Selected haiku 2013

When His Excellency Dr Drago Štambuk suggested that the International Academic Forum consider launching a haiku award in memory of Vladimir Devidé, it did not take much convincing. IAFOR is dedicated to the promotion of international, intercultural and interdisciplinary research, dialogue, and understanding, and Vladimir Devidé would have identified strongly with this mission, for in many ways it was also his own. He was a mathematician, a Japanologist, a translator, and a poet, who through haiku accessed another culture and built bridges between Croatia and Japan, and within Japan. After his death, those bridges continue to develop between exponents of classical and modern haiku as the award recognizes excellence regardless of whether submitted haiku are in the traditional or more modern style, and indeed has been generously backed by the two principal haiku associations representing these schools: the Haiku International Association and the World Haiku Association.

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The award also reaches out to practitioners around the world as it both promotes understanding of the commonality of shared experience, excellence within the art form, as well as the wider work of the organization, for while haiku is a quintessentially Japanese form of poetry, it has become a global art form due to its universal appeal. No other form can so convincingly celebrate banality and frivolity; convey a moment of giddy happiness, or a lifetime of pain. It can offer humorous asides, throwaway puns, and yet also touch the depths of profundity. In their small, unassuming way, haiku can, at their best reflect and inspire the shared experiences of people throughout the world. Poets from thirty countries submitted entries to the third Vladimir Devidé competition, and the quality of their entries was consistently high. I trust you will enjoy the following haiku, selected with great care by Dr Štambuk.

Joseph Haldane Nagoya, January 2013

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Acknowledgements The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) would like to thank the many poets and other lovers of haiku who supported the award and haiku reading event, including Akito Arima, President of the Haiku International Association, Hana Fujimoto, the organization's Secretary, and poet and translator, Emiko Miyashita. We would also like to thank Ban'yan Natsuishi, President of the World Haiku Association for his help in promoting the award. The organization would like to thank Professor Mark Williams for delivering the LibrAsia 2013 keynote address, as well as announcing the results of the 2013 Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award. We would also like to thank, founder and judge, His Excellency Dr Drago Štambuk, for his continued work on behalf of the Award.  

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The haiku in Japanese Tradition A study of the history of poetry in Japan takes us to the earliest extant written documents that date back to the Nara period (702-784). It was at this point that those in the imperial court began the process of seeking to adapt the Chinese writing system to the intricacies of the Japanese language in an attempt to better understand the various Buddhist documents that had been increasingly arriving in Japan. This process was long and laborious, and the problems were exacerbated by the fact that the two languages had very little in common at either the syntactic or semantic level. The first written manuscripts to emerge from this process were two quasi-historical works, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon shoki (720), both of which represent imperially sanctioned attempts to record Japanese mythology as handed down orally by the compilers’ ancestors. Both of these texts are marked by the prime position afforded to poetry – with many of the verses attributed

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to the founding deities (kami) of the nation. With these developments, the Japanese literary tradition of combining poetry and prose into the same text was established, and the importance attributed to verse was subsequently reinforced with the appearance, a few decades later, of the first anthology of Japanese poetry, the Man’yōshū (Collection of a Thousand Leaves). It is not for nothing that the era that followed – the Heian Period (794-1180) – is remembered for its literary legacy. It was at this time that life at the imperial court flourished with literacy thanks to the increasing familiarity with Chinese scholarship. Famously described by one commentator, Ivan Morris, as representing the ‘world of the Shining Prince’, this period saw the production of some of the world’s earliest examples of what can loosely be described as psychological fiction. Epitomized by Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, c.1008-20), the period saw the establishment of the monogatari

