Re: TRANS: a haiku

Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...> wrote:


>Haikus are, indeed, poems of exactly 17 syllables, with a
>5-7-5 break down, but technically, a haiku must have syntactic*
>breaks between each line. One should not, in other words, just
>take a sentence or phrase of 17 syllables and then, graphically,
>force it into the 5-7-5 form (I think that's called senryukuu).
Hm, you're right, all haiku I've seen so far are rather
clean-cut. In particular, I haven't seen conditionals in any
of them, which is only expectable given the character of the
poem.

I have another one here (one I just made, but before reading
your message):

    pequeñas gotas        little waterdrops
    ominoso cielo gris    ominous [is the] gray sky
    otoño quieto          [a] quiet* autumn

(* more or less)

Now this one looks too much like a list, no verb or anything,
but... (As you may guess, it's beginning to rain over here --
I haven't seen the sun in three days.)

>* (I am not sure, however, whether the rule is just against enjambment or
>against continuous sentences in general.  If just the former, then the following
>are also possible:
>
>         To have no errors
>         Would be life without meaning
>         No struggle, no joy

The first two verses look pretty much like a continuous sentence
to me. The one that follows,
>
>         Out of memory.
>         We wish to hold the whole sky,
>         But we never will.

seems better to my untrained eye -- due to the break in 'but'.
Maybe one should allow several propositions to occur, with
explicit conjunctions (many 'good' haiku make them implicit).


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  ... I cannot combine any characters that the divine Library
  has not foreseen, which in some of its secret tongues do not
  bear some terrible meaning. No-one can articulate a syllable
  not filled of caresses and fears; which is not, in some one
  of those languages, the powerful name of a god...
                   Jorge Luis Borges, _The Library of Babel_