The International Festival of Haiku, Constantza, 22th-29th of May, 2009

CONSTANTZA HAIKU SOCIETY - ROMANIA AND JAPAN EMBASSY FROM BUCHAREST

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

THE SCHOOL INSPECTORATE CONSTANTZA, THE CULTURAL DIRECTION OF THE DISTRICT CENTER CONSTANTZA, THE CULTURAL DISTRICTIT FOR THE CULTURE, CULTS AND NATIONAL HERITAGE, WRITERS’UNION-ROMANIA (DOBROGEA DISTRICT), UNIVERSITIES: „ANDREI ŞAGUNA”, „SPIRU HARET”-TERRITORIAL CENTER CONSTANTZA, „OVIDIUS”, „TOMIS”, KINDERGARDENS, SCHOOLS, LYCEES, SCHOOLS GROUPS, CULTURALS CENTERS, MUSEUMS (MUNICIPAL AREA, IN DISTRICT, AND IN THE OTHER TOWNS)

Invites you to participate in The International Festival of Haiku which will develop in Constantza, in the period 22th-29th of May, 2009, in the educational project, with a cultural and artistic impact: ROMANIAN-JAPANESE INTERCULTURALITY, by theme: HAIKU IN THE CONTEXT OF WORLD-WILD LYRIC, an event organized on the occasion of 50 YEARS FROM THE RELATIONSHIP REFRESH OF THE ROMANIAN-JAPANESE DIPLOMACY (September 1959-2009) and JAPAN DANUBE-FRIENDSHIP YEAR 2009 (AUSTRIA, BULGARIA, HUNGARY, ROMANIA, 1st January-31st December).

The calendar of the activities will comprise: in the first 4 days: seminars, communications (10-12 slides), debates, book exhibitions, of haiga, Power Point sights (lyrical texts), hearings: classic and folk Japanese-Romanian music; workshops of creation, and ikebana demostrations, book presentations, ginko trips, haiku and haiga competition, (dead line 1 May) with a receiving term of the texts and titles of communications as well as of the books to be presented and launched on 1st May , 2009.

Option: 4 days of trips at the Monasters and Museums of Constantza and Dobrodgea district and the Danube Delta. Accomodation at Hotel Saguna** (2 bed by room, shower in hall) - Mamaia, by 7.5 euro single and 10 euro double room by day; lunch and dinner at Colegiul „Constantin Brătescu”:, constantza, 5 euro by day; Hotel *** Parc - Mamaia (tel 0241/831720 www.hotel-parc.ro), single 23 euro +1 taxes/double room 30 euro+ 1 taxes for ; lunch and dinner:18 euro, by day, breackfast included.

We will be very honoured to have you among the participants.

For other pieces of information you may use:

tel. 0341/408421;

0723/230273;

0241/695143;

0341/806982;

laura.vaceanu@yahoo.com;

mnt_flora_alexandra@yahoo.com;

The Haiku Society Staff in Constantza

Spring in November

(brave line, beautiful verse)
by Dumitru Radu

tranlated into English by Dumitru Rosu

The change of our eurocentric attitude opened new windows to Far Eastern cultures whose art and literature can be enjoyed despite language and philosophical barriers.
In this framework, classical Japanese poetry has aroused particular interest thanks to its haiku micro-poem as well as other related poetic genres (tanka, renku, haibun).
We note however that in recent years there has been growing interest for poems that associate the haiku with images (drawings or photographs): the haiga and photo-haiku. They polarize the recipient’s interest by revealing a complementarity between the visual and the textual. Numerous exhibitions at home and abroad stand testimony to this impact that challenges both imagination and creativity.
After the first haiga exhibition of Paula and Adina Romanescu in Bucharest, 1994, there have been others in Constanta and Targu Mures. A successful photo-haiku exhibition was that of Jules Cohn Botea at Cercul Militar din Bucureşti, at the bebinning of 2008.
The year’s end brought us a new haiga exhibition, that of graphic artist and poet Dumitru Roşu and of poetess Vali Iancu, opened 18th to 30th November 2008 at Sala Dalles in Bucharest.
The boldness of the line and beauty of the verse come together in the works of Dumitru Roşu. Being fascinated by Hokusai’s stamps, he puts together a small group of poems named Facets of Mount Fuji.

Fascination –
Solar eruption
On Mount Fuji

The second image is auditory: the silence of the ocean deep competes against the height of the celebrated mountain peak:

Halt on Mount Fuji –
From the peak I hear
The silence of the deep

Another exotic theme approaches the desert and its contrasting colours:

Sunset –
Among blooded dunes
Grey dromedaries

The two “erotic” haikus do not convince us, as the rules of haiku exclude the erotic element.
The one I find the best is a local theme preserving over time the sadness of the exiled poet:

On the sea shore
Ovidiu’s sorrow
Carved in stone

If we weigh the visual against the poetic, the balance tilts toward the first, and the small number of haigas does not allow a more ample appreciation.