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tradition that has, to some extent, determined the future direction of all subsequent Japanese literature. The term is usually translated as ‘tale’ – but, central to the genre is the inter-relationship between the poetry that populates these works and the prose narrative passages that often serve, inter alia, to elaborate on the circumstances of composition of the poems. The central position of poetry within the monogatari form was subsequently maintained by several new literary genres, including the zuihitsu (random jottings), gunki-mono (war tales) and setsuwa (Japanese folktales based on oral tradition). At the same time, moreover, this led to an increasing focus on poetry as a discrete art form, from which several collections of waka (Japanese poetry) emerged. One particularly popular aspect of poetry composition was that of the renga, or ‘linked verse’, that would often be composed by a group of literati, with each individual adding a stanza to some emerging poem as part of some celebratory occasion. In time, considerable focus came to be paid to the

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opening stanza, or hokku, an element of the longer linked poem, with this initial section invariably according to a 5-7-5 syllable count. By the time of the acknowledged master of this form, Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), these hokku had begun to appear as independent poems – with many of Bashō’s creations now readily accessible in translation to a global readership. Perhaps best known is his ‘frog haiku’:

Furuike ya An old pond Kawazu tobikomu A frog jumps in

Mizu no oto The sound of water In this composition, Bashō can be said to encapsulate, within the confines of seventeen syllables, the essence of the form. The juxtaposition of the ‘eternal’ (old pond) with the ‘ephemeral’ (the sudden breaking of the silence caused by the movement of the frog), the use of a kireji (‘cutting word’) in the original Japanese (ya) that serves to highlight the juxtaposition between two initially apparently unconnected concepts, the incorporation of a seasonal word (the ‘frog’, implying Spring): all served to cement

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the reputation of this poetic form as integral to the Japanese literary tradition. In the late 19th century, it remained for the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), the major figure in the development of modern haiku poetry, to rename these stand-alone hokku as haiku, with this latter term now generally applied retrospectively to all hokku appearing independently of an extended linked verse. The genre has subsequently moved from strength to strength – with interest in the Vladimir Devidé Haiku competition ample testimony to the enormous prestige currently enjoyed by the form. I have been most impressed by the quality of some of the submissions for this Award – and look forward to the opportunity to read more offerings from some of the contributors.

Mark Williams Vice-President, Akita International University

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vladimir devidé haiku award

selected haiku 2013

Founder & Selector: Drago Štambuk, Croatia

iafor

3rd Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2013

Founder & Selector: Drago Štambuk, Croatia

Number of Entries:

Number of Entries: 171, from 30 countries (the highest from Croatia: 43; 25%; then USA: 26, 16%; United Kingdom: 12, 7%; New Zealand, Romania,

Serbia: 8, 4.6%.

Organizer:

The International Academic Forum as Part of

LibrAsia 2013:

The 3rd Asian Conference on Literature and

Librarianship

Osaka, Japan, April 4-7, 2013

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Table of Contents

一 Vladimir Devidé 4 二 Drago Štambuk 9

三 Grand Prize 19

四 Runner Up 23

五 Commended 43

VLADIMIR DEVIDÉ Despite a successful international academic career as a renowned mathematician, with professorships in Australia and the US, as well as his native Croatia at the University of Zagreb, it is primarily as a Japanologist and haiku poet that Vladimir Devidé is now remembered. Devidé was not only one of the world`s most celebrated haiku poets, but a tireless promoter of Japanese culture. If Croatia is now considered a Haiku “superpower”, with more poets practicing the art per capita than any other nation, it is largely thanks to his efforts. A full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Vladimir Devidé has won a number of awards and honours, including the Le Prix CIDALC (1977), the Prize of the City of Zagreb (1982), and for his work as a promoter of Japanese culture, the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure (1983). Vladimir Devidé died in August 2010.

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VLADIMIR DEVIDÉ HAIKU AWARD The competition was founded by his fellow countryman and haiku poet, Dr Drago Štambuk, as a tribute to Devidé's vision and passion for haiku. The award is based on literary merit, regardless of whether in the traditional or modern style. As such, it aims to transcend haiku divisions in the unifying spirit of Vladimir Devidé.

