Japanese and Western Literature. Armando Martins Janeira

It happened in the seventeenth century in Spain with Gongora, chiefly with his followers and imitators; in Italy with Marino; in France with the mannerisms of the Hôtel de Rambouillet.

      In Japan, the excessive care for form never brought a decadence similar to Gongorism on account of the short and simple form of haiku. Poets could polish it like a jewel, brighten its light, chisel its shape, and reduce it to the pure essence of beauty. Perfection was attained through a harmonious combination of form and substance. The brevity of the poem made possible this difficult balance.

      But if there was never a disintegration in form, the haiku and tanka degenerated in repetitions of theme. As we will see, before the time Japan began to breathe the new winds of the West, the poets were reproducing the same images and ideas, with few minor alterations.

      THE CONCEPT OF NATURE

      The poet, says Rimbaud, must know himself entirely. He searches his soul, suspects it, tempts it, learns it. After having learnt it, he must cultivate it. . . . The Poet becomes clairvoyant through a long, immense, reasoned unruliness of all his senses."

      Even for a poet as free and rebellious as Rimbaud, reason takes a predominant place in the poetic creation. Wilhelm Dilthey affirms that the poetic enlightenment of Schiller's imagination comes always from an intense and conscious work. Schiller himself said that the poet "is the one capable of transmitting his own sensible state to an object, so that that object impels us to pass into that same sensible state, which means that it acts vividly on us." Thus the poet concentrates completely on his own powers; even his madness is reasoned. He transfers his poetic state to the objects; he does not dissolve himself into the nature that surrounds him; on the contrary, he absorbs nature into himself to build with it his own poetic world ; he transforms nature by the prodigy of his imagination, the power of imagination by which he creates a world distinct from the normal world.

      Paul Valéry writes in Mémoires d'un Poème:

      I would prefer to have written a mediocre work with all lucidity than a master-piece in a flash in a state of trance. Because a flash resolves nothing. It brings me nothing that can surprise me. It interests me much more to be able to produce at my will a very small flash than to wait for projecting here and there the great sparks of an uncertain storm.

      To realize the complex poetic operations of imagination, let us look to Dryden:

      The first happiness of the Poet's imagination, is properly Invention, or finding of the thought; the second is Fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought as the judgement represents it proper to the subject: the third is Elocution, or the Art of clothing and adorning that thought so found and varied, in apt, significant and sounding words. The quickness of the Imagination is seen in the Invention, the fertility in the Fancy, and the accuracy in the Expression.

      These few testimonies of Western poets are enough to show that poetry in the West demands a full concentration of the poet, a complete introspective use of all his powers of reason and intuition in order to appropriate the objects of the outside world, and to build with them an inner world of transcending beauty totally transformed.

      The concept of nature in Oriental poetry is totally different. Nature is not a physical manifestation of its creator, but something which exists by itself. Nature was not created for man, and is neither benign or hostile to him. In Japanese and Chinese poetry, man's destiny is neither to struggle against nature nor to dominate it as in the West. Man is embraced in the eternal cycle that goes with nature: birth, growth, and decline, death and rebirth. It is this contrast between the mutability and transience of human life on the one hand, and the permanence and eternal renewal of the life of nature on the other that gives much Chinese poetry special poignancy and endows it with a tragic sense, writes J. Y. Liu in The Art of Chinese Poetry.

      In Spirit of Japanese Poetry, Yone Noguchi states:

      Poetry should express the truth in its own. way; by that truth we Japanese mean nature; again by that nature the order of spontaneity, Lao Tze says: "Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven its law from Tao; but the law of Tao is its own spontaneity."

      For Yone Noguchi, spontaneity means God,

      Basho has left a lucid description of the spiritual operation required of the poet. He has to bury his self in the object he is going to treat poetically.

      When you see an object, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself; otherwise you impose yourself on the object, and you do not learn. The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry. However well phrased it may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry, but merely your subjective counterfeit.

      You can learn about the pine only from the pine, or about the bamboo only from the bamboo.¹¹ The exact words of Basho are: "As to the pine follow the pine, as to the bamboo follow bamboo." The Japanese word for "follow" is narau, which also means "to imitate," " to learn," "to be in accord with." One of Basho's disciples commented: "Narau is to enter into the object and to bring out what is innerly there and to give it a literary form. When, however, the expression is not in accord with the feeling naturally emanating from the object, there is a split between the object and the expression which violates sincerity." Thus the suchness of things is warped. The poet must become a pine into which the human heart has entered. This process is different from, if not opposite to, the one described by Western poets. Poetry, for Basho, comes from spiritual enlightenment.

      For the Japanese reader the poem is not only what is written, but also the invitation to collaborate and widen, by his own imagination, the rich suggestions in the poem. Through a training of many centuries, the Japanese reader can decipher in a few syllables a whole philosophy of life, which he enlarges and deepens through his own meditation.¹²

      We can better understand the concept of nature in Japanese poetry if we think of those painted scrolls in which the human figure is lost in the vast landscape as merely one element of it, like a tree or a stone.

      A few rare and vague strokes most carefully conceived and thrown on the silk are but mere suggestion of a rich world of beauty, invisible in the harmony of the wide empty spaces. Painting for centuries has been intimately associated with poetry, especially when expressed in its abstract form, calligraphy; thus it exerted a great influence upon poetry, having suggested, many poetic concepts.

      The Chinese painter Wang Li, when asked who his master was, gave an answer similar to the previously quoted description by Basho: "I learned from my heart, my heart learned from my eye, and my eye learned from the Hua Mountain."¹³ Another Chinese painter, Chin Nung, said, "You paint the branch well and you hear the sound of the wind." Yasunari Kawabata wrote about the poet: "Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon; the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature." In Western poetry, on the contrary, the influence of painting as well as the influence of music was one of exaltation; they have lifted the force of imagination in the works of great poets like Hugo and Goethe.

      In the East, as the attitude of man towards nature is pure contemplation, man loses his individuality to be anonymously dissolved in the universe to which he naturally belongs. Basho has expressed this poetical and psychological process in very condensed lines of the previously mentioned poem:

Furuike ya	Ah, the old pond
Kawazu tobikomu	A frog jumps in
Mizu no oto	Sound of water.

      The depersonalization of the poet into the surrounding serenity of nature is complete. There is not even the faintest allusion to the beauty of the quiet water into which the frog jumps. The frog breaks the mirror of the water's surface as the sound breaks the silence. This absolute immobility of things is the face of eternity; that is why the small incident of breaking the silent surface of this absolute world takes on enormous proportions. The spirit of the poet is in the total (the silent world) and in. the incident (the splashing of the water) with such a high degree of identification that any intrusion