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Japanese poetryLesson 7. The target skill is that of analyzing imagery in terms of the associations created.
1. Brainstorming. An association, by definition, is a connection in the mind between ideas, sensations, memories, etc. An association may connect two ideas, or bring about a number of ideas, either in a linear sequence (each causing the next one) or in a kind of «bunch» (one idea bringing about many others). Apart from arrangement, we can discuss the mechanisms that give rise to associations. What mechanisms can you enumerate? Try to provide examples of the way any two ideas are connected. For instance, what is the connection between the following lines: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (Shakespeare)? Or: “Íî÷ü, óëèöà, ôîíàðü, àïòåêà, áåññìûñëåííûé è òóñêëûé ñâåò …” (À.Áëîê)?
2. Tanka is the most prevalent verse form in traditional Japanese literature. Each short poem consists of five lines of 5,7,5,7 and 7 syllables. The enduring popularity of the tanka form resulted partly from the limiting characteristics of the Japanese language, which made it difficult to maintain a high level of intensity throughout a long poem, and from the Japanese preferences for simplicity, suggestion, and irregularity. These are reflected in the brevity of the Tanka form, in the evocativeness of the poems, and the uneven number of lines and syllables per line. Most tanka include at least one caesura, or pause, often indicated by punctuation in English translations. Tanka often tell a brief story or express a single thought or insight. Tanka poets generally exhibit restraint relying on clear, powerful imagery to evoke an emotional response rather than using abstract words to directly express their feelings. At the same time, Tanka poets often suggest or hint at the existence of a higher reality. How do the above-mentioned characteristics of tanka reveal themselves in the poems below? At the great sky Was it that I went to sleep I gaze all my life: Thinking of him, For the rushing wind, That he came in my dreams? Though it howls as it goes, Had I known it a dream, Can never be seen. I shouldn’t have wakened. (9-12 centuries A.D.)
3.Haiku (or hokku, originally the opening verse of a longer poem), three-line verses of 5-7-5 syllables, present spare yet clear images that stimulate thought and evoke emotion. When the hokku became detached from linked verse, it also cast off the room the tanka provided for drawing a moral (though not all tanka moralize) and what was left was the irreducible mysteriousness of the images themselves. Because of the brevity of the haiku form, the image cannot be presented in detail, so haiku employ the power of suggestion to produce a detailed picture in the reader’s mind. The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it. By establishing the season the haiku calls to mind all the details and ideas that readers associate with the time of the year. Offer a few seasonal words to your group-mates, so that they can suggest a chain of associations each word causes.
4. If the first level of haiku is its location in nature, its second is almost always some implicit Buddhist reflection on nature. One of the striking differences between Christian and Buddhist thought is that in the Christian sense of things, nature is fallen, and in the Buddhist sense it isn’t. Another is that, because there is no creator-being in Buddhist cosmology, there is no higher plane of meaning to which nature refers. At the core of Buddhist metaphysics are three ideas about natural things: that they are transient; that they are contingent; and that they suffer. Though the melancholy of autumn is as traditional an experience in European poetry as it is Japanese, it is not fundamentally assimilated into the European system of thought. English poets had a word for these feelings, they called them “moods.” When Wordsworth or Keats writes about being “in pensive or wayward mood,” you know that they are doing one of the jobs of the artist, trying to assimilate psychological states for which the official culture didn’t have a language. Basho’s Japan did. The old Japanese phrase that sums up the transience of things, “swirling petals, falling leaves,” was a religious thought. Japanese literary criticism states that three masters in the haiku tradition, Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa, represent three types of the poet – Basho the ascetic and seeker, Buson the artist, Issa the humanist – and their differences are clear at a glance when you read them. Here is a fall poem that has Basho’s poignant calm and spiritual restlessness: Deep autumn – my neighbor, how does he live, I wonder?
And this winter poem was Buson’s painterly mix of precision and strangeness: Tethered horse; snow in both stirrups.
And here is a summer poem of Issa’s, with its pathos and humor: Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. What are these haiku about? What mechanisms give rise to associations?
5. Though some haiku seem to contain only one image, most present an explicit or implicit comparison between two images, actions, or states of being. Identify the author of the following haiku and analyze some of them: explain the effect produced and the connotations received by separate objects due to the associations that emerge in the reader’s mind.
6. Buson has a whole series of haiku verses beginning with the line “Spring rain” and “The short night”, showing different frames of mind, - like an Impressionist painter who depicts the same lily pond or haystack in different lights. Try to give your own version of two haiku with these opening lines.
7. Which is easier and which is more effective: to suggest a feeling or to describe it in detail? Explain, provide examples (with your own examples among them!)
