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RE: Mizu No Oto - Every Image Has Its Haiku - Edition #35 (English)
Hello potassium holders, I'm back, and here's my entry for this week.
City covers,
Immutable spirit!
Remains intact
I thought that the haiku in English used the structure 5-7-5 the same as in Spanish, at least that's how @haikubot reviews it. This time I made my haiku with a structure 4-6-4 and it seems a lie but the fewer syllables we use the harder it is to write the poem.
I come from a Romance language, like you, and always felt that 5/7/5 syllables were too much in English. My Italian haikus, once translated in English, needed less syllables.
English 17 syllable haiku seemed to me, mostly, awkward, since packing a lot of words and concepts in a haiku is quite a bad thing; on the contrary, Italian or Spanish haiku seemed to me right like Japanese.
Later, I met in my readings the same opinion I was developing, expressed by much more eminent haiku scholars than me, in particular: bilingual Japanese-American poet Keiko Imaoka, British and American literature professor at Kumamoto University Richard Gilbert, and USA haiku poet, translator and editor Jane Reichhold.
All these agreed in saying that English language is more concise than Japanese or Romance languages, so 17 syllables are too much for a haiku, leading to a deep misunderstanding of this form of poetry ;)
The 3-4/5-6/3-4 form comes from their articles and studies.
Personally, I find 3-5-3 perfect for my English haikus ;)
It's very interesting what you're saying, and I didn't know anything about it.
I also agree, English is much more direct than our romance languages and fewer words are needed to say the same thing, and in this case, it makes sense to use fewer syllables to express a haiku.
Please don't think I was complaining about the number of syllables, it's just that called my attention and didn't know why it should be done that way, and then I was getting used (erroneously I think) to doing haikus with the metric 5-7-5.
Thank you very much for the explanation Marco, now I understand a little more about haiku in English
I didn't think you were complaining, my friend. I've been olny carried away a little with the explanation... ;)