Her poetic experience, activity within the workshops of the Romanian Haiku Society, and publications in periodicals, allow poetess Vali Iancu to develop a broad thematic palette, ranging from thought to timelessness, from flower to remembrance.

Let us have a taste of a few haigas:

Old fireplace –
the ghost of youth
dances in the flames

Here, the intense feelings of youth overlap the flames that define both their intensity, and perishable nature.
The thought poising for a moment over a half-drunk glass of beer echoes the wind-blown leaves, both just as hesitant in their drift.
The poetess proves to be a fine “watercolourist” through the faint caresses of shadows over otrher shadows (saints), in turn shadowed by time:

Leaves’ shadows
caress the faces of saints
in the old stained glass

By cultivating contrasts, Vali Iancu opposes the violets in her mother’s window to a spring snowfall:

My mother’s window
full of violets –
outside, it’s snowing

Her ability to create an autumn atmosphere is proven by another poem. Brahms, usually volcanic, can only be heard faintly, echoing the pale autumn tones:

Frost takes over –
no bug outside
subdued Brahms

For last I have left a poem I noticed long ago, which would do honour to any anthology. It is a poem capturing the moment, a constant element of Japanese haiku:

A drifting butterfly
stopped on my shoulder –
friends of a second

Graphic artist Dumitru Roşu understood the poetess’s intentions which he illustrated with subtlety, always surprising through novelty.
A haiga should be admired in an exhibition, not in a book, on the Internet or on television where it loses its flavour, because reception is amplified in an exhibition room through the joint energetic fields, the light, the atmosphere, and the presence of the authors.
One leaves this exhibition with a feeling of Spring, although it’s November and cold. The poems’ texts mounted on branches gives the impression of the month of flowers, and the line and verse join into a symbiosis not to be forgotten soon.
To quote Arghezi, who, witnessing the performance of a violinist, noticed that “the joining of a second’s worth of bow with a second’s worth of violin gives birth to an eternity of thrill”, we now bear witness to another union: that of a line coupled with a verse giving rise to sentiment.
I congratulate the authors for the visual and spiritual feast and urge them to join their creative powers once again for other such occasions.

WINNERS OF ROMANIAN MONTHLY KUKAI AUGUST 2008

We go on to publish our winners. These are the awarded poems at Romanian Kukai contest for June 2008. The theme of the contest was melon.

First place

Nobody to watch –
among yellow melons
the moon is missing

Eduard Ţară

harvest time -
only the moon's shadow
on a melon stalk

Simona Dobrescu

Second place

With all its seeds
the slice of water melon
is laughing at me

Ioan Marinescu-Puiu

Country road–
the crunch of carts
laden with melons

Adina Enăchescu

Moon in gloom -
the melons lights up
the thief’s way

Doina Bogdan Wurm

Third place

Melon thieves -
just this night the guard
would be drunk

Ana Ruse

Drizzle -
among the striped melons
the old dog…

Felicia Leş

Translation made by Magdalena Dale. We are not native English speakers. In this way we will appreciate if you will point out the possible mistakes of the English version of our poems.

WINNERS OF ROMANIAN MONTHLY KUKAI JULY 2009

We go on to publish our winners. These are the awarded poems at Romanian Kukai contest for June 2008. The theme of the contest was mirror.

First place

Puddle in the road
clouds dissipate
beneath the cartwheel

Dumitru Radu

Second place

Scorching nights –
more and more universe
mirrored in the pond

Eduard Ţară

The moon watches –
a deer is sipping
stars from the spring

Adina Enăchescu

Nestling lark -
the shadow of a hawk
in the distance

Livia Ciupav

Third place

water surface
the sun is touching
a dragonfly

Tincuţa Horonceanu Bernevic

Translation made by Magdalena Dale. We are not native English speakers. In this way we will appreciate if you will point out the possible mistakes of the English version of our poems.

The 2nd Kokako Tanka Competition

Open to all!

Closing date: 31st December, 2008

First Prize
NZ$250

2 Runners-up prizes of NZ$100 each

Judge:
Tony Beyer

Send entries to:

The Kokako Tanka Competition,
Patricia Prime, co-editor
42 Flanshaw Road
Te Atatu South
Auckland 8
New Zealand

Please make cheques out to Kokako
Overseas entrants may send cash at their own risk


Conditions of entry

1. Tanka must be previously unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere.
2. Entry fee is NZ$2 per tanka or 3 for NZ$5; for overseas entries, US$1 per tanka, or 4 for US$3. Any number of entries.
3. Send two copies of each tanka, or group of tanka, with your name and address on one copy only.
4. Winning tanka and commended entries will be published in Kokako 10 (April, 2009).
5. Winners will be notified by mail.
6. Any theme is acceptable.


