiting.

Collect radish.

The task of the poet is to infect the reader with lyrical excitement, to wake him up. imagination, and for this it is not necessary to draw a picture in all its details.

This way of depicting requires maximum activity from the reader, draws him into the creative process, gives impetus to his thoughts.

Giving preference to small, haiku sometimes painted a picture on a large scale:

Raging sea space!

Far away, to Sado Island,

The Milky Way creeps.

This poem by Basho is a kind of peephole. Clinging to it with an eye, we will see a large space. The Sea of ​​Japan will open before us on a windy but clear autumn night: the glitter of stars, white breakers, and in the distance, on

edge of the sky, black silhouette of Sado Island. Or take another poem

Basho :

On a high embankment - pines,

And between them the cherries show through, and the palace

In the depths of flowering trees...

In three lines - three perspective plans. This example shows how haiku is akin to the art of painting.

They were often written on the subjects of paintings and, in turn, inspired artists; sometimes they turned into a component of the picture in the form of a calligraphic inscription on it.

Often the poet creates not visual, but sound images. The howl of the wind, the chirping of cicadas, the cries of the pheasant, the singing of the nightingale and the lark,

The lark sings

With a ringing blow in the thicket

The pheasant echoes him.

The Japanese poet does not unfold before the reader the entire panorama of possible ideas and associations that arise in connection with a given object or phenomenon. It only awakens the thought of the reader, gives it a certain direction.

On a bare branch

Raven sits alone.

Autumn evening.

(Basho )

The poem looks like a monochrome ink drawing. Nothing superfluous, everything is extremely simple. With the help of a few skillfully chosen details, a picture of late autumn has been created. There is a lack of wind, nature seems to freeze in sad immobility. The poetic image, it would seem, is a little outlined, but it has a large capacity and, bewitching, leads away.

At the same time, it is extremely specific. The poet depicted a real landscape near the hut and through it - his state of mind. He speaks not of the loneliness of the raven, but of his own.

Even the grammar in haiku is special: there are few grammatical forms, and

each bears the ultimate load, sometimes combining several meanings. The means of poetic speech are selected extremely sparingly: haiku avoids epithet or metaphor, if it can do without them. Sometimes the entire haiku is an extended metaphor, but its direct meaning is usually hidden in the subtext.

From the heart of a peony

The bee crawls slowly...

O with what reluctance!

Basho composed this poem when leaving a hospitable home

your friend. It would be a mistake, however, to look for such a double meaning in every haiku. Most often, haiku is a concrete representation of the real world that does not require and does not allow any other interpretation.

"Ideal", freed from all rough landscape - this is how the old classical poetry painted nature. In haiku, poetry regained its sight. A man in haiku is not static, he is given in motion: here a street peddler wanders through a whirlwind of snow, but a worker turns a grain mill. The gulf that already in the tenth century lay between literary poetry and folk song became less wide. A raven pecking a snail in a rice field with its nose - this image is found both in haiku and in a folk song. haiku teaches look for the hidden beauty in the simple, inconspicuous, everyday.

Beautiful are not only the glorified, many times sung cherry blossoms, but also the modest, imperceptible at first glance flowers of colza, shepherd's purse.

Take a close look!

Shepherd's purse flowers

You will see under the blanket.

(Basho )

In another poem, the fisherman's bastard at dawn resembles a blooming poppy, and both of them are equally good. Beauty can strike like a lightning strike:

I barely got better

Exhausted, until the night ...

And suddenly - wisteria flowers!

(Basho )

Beauty can be deeply hidden. The feeling of beauty in nature and in human life is akin to a sudden comprehension of truth, the eternal principle, which, according to Buddhist teaching, is invisibly present in all phenomena of being. In haiku we find a new rethinking of this truth - the affirmation of beauty in the inconspicuous, ordinary:

They scare them, drive them from the fields!

Sparrows will fly up and hide

Under the protection of tea bushes.

(Basho )

As noted above, haiku (especially later ones) do not use any kind of metaphor. Of the techniques known in European poetry, she uses only comparisons, and even then sparingly. Haiku poetic speech is distinguished by techniques that either do not reach the European as unusual (such are "engo" - the mechanical use of associations); or they give him the impression of anti-artistic trickery (such is the play on homonyms, i.e., the ambiguity of meaning). In the absence of other poetic devices and the aforementioned pettiness of the subject, all this often leads to the fact that haiku is perceived as pure prosaism.

Finally, the third and perhaps the main feature of haiku is that they are entirely designed for a special way of perception, which the Japanese call "yojo" -" afterfeeling". This property, again characteristic of many types of Japanese art (in particular, some schools of painting), for which in Russian there is no better name than "suggestiveness" - is an essential feature of haiku. The task of haiku is not to show or tell, but only to hint; not to express as fully as possible, but, on the contrary, to say as little as possible; to give only a detail that stimulates the full development of the theme - an image, a thought, a scene - in the reader's imagination. This work of the reader's imagination is " afterfeeling"and is an integral part of the aesthetic perception of haiku - and it is something least of all familiar to the European reader: a collection of haiku cannot be "skimmed through the eyes", leafing through page after page. If the reader is passive and not attentive enough, he will not perceive the impulse sent to him by the poet. Japanese poetics takes into account the counter work of the reader's thought.

The conciseness of haiku, - that feature of it, which first of all catches the eye - is already a secondary property; however, for the understanding of haiku not only by Europeans, but even by the Japanese, it plays a significant role. With the relative length of Japanese words, seventeen syllables sometimes fit only four meaningful words, while the maximum (extremely rare) number of them is eight. The result is that the greater half haiku without