SUPPLEMENT TO LESSON 7 “JAPANESE POETRY”
Basho during his forty-nine years, reinvented the forms of both the haiku and linked verse as they were practiced in his youth and gave them a power and seriousness they had rarely had before. BY his early thirties he was a haikai master and a professional teacher of poetry. Throughout his thirties he studies Chinese poetry and Taocism, and at least for a while, he studied Zen and practiced meditation. The poetry of those years took from the Chinese models a plainness and depth very different from the rather showy and playful poems in the Japanese tradition. By his forties, sick of literary life Basho began to travel and wrote the travel journals, mixtures of verse and prose, that have become classics of Japanese literature. it was in these last nine years of his life that he remade the haiku form, transforming it into one of the great lyric forms in human culture. Japanese scholars are fond of contrasting Basho and Buson: Basho the seeker, Buson the artist; Basho the subjective poet, Buson the objective poet; Basho the ascetic writer, Buson the worldly painter. Buson is that rare phenomenon, a great poet who was also a very distinguished painter. His poems are painterly in several senses. They are visually intense, many of them have a certain cool and powerful aesthetic detachment, and they are in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being, as if it were brush strokes on white paper. Issa – his name means “a cup of tea” or “a single bubble in seeping tea” - is a much-loved poet. He has been described as a Whitman or Neruda in miniature, probably because his poems teem with creaturely life, especially the life of the smallest creatures. His main English translator, a Scot, compares him to Robert Burns, who was almost his exact contemporary. And in other ways Issa’s sensibility resembles that of Charles Dickens – the humor and pathos, the sense of a childhood wound, the willingness to be silly and downright funny, and the fierceness about injustice. In his best work he is – for all the comparisons – quite unlike anyone else, the laughter cosmic, the sense of pain intense, as if the accuracy and openness of his observation left him with a thinness of the mind’s skin, with no defenses against the suffering in the world. Though he was a pious Buddhist and inclined to moralize in his prose, there is an interesting edge of rage in his poems, something very near cynicism. What is delightful about his insouciance casts a shadow.
SUPPLEMENT TO LESSON 7 “JAPANESE POETRY”
Basho during his forty-nine years, reinvented the forms of both the haiku and linked verse as they were practiced in his youth and gave them a power and seriousness they had rarely had before. BY his early thirties he was a haikai master and a professional teacher of poetry. Throughout his thirties he studies Chinese poetry and Taocism, and at least for a while, he studied Zen and practiced meditation. The poetry of those years took from the Chinese models a plainness and depth very different from the rather showy and playful poems in the Japanese tradition. By his forties, sick of literary life Basho began to travel and wrote the travel journals, mixtures of verse and prose, that have become classics of Japanese literature. it was in these last nine years of his life that he remade the haiku form, transforming it into one of the great lyric forms in human culture. Japanese scholars are fond of contrasting Basho and Buson: Basho the seeker, Buson the artist; Basho the subjective poet, Buson the objective poet; Basho the ascetic writer, Buson the worldly painter. Buson is that rare phenomenon, a great poet who was also a very distinguished painter. His poems are painterly in several senses. They are visually intense, many of them have a certain cool and powerful aesthetic detachment, and they are in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being, as if it were brush strokes on white paper. Issa – his name means “a cup of tea” or “a single bubble in seeping tea” - is a much-loved poet. He has been described as a Whitman or Neruda in miniature, probably because his poems teem with creaturely life, especially the life of the smallest creatures. His main English translator, a Scot, compares him to Robert Burns, who was almost his exact contemporary. And in other ways Issa’s sensibility resembles that of Charles Dickens – the humor and pathos, the sense of a childhood wound, the willingness to be silly and downright funny, and the fierceness about injustice. In his best work he is – for all the comparisons – quite unlike anyone else, the laughter cosmic, the sense of pain intense, as if the accuracy and openness of his observation left him with a thinness of the mind’s skin, with no defenses against the suffering in the world. Though he was a pious Buddhist and inclined to moralize in his prose, there is an interesting edge of rage in his poems, something very near cynicism. What is delightful about his insouciance casts a shadow.