Any queries, email: pprime@ihug.co.nz

Comfort Procust

The poet Ion Untaru comes to the Universe of Poetry from the rigorous world of numbers. This fact cannot be neglected if we want to see his true portrait. In him coexist two egos (beings). Thirsty spirit for real world, characteristic of all people working in the field of science – he is a graduate of the Economical Sciences Academy of Bucharest - doubled by the poetical nature makes a genuine poet of a sensitive artistical soul which knows to observe beauties and sadness of nature and society.
His artistic personality, strong but contorted as the statuary Laokoon group predicted ever since his first book „Mister Liszt” (Publishing House Amurg sentimental, 1994) appeared, divided into two parts: „Walking with the coach” and „Lamentation of the nightingale”.
His poetical universe is here constituted, and his poems always reflect nature and society. Nature expires him to write exotic and succinct but concentrated haiku poems, while the society is an inexhaustible source of his senryu poems. The expression „One eye is laughing and the other is crying” is very well adapted to these two literary forms, coming from the Country of the Rising Sun.
Both in prose and in poetry the writer Ion Untaru knows how to organically join the two sides of human existence, life and death. He enjoys the incomparable nature, assuming the great or little dramas, so many in fact, of his fellow people. Even though, from the beginning, he seats himself under Bacovia’s zodiacal sign, the Romanian classic closest to haiku.

The graveyards are flooded
We’re closed in our houses
Father and mother and daughter
All of them, praying in vain
Look here sweetheart how cold are
Our hands dead people weep
None of us is really old,
No chance to get out bold

The poet’s soul is rich. It frets, laments, contemplates, admires. His frame of mind is not easy to quantify nor to put into moulds. The man of rigorous, right numbers, after his free verse period, is in a continuous search of forms able to better express the truth. I mean the artistic truth. Like an athlete which begins the marathon to reach the top of his career with a hundred meters. His endeavors can be compared with the hard work of a sculptor passing from his great breadth to miniature works. As the size decreases, the value of the work increases. How much sawdust is made when a sculptor gives life to a child head, for instance? And how many words a poet is to get rid off or to transfigure to eventually get a jewel the size and magnificence of a sonnet, roundel or haiku?
Only a poet who have tried, like the legendary Procust, to bring everything to the same size, to a common denominator, speaking in mathematical terms, does know it. Ion Untaru is one of these poets who times words, gathering them in the fold of fixed form poems.
Such an example is „Flower of Lotus” (Semne, 2006). This book contains 148 poems, each consisting of quatrains. An immense number of verses - 3960. The author has managed to avoid monotony. The mould is the same, but the content is varied. Writing in the atmosphere of his fellow Ion Barbu, the poet of lotus flower (often met in haiku poetry), he resurrects the old Balkan world. A lot of words and syntagms have the aroma of old wine preserved in mulberry wood barrels: old accordions, romances with music perfume, sensation in fauburg, confused bonnet, tapestries of old Bucharest, the fees‘coach in trot, boots, bazaars, grinder, a castle man, a map of a military Roman camp. And so it continues. The summary of „The Old Book” by Geo Bogza can be read as an independent poem. The quasitotality of titles of these 148 poems in a specific immutable form created by him, are poetical by themselves and all of them could be considered poetry: The blind artist was painting a nu, The Solitude of the great pictures, Falling asleep with silence in my hand, History is but a reptile, Violin concerto of a cricket, The grinder at the coin of the street, Great chars with tilts, Silence as a corrugated paper, A Butterfly or may be a fee, I kiss and break this sword. Such poetry does contain some verses particularly beautiful which can exist for themselves, like a pillatian poem written in one verse: My celestial chain of jewels, The Moon was descending like a battle ax, The life is flowing the sky into inkpot...
Next come his sonnets. Ion Untaru has written them ever since the 80’s. In his debut thin booklet, mentioned above, he tried to feel the sea with his finger, publishing two sonnets: „The world axes” and „Matrimonials”. Only a year later, he has achieved the true measure in this field of maximal formal restrictions, allowing him to free his imagination. „Invitation to the castle” (Sagittarius, foreword by Marcel Crihană), contains 132 sonnets. As a pure statistical fact, the „Invitation” has 12 sonnets less than the great Will has written. Their elaboration took place, I suppose, in longer torments. Lucian Blaga says in „Quatrain”: „No song is easy. Day / and night – nothing is easy on earth: / that dew is the sweat of nightingales / which have labored all night singing”.
It is not easy to cut legs, even though they are not of flesh and bones, but of words, and to put them in a mould to stay there for a long time, aiming sometimes at eternity. You confer them, it is a comfortable bed, Procust’s bed. „The Comfort” of the poet, the surgeon of these operations of amputation and implant, is not easy to resume in words. Ion Untaru does this in his manner in his sonnet „Instrumentaire”, opening the volume:

