Continuation from page 3

THE LEAVES ARE BACK ON THE TREES

Translating
Translating the haiku and rendering them in Greek was no easy matter. We did our best to work without any “surplus matter”, compressing the meaning. We aimed at sticking to the essence of an idea, without losing any of the harmony, power, and allusiveness that the haiku has. The use of the word “rendering” is deliberate. It was a labour of love, and also of respect for our faith in the original. We had haiku that contained difficulties and ambiguities sometimes bordering on the inscrutable; haiku with transparency, allusions, delicacy, humour, beautiful images, concepts, and ripeness of thought. We had with us Athina Kontoyanni, who has studied in Japan, and there were times when we chose to translate straight from the Japanese rather than from the French, when the latter was at variance with the original. We used our own judgment to select the most representative poems and I think we are justified by the result.

Hearty thanks
Finally, my warmest thanks to those Greek and foreign poets, women and men, who showed their belief in the difficult concept of this anthology and its global  meeting  of  minds  by  sending in their work  and  thus  helping  make  the  anthology possible. I also would like like also to thank those friends and poets in all four corners of the world who  gave me  so  much  sustained  help in my search for  other  haiku  writers. To my much loved and excellent friends, Humberto Senegal (Colombia), David Cobb (England), Alain Kervern (France), Milijan Despotovic and Zoran Doderovic (Yugoslavia), Dubravko Marijanovic (Croatia), Patrick Blanche (France), André Duhaime (Canada), Bart Mesotten (Belgium), Janice M. Bostok (Australia), R.K.-Singh and Rizvi Manzil (India), Ion Codrescu (Romania), N.Chadzinikolau (Poland), Vladimir Devide (Croatia), James Kirkup (Principality of Andorra), Athena Spillmann (Switzerland), Win Lofvers (Holland),Sonõ Uchida (Japan), Carlo Zanoni (Ireland), Robert Bebek (Croatia), and  that  is  not  all,  because  one way or another, everybody helped! I thank the Japanese haiku writer Sonõ Uchida with all my heart for allowing us to use his text as our Introduction. His words enable one to get a complete picture of how a haiku is written.

I owe equally warm thanks to my friends in the translation group for all their support as “accessories after the fact”. Those who so generously gave of their time and trust to see it through will be well pleased with the result: Basil Christopoulos, Athena Kontoyanni, Koula Aspiotou, Aghapi Daifa, Heidi Fotou, Matina Spetsiotis.

And my very special thanks to the unsurpassed Danae (Mrs Strategopoulou). Without her encouragement I would never dare go ahead. She stood staunchly by my proposal, and her support was crucial. If the approach to the haiku was successful, it was because Danae kept telling me that I should be patient (and vice versa!). She offered constructive criticism,  brought her sense of  humour to my  letter-writing  and  all  my  other  trials, and applied her wide knowledge of haiku to matters of detail. She told me a thousand and one stories from her life, and, when we broke off work she would sit down at the piano, telling me “ I’m going to play you the seventeen moments of Spring” or “ I’m going to play you one of my songs”. I felt both privileged and enchanted, for these sounds were, at least for the time being, “for my ears only”. Danae the star, interpreter of the beauty of words and music, and of her own years of glory. All this, and the haiku passages as well, made sure that our work and our hours of blessing were perfectly in balance.

A very big thank-you to our painter Alexander (Moustákas), an up-and-coming painter, for his artistic contribution to the book. His striking and fastidious feeling for form comes across in his talented line-drawings, which make the most of the visual side of haiku.

This feat has been accomplished. All the controlling voices are present, with their letters and biographical details to act as something of a cardiogram (after the “mild heart attack” they gave me), and to set their world in proper balance. All their haiku poems are present, in an existential epiphany, a flower blossoming in spring, to shed its leaves in autumn, with the repeated rhythm of a life-giving cycle : The leaves are back on the trees!   

Zoe  Savina
Translation in english: Richard Witt.

*  Seferis won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963.
** Prokroustes was a wicked bandit on the Athens-Corinth road. He put his visitors on the bed in his inn. Either they were longer than the bed, in which case he cut their feet off, or they were shorter, in which case he “stretched” them. He was eventually dealt with by Theseus.
*** See the evidence in the work by A.Konstantinidis, which received the medal of the Academy of Athens.