Render the following piece into Russian: So much has been written by western commentators about the connection between haiku and Zen that I’m not inclined to say much about it. A short version would be to say that Zen provided people training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing, like bush warblers and snow fall, though more intimate to us. Trying to find this quality in every haiku, however, romanticizes them and the culture they came from. It tends to make one rush to their final mysteriousness and silence. I know that for years I didn’t see how personal these poems were or, to say it another way, how much they have the flavor – Basho might have said “the scent” – of a particular human life, because I had been told and wanted to believe that haiku were never subjective. I think it was D. H. Lawrence who said that the soul can get to heaven in one leap but that, if it does, it leaves a demon in its place. Better to sink down through the levels of these poems – their attention to the year, their ideas about it, the particular human consciousness the poems reflect, Basho’s profound loneliness and sense of suffering, Buson’s evenness of temper, his love for the materials of art and for the color and shape of things, Issa’s pathos and comedy and anger. One returns to their mysteriousness anyway. (Robert Hass. Introduction to The Essential Haiku)
Render the following piece into Russian: So much has been written by western commentators about the connection between haiku and Zen that I’m not inclined to say much about it. A short version would be to say that Zen provided people training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing, like bush warblers and snow fall, though more intimate to us. Trying to find this quality in every haiku, however, romanticizes them and the culture they came from. It tends to make one rush to their final mysteriousness and silence. I know that for years I didn’t see how personal these poems were or, to say it another way, how much they have the flavor – Basho might have said “the scent” – of a particular human life, because I had been told and wanted to believe that haiku were never subjective. I think it was D. H. Lawrence who said that the soul can get to heaven in one leap but that, if it does, it leaves a demon in its place. Better to sink down through the levels of these poems – their attention to the year, their ideas about it, the particular human consciousness the poems reflect, Basho’s profound loneliness and sense of suffering, Buson’s evenness of temper, his love for the materials of art and for the color and shape of things, Issa’s pathos and comedy and anger. One returns to their mysteriousness anyway. (Robert Hass. Introduction to The Essential Haiku)
Identify the author of these death poems and explain why you think so:
Identify the author of these death poems and explain why you think so:
Identify the author of these death poems and explain why you think so:
Identify the author of these death poems and explain why you think so:
Identify the author of these death poems and explain why you think so:
Identify the author of these death poems and explain why you think so:
Identify the author of these death poems and explain why you think so:
Oriental Art Lesson 8. The target skills: a comprehensive description of a pictorial work of art; drawing analogies between human thought, poetry, and pictorial art. (“Exploring Global Art”, “Encyclopedia of Visual Art”, volume 2) 1. Enlarge upon one of the passages below. Make use of «Èñêóññòâî è ìèð», as well as any other reference materials that happen to come your way: 1) The Chinese civilization is the only continuous civilization in the world. The Shang people of the earliest known dynasty (16th -15th cent. B. C.) practiced Taoism. Taoism is a philosophy and religion founded upon the teachings of Lao-Tse, thought to have lived in the 6th cent. B. C. and based upon the concept of Tao, seeking to achieve practical and spiritual harmony with the universe. 2) Confucianism: an ethical system based on the teachings of Confucius, emphasizing personal virtue, devotion to family (including the spirits of one’s ancestors), and justice. Confucius taught that all human relationships involved a set of defined roles and mutual obligations. He was not concerned with such matters as the meaning of life and death or the destiny of the soul. The only reward he offered his followers was the feeling of peace that comes from having made use of one’s life well. 3) Shintoism (literally, “the way of gods”): the indigenous religion of Japan marked by the veneration of nature spirits and of ancestors. Central to Shinto beliefs is a Japanese sense of intimacy with nature’s awesome forces as embodied by myriad spirits, or Kami, that animate the human and natural world. It was, however, only in response to Buddhism that Shinto became formulated as a religious system. Shrines serving as abodes for the kami, were built, and there gradually developed a distinctly priestly class to oversee all Shinto rituals.
2. What are the chief similarities that bring some of these teachings, (or all of them, Buddhism including), close together? What are the chief diversities that set these four teachings apart from each other?
3. Translate into Russian (to be handed in!!!) and practice back translation in class. *** One of the principles that Japanese artists learned from the Chinese was the use of “negative space”. In this style of painting or ink drawing the artist leaves unpainted or blank areas. When you view the painting, you are supposed to fill in the empty spaces with your imagination. This principle often lends Japanese and Chinese art a light and floating feeling. The brushwork is kept to a minimum. The artist suggests harmony in nature with just a few brushstrokes and the use of negative space. *** In the 12th century, Chinese artists developed a style of small-format painting. The artist brings all his observation of the natural world down to the scale of an album leaf. The interplay of space, line, and form becomes the special concern of a painter. This style is marked by the development of a sophisticated surface composition – the so-called «one corner» arrangement», as well as by the sensitivity to near-balance and off-balance. *** The philosophy of the Taoist poet is replaced by the more romantic artist creating a world of specific atmosphere of soft sadness, weeping mists, and evening light. The Chinese artists had such a sureness of touch in the handling of ink tone that it became a very expressive medium, capable of evoking not only space, but also color and texture. Paper was now often chosen base for painting, offering a wider scope for ink texture than silk. *** Landscapes were often composed by the traditional means of a series of eye-levels, so that we view the picture in a series of steps. Each scene is actually at eye-level, carefully observed and expressed with a well-controlled brushwork. *** The surface composition is sensitively balanced by both line and tone. A swirling, curving line gives the composition a movement, swinging our eyes up the picture and carrying them smoothly from one scene to another. *** Quite unlike a European painting in which atmospheric tone is all important, a heavy tone and strong contrasts being reserved for the foreground, accents in Chinese painting are placed at crucial points over the surface of the painting, often in conflict with the requirements of recession. 4. Describe a Chinese or Japanese landscape: its subject matter, composition, linear and tonal qualities. Does it harmonize with a certain philosophy or religion? Does it call to mind a certain sample of oriental poetry?
5. Show your knowledge of some of the following terms related to Oriental thought, pictorial art, architecture, music, theatre, home arrangement, and other attributes of culture. *** Pagoda, Yin and Yang, Ukiyo-e, Kabuki, Bonsai, Ikebana, Shamisen, Tokonoma
6. Japanese pictorial art is known to have influenced a number of European painters: Van Gogh, Lautrec, and many others. a) Explain to what extent this influence can be observed in this or that painting. b) Think of a haiku that might describe in words what is revealed by means of paint.
Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1209
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