A Crow On A Bare Branch:
...BRANCH: A COMPARISON OF MATSUO BASHŌ’S HAIKU “KARE-EDA-NI…”
AND ITS ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Elin Sütiste
Introduction This paper aims to describe, compare and analyse different shifts that have occurred in the translation of Matsuo Bashō’s haiku “Kare-eda-ni…” into English. With the help of close reading, attention is paid to the interference of the original haiku’s features (such as
syllables, seasonal word kigo, cutting word kireji, imagery etc.) with the poetic standards
of the target culture (e.g., characteristics like title, rhyme, number of lines etc.)
As evidenced by the bulk of translations1 and the time-span during which these have been made, “Kare-eda-ni…” has fascinated Western translators since the beginnings of haiku2 translations. The text corpus used here consists of 32 English translations
composed from 1899 until 2000 (see appendix).3
As is generally known, Japanese poetry is based on the 5- and 7-syllable patterns. Although the original haiku texts are presented in Japanese in the monolinear form,
translations usually follow their underlying structure of 5-7-5 syllables and render a haiku in the form of three lines. However, this has not always been the case. Haiku was
introduced to the West rather recently, at the turn of the 20th century. As there was no corresponding form for haiku in the West and haiku itself was a novelty, Japanese haiku
was paralleled for some time and degree to epigram, as is evident from some of the first
writings on haiku, e.g. B. H. Chamberlain’s “Bashō and the Japanese epigram” (1902), or William Porter’s anthology of translations, entitled A Year of Japanese Epigrams (1911) etc (Kawamoto 2000: 47, Kuriyama 1983: 80). By today, haiku as a literary form has become widely recognized also in the West, and the translations hardly follow the model
of epigram anymore. Also, haiku does not exist only in the form of...
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