The Aoption and Adaptation of Haiku in Europe

VANDE WALLE, Willy. F.

doi:2019.9.1.31

The Journal of Japanese Language Literature Studies > Volume 9(1); 2019 > Article

Special Issue

Border Crossings: The Journal of Japanese-Language Literature Studies 2019;9(1): 31-47.
doi: https://doi.org/10.22628/bcjjl.2019.9.1.31

The Aoption and Adaptation of Haiku in Europe

Willy. F. VANDE WALLE

Professor emeritus, Research Unit of Japanese Studies, Leuven University, Belgium

ヨーロッパに於ける俳句の受容―― 軌跡と展望

ウィリー·F·ヴァンドゥワラ

ルーヴァン大学文学部東洋学科名誉教授、日本学特任教授

Correspondence Willy. F. VANDE WALLE ,Email: willy.vandewalle@kuleuven.be

Published online: 30 June 2020.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

British scholars and several other Westerners who had mastered Japanese were the first to introduce the haiku to the West. In the early stages of its introduction, individual haiku were often compared to epigrams and maxims, and in translation they were even transformed into a rhyming format. However, from around the turn of the century the haiku was gradually recognized as a literary genre in its own right, and Paul-Louis Couchoud was one of the first to grasp its specific characteristics and qualities. After visiting Japan, he published a cycle of 72 “Hai Kai” about a boat trip on the river Seine in 1905. His sensitivity to the characteristics of the haiku was inherited by a new generation of French haiku poets, who adapted and transformed the form into a largely Westernized genre. The haiku even elicited interest among a number of leading European poets and novelists, who, while often adhering to European literary forms, experimented with the forms of sensitivity and perception they believed to be unique to the haiku.
After the Second World War, the publication between 1949 and 1952 by Reginald Horatio Blyth of several volumes of English translations of Japanese classical haiku, with commentaries, marked a watershed. These widely-read texts laid the foundation for the definitive popularization of the haiku genre in the West.

Keywords: Haiku, Haikai, Imagism, Paul-Louis Couchoud, Reginald Horatio Blyth

キ―ワ―ド: 俳句, 俳諧, イマジズム, ポール·ルイ·クシュー, レジナルド·ホーラス·ブライス