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DRAGO ŠTAMBUK His Excellency Dr Drago Štambuk is the Croatian Ambassador to Brazil, a post he took up in early 2011, after five years as Ambassador to Japan and the Republic of Korea. Dr Štambuk is a widely published and acclaimed poet, and is now recognized as one of Croatia's most distinguished men of letters. His writing career began in 1973 and has grown to include more than 40 collections of poetry in Croatian, English, French and Spanish, and his work has been included in all relevant anthologies of Croatian contemporary poetry. The ambassador has received numerous literary awards in his native country and abroad, and was the first recipient of Dragutin Tadijanović Award established in 2008 by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is also a founder and director of the All-Croatian Poetry Festival on the Island of Brač, founded in 1991. As well as his writing, Dr Štambuk has had two  

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separate careers as both a medical doctor anda diplomat. A graduate of Zagreb University's Medical School (1974), he went on to specialize in internal medicine, gastroenterology and hepatology at the Clinical Medical Center in Zagreb, before moving to London in 1983 to continue his medical career at both the Royal Free Hospital and St Stephen's. Following the independence of Croatia in 1991, he became a diplomat, and has served as the Croatian ambassador to various countries, including India and Egypt, and from 2005 was named as Croatia's representative in Tokyo. His brief was expanded to include the Republic of Korea in 2006. The ambassador was a Fellow at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002. He was appointed to the IAFOR International Advisory Board in 2010 as the conference chair for the first Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship 2011, and instituted the Vladimir Devidé Haiku award as a tribute to Devidé,

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who had died earlier in 2010, serving as the judge for the 2013 award.

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The Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award is for haiku regardless of whether it is traditional or

modern; it transcends haiku divisions and is based only on literary merit.

The announcement of the Award and reading

of the winning haiku was made by Professor Mark Williams of Akita International University,

Japan at LibrAsia 2013, April 6, 2013.  

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Grand Prize

knock on the door – from this and other side

question marks

Krzysztof Kokot, Poland19

Runner Up

cold bed… trying to embrace

my own self

Borivoje Sekulić, Serbia23

Runner Up

a butterfly on my doorknob –

I wait in the rain

Lavana Kray, Romania25

Runner Up

a little boy looking back and back

at the man in the wheelchair

Owen Bullock, New Zealand27

Runner Up

early frost… the carpenter’s hands

encircle a mug of coffee

Vanessa Proctor, Australia29

Runner Up

autumn dusk… an old man listens to earth’s breathing

with his stick

Ljubomir Dragović, Bosnia and Herzegovina31

Runner Up

‘small scar breaks the pattern of my thumbprint’

Anna Jacobson, Australia33

Runner Up

slippery frost my friend safe

by my wheelchair

Silva Trstenjak, Croatia35

Runner Up

The sun painted a white undershirt

on my red skin

Willy Cuvelier, Belgium37

Runner Up

end of bond the door can’t swing

just one way

Ernesto P. Santiago, Greece39

Commended

Giant redwood a speck

on the hillside

Steve Wilkinson, United Kingdom43

Commended

old vendor – bayonets and medals

eaten by rust

Niiko, United Kingdom45

Commended

my reflection the pond more covered in leaves

than not

Seren Fargo, USA47

Commended

funeral procession the snow slowly covering

the way back

Maria Kowal-Tomczak, Poland49

Commended

clearing out Mom’s house her wrinkled face appears

in a cutting board

Brian Robertson, Canada51

Commended

they haven’t changed in all these years – shadows

of winter trees

Ed Bremson, USA53

Commended

mangoes dripping from the tree. i am dripping with

memories, longing.

Susan Getty, USA55

Commended

by a sugar cube united ants feast sweet harmony

Štefanija Ludvig, Croatia57

Commended

autumn chill – grandma’s old shawl – I wrap my shoulders

closing my eyes

Szilvia Auth, Hungary59

Commended

unzipping the world in two

a ship’s wake

Dejan Pavlinović, Croatia61

Commended

No longer a heart, a butterfly in my chest –

Spring, Autumn, both gone

Steven Grieco, Italy63

Commended

So many ways to say goodbye –

dandelion fluff

Eduard Tara, Romania65

Commended

peace on both sides of cobweb

Željko Funda, Croatia 67