Japanese and Western Literature. Armando Martins Janeira

realm of beauty.

      Following in the steps of Basho was another great Japanese poet, Issa Kobayashi(1763-1827). He, too, wandered about Japan and left several diaries with reminiscence of his travels and poems he composed along the road. After the example of Basho, the roaming in travel became associated with poetic reverie. "I made my mind to travel north this year," writes Issa, "to get more practice in writing haiku. I slung my beggar's wallet round my neck and flung my little bundle over my shoulder,"⁹

      Like Basho, Issa took a pseudonym (Issa meaning "a cup of tea"), adopted the tonsure and priest's robes, and wrote haiku all his life. Once, after a poetry party, Issa composed more than one hundred poems. He also used the haibun form created by Basho.

      Issa's beautiful book Ora ga Haru (The Year of My Life), which has been translated into English, condensed the experiences and thoughts from the best years of his life (though they were all interwoven and all referred to as the year 1819), In reading the work we can sense a vivid yet delicate feeling of complete identification with nature, a deep Buddhist compassion for all creatures. On the day he married he made this simple entry in another of his diaries: "11th April, Fair wife came."

      He speaks with touching tenderness of his little daughter playing and dancing with a group of children under the moonlight:

      Watching her, I quite forgot my old age and my sinful nature, and indulged myself with the reflection that when she should be old enough to boast long hair with waving curls, we might let her dance, and that would be more beautiful,I fancied, than to hear the music of the twenty-five celestial maidens.

      When she died of small-pox, he contains his deep sorrow, saying that it was no use to cry because "blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall. Yet, try as I would, I could not, simply could not, cut the binding cord of human love."

      For a Western reader a book like The Year of My Life gives an invaluable insight into the Japanese soul, because from the commentaries in prose the feelings which are deeply imbued in haiku come in clear and expressive tones; therein Issa has more human warmth than Basho.

      CONFRONTATION WITH WESTERN DIARIES

      If we want to find a counterpart to the Ten-feet-square Hut, Idle Thoughts, or The Year of My Life in the West, we had best turn to Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Portugal has a very rich ascetic literature; and Spain, the richest mystic literature of the world. The Iberian writers of that time were ascetic monks who lived a solitary life as did the Japanese.

      We see how mysticism has similar manifestations in all religions. Ascetism is a moderate and reasonable form of mysticism, one with no exaltation, raptures, or visions, but rather a concentration on the moral lessons of religion. It practises solitary meditation that brings the ascetic man nearer to nature, to the beauty of things, to the love of men and all animals as creatures of God.

      In Spain we find also a deep love for the beauty of nature shown in a work of Fray Luis de Granada (1504-88), Introducción al Símbolo de la Fe, which was one of the first books printed in Japan, in 1592, translated (in part) under the title Fides no Doxi, The passing of seasons show impressions of joy and melancholy like those of Japanese ascetics. Sometimes he reminds us of Kenko, in commenting on the serene pleasure of looking at the moon:

      How agreeable it is, in the middle of summer, to look at the moon, so full and so bright that with its shining light it covers all the stars!

      Or we see the joyous enthusiasm for spring:

      Who could be able to express the beauty of the purplish violets, of the white lilies, of the resplendent roses, and the grace of meadows tinted with flowers of so many colours, some golden, some red, some with infinite mixed hues.

      Fray Luis de Granada shows this same ardent love for animals, to such a point that with his candid kindness he proposes that a dog which died for his master is an example or the perfection of Christian lire." It is in his love for all creatures and love for the infinite beauties of nature that the candid friar finds, in his solitude, the way to God. There is no doubt that in the fundamental stream of poetry that runs through both works we can find many signs that these two writers, however far apart, are brothers in spirit.

      We have already discussed the books of prose and poetry, haibun, and their unique Japanese character. It is impossible to find anything similar in Western literature. When the English translation of the travel books of Basho appeared, a critic quoted Henri Michaux as the only Western writer having used a similar genre of prose and poetry to register the impressions of his journeys and moments of his rare, most originally expressed emotions. Michaux, in Passages, for instance, has used a literary process similar to Basho and Issa; but he seems far from them if we consider his love for the absurd and for the fantastic, his acid, biting phrase (it is enough to remember the bitter chapter on Japan in Un Barbare en Asie).

      Nearly everybody knew of the book of Ramón Jiménez, Platero é Yo, when this Spanish poet received the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Platero is the name of the charming little donkey in whose "Christian" company Jimenez travelled around Spain. (R. L. Stevenson also travelled with a donkey.) But this book of Jimenez is in prose. Nearer to the form of the haibun and of the human lyricism of Issa is the Portuguese writer Miguel Torga. Torga, also a poet, wrote a book of short stories, Bichos) translated in English and impregnated with the most tender love for animals. But it is in his diary that Torga uses a composition, part poetry and part prose, which suggests traces of the diary of Issa.

      Torga probably does not know any more of Issa than Issa could know of him; it is one of those parallel phenomena which often have been pointed out in the world of culture. Torga has travelled around Portugal, tasting the bread and wine of every village; he is taken by "an irresistible urge to know the hardness and colour of the earth, taste the bread, drink the wine, caress the stones, listen to people's voices." He loves the landscape, with a "chaste love"; he cannot speak of a mountain covered with snow without feeling clean and deeply moved, nor "of a leaf without trembling as a leaf"; nor can he look at an abyss without a deep shadow in his eyes. This is why he says, "At certain hours I am stone, dew, flower, mist."

      Torga feels the same deep love for nature, but he expresses it with less refinement and more strength, and at times even with violence: "The day was an ox that died here, near a meadow. He was labouring, and suddenly he fell right on the soil. They took his skin and buried him just there. The plough shining on his tomb was his crown of flowers."

      The diary of Torga frequently intermingles with poetry the author's reactions to great problems of the modern world and to fundamental questions of Portuguese life. In it are echoes of a reality which is transient but irrefutable for the poet of today. Nevertheless, it often shows the poet's moments of transfiguration while elated. In these moments, the same kindness and humble simplicity, the same tender respect for earth's beauty and the same love for men make Torga similar to Issa. The two poets, so separated in time and space, are similarly open and sensitive to the wonders of the common things of life.

      It would be interesting to go further and make a comparison between the Japanese diaries and the literary currents that in the West have produced a similar genre.

      France is the richest country in mémoires. As early as the fifteenth century, Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris appeared as a valuable contribution. In the sixteenth century we find the memoirs of Comines, full of commentaries on the times of Louis XI and Charles VIII; in the seventeenth century there were those of Sully, Richelieu, and de la Rochefoucauld, and the celebrated memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, which Voltaire has praised as having the air of grandeur, impetuous genius, and inequality. In the eighteenth century we find the Confessions of Rousseau, so touching in their nakedness; the memoirs of Beaumarchais, which, according to Voltaire, are the most singular, the strongest, the boldest and the most comic; and also the writings of the men of the French Revolution: Talleyrand, Napoleon, Barras, Guizot. In the last century, the two thick volumes by the Goncourt brothers are a minute report of the literary and artistic Paris of their day.

      It could be said that all notable writers have thought it important to deliver the judgements and secrets of their intimate life to us. Gide left the most interesting journal of this century. After him came François Mauriac, with Mémoires Interieurs;