Book Review: Pagini de haibun / Haibun Pages
By Ion Codrescu
Editura Eikon
Bucharest, Romania
Foreword by Ito Isao
Preface by Rich Youmans
Postface by Liviu Franga
2024, paperback, 270 pages
ISBN: 978-606-49-1223-7
59 lei + VAT/shipping
Available from the publisher or from the author
Reviewed by Judson Evans
Haibun Pages offers a collection of over two decades of work by a master artist-poet with a worldwide reputation for consistent craft and depth of engagement. What makes Codrescu’s haibun and visual art most enjoyable, as we might expect from a devotee of Basho, is the way he distills a lifetime of cultural knowledge into fresh perceptions. This is a poet who was taught by his father to know the species of trees by their touch, and who—besides a keen artist’s eye for visual detail—
far-away thunder—
the light lingers
on the peak
(from "The Pianist")
makes us smell his sensory world: bunches of mint, geranium scent, the table cloth(‘s) wet smell, scent of acacia flowers, and most pungently:
spiderweb—
strong perfume
of white lilies
(from "Ivanciu")
This bilingual book (each work is presented in both Romanian and English) begins with an essay by Codrescu about his “Way to Haibun.” He describes how an album of ink paintings sparked “a passion for Japan,” how that passion led to haiku (“Each poem seemed like a minimalistic notation or a flash of words against the white sky of the paper”) and ultimately to haibun. Here, I will focus on three unique aspects of that journey: first, Codrescu’s saturation in Japanese culture and aesthetics; secondly, his devotion to visual art, and the way his poetic and artistic gifts create dialogue throughout this collection (in particular because the 25 haibun are interspersed with his black-and-white mixed media works on paper); and third, his distinctive Eastern European perspective.
All three of these qualities are synthesized throughout the book, but I will turn first to the deep reverence for Japanese culture, which is obvious here through his imagined letter to Basho:
I … learned about the cosmocentrism of the Far East, the idea that human is a only part of the universe, like a blade of grass, a tree, a butterfly and a passing cloud.
redecorated house—
a sparrow begins
its nest
(from "May Evening")
Likewise, the travelogues to key Japanese gardens and shrines bring alive this appreciation, as in “Ryoan-ji Garden,” where Codrescu creates an imaginative bridge between his Romanian park on the Black Sea and the famous Zen garden of the title, or in “Towards the Mountain Temple,” where Codrescu’s encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese and Japanese art makes him a trusted guide:
In classic Chinese and Japanese painting a green mountain means stability and a white cloud suggests instability, wandering. To know a mountain you must wander through its paths, woods and rocks, hearing its sounds and voices, watching it from far away, or drawing it. … I take the brush, the paper and the ink and paint the landscape. Then I will go towards the mountain temple.
the last brush stroke—
a dewdrop falls
on my ink sketch
The ink sketch is a good segue into the skills of sketching and painting which charge many aspects of this body of work. Codrescu creates verbal landscapes with a delicacy of outline and subtlety of color, as we find in in his evocation of place in the haibun that opens the collection, “In the Apuseni Mountains”:
No cars arrive here; there is no electricity, no pollution. From the top of the mountain on which I stand, the farms all seem to be nests among this green landscape, and their rhythm on the slope is as natural as trees in a forest. I admire the proportions of the buildings, the patinas of their wood. When by chance I arrived here, I thought the entire hamlet was abandoned.
the wind flies away—
the grass keeps its trace
for a moment
In Codrescu, the relationship between the writer and visual artist comes to the surface as he re-creates the Romanian countryside. His piece continues:
After some hours of sketching, I noticed people moving around the houses and talking with the animals. Wandering down to the paths, I meet an old woman and ask her permission to take photos … She says that in the last few days she has talked with only her cat, sheep, and fowls … The scent of dry basil floats throughout. Many old icons cover one wall. She says: “Here is my place where I pray. This is my church, near this flickering candle …” In the next few days, Easter will arrive. I imagine the moments when the old woman will spend in her church, feeling the holy spirit … Thanking her for her kindness, I go outside to catch the last train.
motionless sheep—
the clear water
in a rusty bucket
It is as if the haibun is written with the same ink brush that ripples the surface in the final haiku.
For readers and writers steeped in the American tradition of haibun—the spirit of which Bruce Ross, in his anthology Journey to the Interior (Tuttle, 1997), traced back to Henry David Thoreau—Codrescu offers a distinctly different Eastern-European tradition. I’m impressed by a sense of deep cultural time linking Codrescu’s Romanian roots to Ancient Roman culture —and to the Roman poet Ovid, who was exiled to the Black Sea port of Constanta (Codrescu’s home city) for his spicy love poetry. Codrescu’s imaginary in “A Letter to Ovid,” like that in his letter to Basho, expresses his ability to respond to poetic masters across oceans of time and space. The very notion of writing imaginary letters to past figures is strongly rooted in European culture—at the beginning of the Renaissance, for instance, Petrarch wrote imaginary letters to St. Augustine and other figures. Codrescu’s European rootedness also connects to core touchstones of Western culture, such as the music of Bach:
I could too hear it, and I was very glad to recognize Bach’s preludes and fugues among his repertory.
empty room—
the resonance
of a voice
(From "The Pianist")
or the architecture and painting of Venice:
Only the clotheslines from one side to another of the narrow street remind you that people live here.
