In my last post I updated my Japanese language-learning progress: slow, very slow, but moving ahead... and having so much fun! And as I was working on some Japanese haiku yesterday, I had a few that ended with かな, kana, which reminded me how Liz asked me about the word kana when we played Know-Your-Haiku; even just looking at the English-language haiku books that have the romaji, she had noticed kana everywhere. What's up with kana?
And, well, that's hard to say, because kana cannot really be translated into English. Noticing words like this is what prompted me to want to learn at least some Japanese in order to be able to better appreciate Japanese haiku.
Admittedly, people talk about things being untranslatable going from one Indo-European language to another, and as someone who has struggled with doing translations into English from various Indo-European languages, yeah, it's true: translation is hard. But from Japanese to English, the challenges are way more fundamental, and this is especially true in the realm of haiku. The very small space of a haiku fills up very fast with untranslatable items. And I should note that this is a separate problem from the words like "the" or "a" that English translators have to add because of English grammar rules, or the need in English to be explicit about what is plural, etc. I know that English translators have to add things to the English translation from Japanese... but what I want to focus on in this post are the words in Japanese that simply cannot be rendered in English at all.
So, back to kana. The Wiktionary entry just says "expression of exclamation or excitement." So in that sense, you can think of kana as a kind of verbal punctuation mark. We don't have a word in English that means "punctuation mark goes here," although we do have an intonation, an emphatic way of speaking, that we can use — but we have no lexical item to do that work. Because this is a lexical item in Japanese, that means the written haiku has an ability to stand on its own both in writing and in speaking: the word kana adds to the interpretive meaning of the poem in its written form and also when the poem is read aloud. (Fun trivia: the English exclamation mark was originally a lexical item... in Latin! It was the exclamation IO. See how that works? The final letter o turned into the little circle underneath; details at Wikipedia: Exclamation mark.)
If you have been reading haiku even just in romaji, you know there are a LOT of haiku that end in kana.
And then, there's keri, けり. This one is more complicated because it is part of the Japanese verbal system — still an utter mystery to me — as a particle indicating a form of the past tense, but it can also stand on its own in Classical Japanese as a word "indicating the speaker has just realized something," often found at the end of a poem.
And there are even more of these words that are specifically important in haiku — lots more! Both kana and keri are examples of kireji, or "cutting words," which are a fundamental feature of how haiku are structured in Japanese. The kireji are so important that they have their own article at Wikipedia: Kireji. Here's a screenshot:
For someone like me, just seeing that list was like catnip to a cat: I love these non-word words, also known as particles. When I saw this list, I knew I had to learn at least something about Japanese and its particles: they are irresistible! Particles like these are one of the reasons why I love ancient Greek, and while ancient Greek does have some great particles (here's a massive book all about Greek particles), those Greek particles offer just a fraction of the range of meaning and function that I am going to discover in Japanese.
So, to end this post, I'll include a haiku that ends in kana... just one of many! I found this one by searching David Lanoue's brilliant Issa site for kana (SO MANY KANA). And look: it's one of Issa's cat poems – one of my favorites!
猫塚に正月させるごまめ哉
neko tsuka ni shôgatsu saseru gomame kana
on the cat's grave
in First Month...
dried sardines
Random observation: Japanese neko, the first word of this haiku, is one of the few Japanese vocabulary items that I already knew before I began this project... because I knew about bake-neko! And you can read all about that supernatural "changed cat" at Wikipedia: Bakeneko, with a 19th-century illustration:
