Brief escapes

During the Covid-19 confinement, in the breaks from the laptop and the jhadu, pocha, bartan, kapda routine, The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse became a refuge of sorts, writes Aditi Phadnis

One of the best things about growing up on the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus in the 1970s and 1980s was Gita Book Depot (GBD). No one ever saw Gita or asked who she was. But the owner, known only as “Dada”, was a portly individual who had a bushy grey beard, vaguely a la Fidel, and leaned to the Left (everyone on campus in those days, including the JNU bus driver Tiwari, leaned to the Left). Dada belonged to Bengal but was known occasionally to snigger about customers from a certain eastern state neighbouring Bengal (JNU got a large number of students from Odisha in those days because of its admission policy and socio-economic deprivation points to encourage students from some parts of India).

Dada had eclectic taste. You could find books here that you couldn’t find anywhere in Delhi, including at the de rigueur The Book Shop in Connaught Place. For instance, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar  was not prescribed reading for any of the courses taught at the university at that time. You could find it at GBD, jostling for space on the shelves with Sartre and Neruda. The Greek great masters: Sophocles and Aeschylus, Socrates and Plato rubbed shoulders with the colourful spines of People’s Publishing House (PPH) publications, execrable English translations of the writings of Gogol, Pushkin and Tolstoy. And of course, Marx, Engels and Lenin. GBD made good money selling Communism.

It was during a pilgrimage to GBD (undertaken every few days to discover the new delights Dada had procured and acquire a copy with money begged, borrowed and occasionally stolen) that I was initiated into the wondrous, calm beauty of Japanese poetry. The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse: From The Earliest Times To The Present, translated and with an introduction by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, first came out sometime in the 1960s but was updated and reprinted many times. It begins with primitive poetry and the Nara period (to AD 794) and moves on to poems written in the Heian period (794-1185), Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185-1603), Edo period (1603-1868) and ends up in the modern period (1868).

Everything in JNU needed to be discussed furiously and settled there and then. If you decided you didn’t want to join the fulmination, you could retreat into the meditative world of the tanka, the senryu and the haiku. Oh, your friends would sneer at your escapism and comment silkily about those who couldn’t take a stand. But wandering through the poetry of Basho, Issa and Shiki was a journey both restful and profound. Especially when seeking to avoid discussions on Nicaragua.

Adam Kern speaks about the “Japanese-ness” of haiku (which, by the way, probably developed from Chinese antecedents, though many Japanese would bridle at this). This includes a suspension of the writer’s ego or personality, objective description and an attempt to grasp the ephemeral, this last based on the Buddhist truism that nothing lasts forever. In a way, this is what makes the poems so age-less. The haiku represents the skill every reporter yearns to master — the capacity to tell the story in very, very few but evocative words, without dragging the “I” into it. Brevity.

During the Covid-19 confinement, in the breaks from the laptop and the jhadu, pocha, bartan, kapda routine, The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse became a refuge of sorts. Delving deeper, Amazon produced another wonderful find: The Penguin Book of Haiku, edited and translated by Adam Kern, which appeared in 2018. Mr Kern corrected some misconceptions: Not only does the haiku not have to be the regulation non-rhyming 17-syllable three-line poem, it is not always about nature and beauty alone. It can frequently be bawdy, sometimes a stinging riposte to social pretension. And, (something Dada of GBD might have appreciated) Rabindranath Tagore, the first Easterner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, emulated the haiku, translating some into Bangla and composing haikuesque verse! Mr Kern’s outstanding introduction to the volume is matched only by the haiku collection that follows.

Here’s one from that collection: “others gone home/now there’s nothing between/ the moon and me.” One that made me smile was the exchange between two poets. One writes “my, oh my, oh my!/all to be said of the blossoms/on Mount Yoshino.” Another responds satirically: “my, oh my, oh my!/ all to be said of the headlice/through a microscope.”

There are some shrivelling comments on social behaviour. “Hitting rock bottom/everyone helps each other - that’s humanity. And ticket window/our kid suddenly grows one year/younger”. Some are word pictures, like this one: “Opening the door -/’oh! oh! oh!’/snow morning”; and “Dragging across/snow-covered mountains,/The echo goes”.

Poets react sardonically to culture. “European food - /Every blasted plate/Is round.” Another says, “Going down in/The lift, it gives/ A gloomy feeling”.

Sadly, what all this reading failed to do was strip me of my primness. So, some of the bawdier haiku will have to remain within the two covers of the books. But here are some sly senryu: “So hard to fall for -/The female/English-language typist”. And: “The tram-car full,/ ‘Stop shoving,’ they shout,/ And go on shoving”.

And this one is definitely for India: “Keep left! To the left!’/The constable waving/His right arm instead”.