So many words assault
The most engraved hidden from you
Where to find better ones and to whom
to offer them daily without fault?
Smelling almond and too
Dark night in sleep, stars on the vault
Through meanings almost one somersault
You quickly find him like a yahoo

To reach the haiku poem of Japanese origin, which aims at the very essence of poetry, Ion Untaru have passed through various custom barriers. A custom for words. Metaphorically speaking, he worked with an electronic balance and a dropper, knowing how to renounce of every unnecessary word and to retain only noble metal. Because pure gold is reserved only for the Creator, as people say.
It seemed that the last variant was roundel, that Al. Macedonski had improved to the highest degree in Romanian poetry – the beginning of the haiku movement in Romania.
In roundel as well in sonnet the imagination of Ion Untaru has no limits. He dedicates roundel to love, tenderness, to a book which opens with hazard, to the organ man (grinder), bells, two to the rain, three to coffee and so on. To decrease the ardor and selection of themes, would be to reduce them in favor of a fashionable content and its depth. Very expressive is the roundel of spring coming late contained in his volume “The Fountain in which souls are seen”. If we look carefully, we shall find in a single quatrain seven elements common to haiku poetry, with many a kigo:

Once again our spring is late
With shining sun and rain for flowers
With insects, butterflies as a dower
And I miss dear cranes from my gate

It wasn’t to be so. Ion Untaru, together with Radu Patrichi, has created a tanrenga, tanka written by two authors. It’s called “From the secrets of friendship” (Amurg sentimental, 2006) and has been written by the two men who have never met in reality.
Ion’s travel from classical poetry to haiku lasted ten years. All his experience determined him to start on a new literary path. Although he doesn’t know all the secrets of the matter, he has had success from his debut pocketbook “Picking up stars” (Ambasador, Târgu Mureş, 2004) he has published as an independent haijin, having much to tell. In his vision, a poet is like a blossoming sweet cherry tree knocking on the window. Pick me up, people, it seems he is telling us in a specific wordless language. He generously offers us his poems instead of fruits:
Before the mirrorwith cherries to the earsa teen-age girl
Even though the Procust’s (Lilliputians) size of the haiku are not entirely fulfilled, the poet creates his poems with touching fragments of life. Formal imperfection is balanced by internal tension posted on such little space. Look how natural two fiancés are, although represented only by their shadows:
Fiancés on the foot bridgetheir shadowsshake hands
The pocketbooks „Prepeleac with moon” and „Inscriptions on the grain of rice”, issued a year later by the same publishing house, the „Haiku” collection edited by Ioan Găbudean, and the latest one confirm the quality of the haijin Mr. Ion Untaru. It rarely happens that one easily write a haiku. Despite its Lilliputian size, concentrating more and more ideas and feelings by less and less words, as even the poet confesses in this sentence:
The wholesterile mountainfor only one haiku
The poet seems to be secluded. In other times he would have been a hermit, a recluse. As there are no caverns, as he says, he exalted himself in the middle of the city, not in a nacre tower. This means an inside exile, sad, without higher hopes, but fruitful. Because solitude is sine qua non for creation.
If up to now he has not become a well-known haijin, his “Birds and words” will enable him to take a good place in the Haiku Constellation of the Romanian language.
After his honorable economist career, Ion Untaru is building his literary career accounting stars and numbering words.

VASILE MOLDOVAN

(English version by Ion Untaru)

WINNERS OF ROMANIAN MONTHLY KUKAI JUNE 2008

We go on to publish our winners. These are the awarded poems at Romanian Kukai contest for June 2008. The theme of the contest was skylark.

First place

poppies shadow -
the skylark's song
towards the sun

Henriette Berge


Second place

A skylark -
suddenly the blue
so much deep

Eduard Ţară

Soaring –
the song of a lark
opens the sky

Vali Iancu

Nestling lark -
the shadow of a hawk
in the distance

Livia Ciupav


Third place

A skylark
with the first dew drops
clearing his throat

Ioan Marinescu-Puiu

Sleepless night
listening to a lark
lone on the porch

Ion Untaru

Following the field -
the skylarks still drop
towards it

Mircea Teculescu

Dancing with the sky,
dissipation of shadows and trill -
a lark

Victoria Chiţoveanu

Day of June -
uniting with the sky

a lark

Dumitru Radu

Translation made by Magdalena Dale. We are not native English speakers. In this way we will appreciate if you will point out the possible mistakes of the English version of our poems.