calligraphed by Friedrich.
Superior Haiku by Ashley: This article is about a haiku (俳句 or hokku) [1] and the creative process of turning it into calligraphy. The wonderful poem is by Ashley. A short video shows the creation process. In the extra-part there are details about calligraphy.
Many people know Ashley because of his beautiful photos and appealing haiku, which he presents on his blog (A Different View). That’s how I came across him and after many mutual comments, something like an artistic closeness developed. Recently, when I was posting about my calligraphy, the devil suddenly hit me and I asked him if he would like me to convert one of his haiku into calligraphy. Of course, I left the choice to him and so he suggested his latest work, a particularly well-done haiku.
Why did I actually make that suggestion other than just because I felt like it? I’ve been seeing haiku on my colleagues’ websites for a long time now. Many of them particularly appeal to me. Not that I’m an expert on haiku, but of course they’ve been with me for decades because of my proximity to Asian culture. I am particularly attracted to those who follow classical formats or at least remain true to the philosophical aspect of traditional haiku, which is of course just a personal point of view.
Ashley’s haiku sits in the middle of this classic tradition and is therefore particularly suitable for our little experiment.
The Haiku
It goes like this:
A dull day
Rain doused, first flowers
Open. [2]
After meditating on this, I came to the following view which is basically Daoistic: e.g. the haiku consists of 2 parts. These parts correspond to the principle of yin and yang. So, the one aspect with a clear mood is: A dull day, Rain doused.
The other, also with a clear aspect: First flowers. Open. The two contrast nicely with each other. The second part arises from the first part. Like a lotus flower that unfolds its beauty in the murky pool.
What doesn’t need to be emphasized because it’s so obvious is the skill with which Ashley has described the scene in just a few words, immediately conjuring up an image in the reader’s mind.
This is of course a good basis for converting this haiku into calligraphy. As already mentioned, I don’t think I’m a good calligrapher, and yet I think the experiment worked quite well. The calligraphy is not a “ladykiller”, but it has appealing facets.
On the way to the finished calligraphy, there were several challenges:
Find the right style for calligraphy
As also mentioned in a previous article, there are several different writing styles in Chinese such as standard script, chancellery style, seal script, cursive script, or in our case grass script. The latter seemed best suited to implementing this superior haiku.
Now not all grass script is the same and it can be surprising to us Westerners how the same character has often been written completely differently by calligraphers over time.
Fig. a below shows the standard font (楷书 kǎi shū), b shows the running script (行書 xíng shū), c the seal script (篆書 zhuàn shū). Fig. d Shows a selection of a very simple character tian 天, as interpreted by various calligraphers in grass script (草書 cǎo shū). You can only move within given limits, otherwise no one would be able to read what is written. Actually, the number of Chinese people who can read grass script is very small and only less than 1% can write it as it is an extremely difficult style to write.
Translation – redesign
Literary translations can generally be difficult. If we stay in languages that descend from Latin, the difficulties are usually limited. But if we translate into Arabic, for example, or in this case into Chinese, we come across a completely different language philosophy. Language translator programs have now become very good for everyday topics. Literature, and in this case we have to use classical Chinese, is a quite difficult topic. [3]
Redesign: If we, for example, let Google translate the text, we get: 平淡的一天；雨澆濕，初開花，打開。This is about as literary appealing as the stock market news.
Redesign should be done in the following way: maintaining the mood, and transferring it into Chinese with the most accurate possible wording and mood. Reduce it to 2 x 4 characters, which is a common format for such poems.
This way, the following emerged: 天暗雨淋 鮮花開明
天 (tiān) day, sky, heaven
暗 (àn) dull, dark, loomy, hidden, secret, muddled, obscure
雨 (yǔ) rain
淋 l(ín) to sprinkle, to drip, to pour, to drench
鮮花 (xiān huā) fresh flowers, flower
開 (kāi) to open, to start, to turn on
明 (míng), bright opposite: dark 暗, (of meaning) clear, to understand, next, wise
or, if you see the last two characters as one term:
開明 (kāi míng) enlightened, open-minded, enlightenment
I’m pretty happy with that.
My first steps through the fog looked like this:
Choose the right composition
Whether a calligraphy is good or not can be defined just as well as whether a sonata is good or not, or a Western love poem. Personal taste aside, there is the craftsmanship component and that is non-negotiable.
What is of course essential is fluency when writing, so that you don’t have to think about which strokes should be placed first and how. This requires practicing the characters until you can write fluently and, ideally, maintain a rhythm. Here is a short video showing the process from calligraphy to hanging.
Extra: The composition
The composition is the hardest part. It’s not just about composing each individual character well, ideally, each one should also relate to its surrounding characters. The characters should not appear as stiff as wooden blocks; they should be firmly anchored in the paper and yet float.
As already mentioned, not only every stroke must comply with calligraphic laws, but also every dot. And you have to keep in mind that the whole calligraphy is well-composed. One aspect of this is the balance, which is achieved differently in Asian art than in Western art. I wrote an article on this: The Principle of the Balance in Chinese Painting.
Some characters are composed of a left and a right part. For those it is interesting to apply the kai : he principle. So breaking up the two sides should create a field of tension between them. This is what should happen throughout calligraphy, i.e. also areas of tension between the characters.
And last but not least, it is important that “qi” can flow through the work. In this specific case it looks like this: So a zig-zag line that finally flows into the colophon, which holds the writing together and thus creates something compact. I’ve already written an article about that too: Four Phases – structure in Chinese Painting
footnotes:
[1] In recent years, the ancient form of Japanese poetry has become quite popular in the West and is summarized under the term haiku. The hokku (often interchangeably called haikai) became known as the haiku late in the 19th century when it was entirely divested of its original function of opening a sequence of verse. Today in Japan the term haiku is used to describe all poems that use the three-line 17-syllable structure, even the earlier hokku.
[2] Just the last word “open”. Chinese is a fascinating language that is much more diverse than very simple English. Open can stand alone, like Ashley. Open what? A door, open your eyes, open a bank account? But that will not be discussed further here.
[3]
Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in the Sinosphere in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century.
Over time, Literary Chinese began to be used in Japan, Ryukyu, Korea, and Vietnam. Each of these countries has its own reading systems for Classical Chinese text, in addition to its own inventories of Chinese character forms.
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