Five

Opening the current issue of Ribbons , the journal of the Tanka Society of America, I find once again another writer's attempt to suggest something of what tanka in English might be. Of the several points offered, the presence of a poem formatted on five lines is once again offered as part of what defines tanka.

While it is conventional to format tanka in five lines in English, it is not required to do so, and exceptions have occasionally been published. I have addressed alternate lineation in tanka in an article in Modern English Tanka. Since then my understanding of tanka structure and definition have continued to refine.

Specifically, the reason why tanka is written in five lines in English is because that tanka is a poem of five poetic phrases. The easiest way to depict those phrases is with line breaks. However, this leads to poets writing things that don't have five parts, but because they are formatted on five lines, they are accepted and published as tanka. No wonder critics have difficulty in distinguishing between English language tanka and short free verse!

There is also a general misunderstanding between free verse and 'unfree' verse. The opposite of free verse is metered verse, eg, verse in which something is counted. Traditionally in English it has been meter, but it could be morae, sound units, lines, phrases, or any other subdivision. In tanka what is counted is 'poetic phrases.' Thus tanka is not 'free', it must conform to this expectation. Because it conforms, it is 'formal verse.'

Formal verse is verse written to a recognized form. The tanka form is clearly understood -- anyone who is a fan of tanka can recite by heart that it is form that originated in Japan, consisting of five phrases of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Once upon a time in literary history Western poets were quite strict about their forms, but they managed to invent new variations of them all the same, with nonce versions of the forms seeing print as well. The sonnet, for example, now has numerous recognized variants, but it is still a sonnet and the relationship between any given variation on the original forms is identifiable.

Just so with tanka; just the numbering of syllables does not serve in English, but I don't believe that formulas based on line length are an adequate definition. It is quite possible to write a poem with something other than five parts and arrange it visually so that it appears to meet the short-long-short-long-long pattern -- but when we are adhering to a format, that is not the same as adhering to a form. Tanka in Japanese are typically written in one or two lines and can be subdivided however the calligrapher pleases. Clearly, the format is not the form.

Having studied the matter extensively, I have noted that certain poems retain their 'fiveness' regardless of how they are formatted, although admittedly, changing the format does change emphasis. The line break is a powerful tool well entrenched in the Western literary tradition. Even so it is quite possible to recognize a poem as tanka that is formatted as two lines, or prose, or even in some other format.

The consequence is a great many short poems are published as tanka that do not adhere to the form. That doesn't particularly bother me since I have always been an advocate for 'tanka and related forms.' Critics of tanka are therefore missing the point. If a journal stated that it published 'sonnets and related forms,' would they claim that it was impossible to know what a sonnet is and that free verse is being published as sonnets? I think not.

On the other hand, there are forums that publish any five line poem and think it to be tanka. Some of these are amateur forums where it is only to be expected that a naive definition prevails, but the larger, more prestigious journals ought to be clear about the matter. Modern English Tanka , for example, is very clear about its expansive scope of using tanka to establish a new lyric poetry in English. I myself am not convinced that lyricism is part of the definition of tanka, but I admit that it is a very common treatment. Lyricism, which is an aesthetic consideration, appears to have replaced form as a defining principle of tanka in many people's minds.

Given the differences between Japanese and English it is inevitable that different treatments will develop in English. How many hundreds of different ways has Basho's frog poem been translated? We cannot say that any one of them is the best translation, but even in the ones we all agree are terrible translations, we can see the shadow of the original. When translating an entire form into English, it is only to be expected that myriad adaptions should result. Therefore, when critics claim to be unable to perceive the difference between tanka and free verse they are coming about it the wrong way. The question is not whether a given poem can be discerned from free verse; the question of whether a given poem's relationship to tanka is detectable.