Giorgione’s “Tempest”—
so much stillness
in the museum
(From "Venice after the Carnival")
—yet even here, the juxtaposition with the Japanese adds surprise:
in an atrium
the story of Noah
told in Japanese
In some of pieces that blend observation with art criticism he reminds me of the nineteenth century British writer John Ruskin.
Yet, Codrescu always alerts us to the simpler beauty of everyday village life with the spirit of wabi-sabi. In “Ivanciu,” the title character is described as a “mason, tinsmith, carpenter, cooper, mechanic and stove builder,” who “join[s] the staves of a barrel with metal circles.” For Codrescu, he is what the various rustic figures in the Narrow Road to Deep North were for Basho, and Ivanciu’s house and its environs are cognate to the rustic huts Basho might visit:
through the rotten fence
a morning glory finds
its way
But Codrescu’s Europe also includes the cruelties and divisions caused by the communist domination of its eastern countries. “:The Floating Butterfly,” one of the most moving pieces in the book, highlights Codrescu’s talent for narrative within haibun:
Communism separated them twenty years ago. In 1969, the son was invited to play in Paris and did not come back to Romania … After the Revolution in 1989, the son could visit his father finally … The father peels some potatoes and the son washes the lettuce with plenty of water. The father is attentive not to peel too much from the potato. He pauses briefly between each potato. The son moves his hands quickly. No word is said, even though they have a lot to tell each other after twenty years of separation. Just the sound of the water.
Suddenly, the silence is broken. Among the lettuce leaves, the son finds a tiny white butterfly. He turns off the tap and puts his middle finger under the floating butterfly to save it. The butterfly does not move at all. The father approaches to see what is happening. The tiny insect begins to move. Son and father look at each other and go to the open window. Carefully the butterfly is placed on the windowsill, outside the wall. They both look towards the West, where the father used to watch in his son’s absence.
starless sky—
the emptiness which
cannot be measured
I would like to conclude with one of the most immersive, multifaceted, and masterful haibun in this expansive collection —”The Pianist,” a haibun that further demonstrates Codrescu’s narrative skills. Here, I am reminded of the Russian tradition of short-story writers like Chekov and Tolstoy. In “The Pianist,” Codrescu manipulates our sensory experience subtly through repetition. Notice the repetition here of the roadside crucifix, an image that comes to mark the interplay of familiarization and defamiliarization, habituation and surprise in the microcosm of a small village:
When the owner of the house near the roadside crucifix brought his furniture, the most difficult thing to unload was the piano. Some neighbors offered to help him, but he refused them politely. Each object was carried carefully and put temporarily in the house. The piano stayed some hours in front of the gate. The people of the village who passed by the roadside crucifix stopped for a moment and stared curiously at the piano. By that evening, the news that the new owner of the house near the roadside crucifix was a pianist had spread throughout the village.
In my reading, the crucifix—the very core of a “passion” supposedly guiding and underlying the Orthodox community of believers —becomes through its omnipresence a mere road marker; in its place, the curiosity and promise of what the piano represents spark sensory details out of the ordinary:
One day a peacock was seen in his garden. The bird liked to stay on the roof of the house or on the branches of the neighbors’ trees. One day, suddenly, the peacock began to sing. His call, so strident and shrill, could be heard from far away. It was hard to decode … Joy? Sadness? Melancholy? Solitude? Pride? All these things?
The village is catalyzed by their mysterious new neighbor, playing Bach, bringing the peacock, releasing tortoises into his pond. Yet, he turns out not to be a pianist at all, but an architect. He becomes a figure of the artist as organizer and orchestrator of the gestalt of perception. The haibun raises awareness of how art makes striking details flare up against an opaque background of familiarity. This interplay is also built into the haiku’s rootedness in impermanence:
Hearing the shrill cry (of the peacock) for the first time, some people were a little frightened, but later they became accustomed to the bird’s song. The sound of the peacock became as familiar as the sound of the piano.
far-away thunder—
the light lingers
on the peak
Codrescu concludes the haibun with the faith that the artist can flow into the world of ten thousand things and reawaken the force of images and symbols.
winter stillness—
at the roadside crucifix
the light of a candle
Page after page of this gorgeously self-illustrated and scholarly book bears witness to that faith.
About the Reviewer
Judson Evans is a full-time Professor of Liberal Arts at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches poetry workshops on haiku, haibun, and renku, and a visual studies course on Paleolithic cave art. His collaborative book of lyric poems responding to cave painting, Chalk Song, was published by Lilly Press, Boston, in fall 2021. He is haibun co-editor for Frogpond.