Week 3 Discussion - Over the Wintry

[Prof. Sky Alton]

This wee, we’ll be discussing “Over the Wintry” by Natsume Soseki

Natsume Soseki was a hugely influential Japanese writer. Though he’s most famous for his novels and short stories, he also wrote a lot of poetry, mostly using traditional Japanese forms. His portrait used to feature on Japanese banknotes.

Click here to read his poem, Over the Wintry. This poem uses a poetic form: it’s a haiku. This style of Japanese poetry has a rigid structure – 3 lines, with lines 1 and 3 being 5 syllables long and line 2 being 7 syllables long (though not all haikus strictly follow the syllable rule, particularly if they’ve been translated from one language to another). It also uses a poetic technique called enjambment, where the poet continues a sentence over multiple lines, usually without using any punctuation.

Feel free to share any thoughts you had while reading: how the poem made you feel, any lines that stood out or what it made you think of. You can also discuss the technical elements of the poem, like themes, images, the meter and the way the poet uses language. If someone else has said something that you find interesting, you should definitely respond to them – this is a discussion, after all.

If you get stuck, you could think about poems in translation. This poem was originally written in Japanese and translated into English. Do you think having a rigid format to follow makes it easier to translate a poem from one language to another or more difficult?

Providing what you share is respectful and HOL-appropriate, it’s completely up to you!

Your response should be at least 80 words long for full credit and must be written in your own words. While quoting from the poem is absolutely fine, you do need to write 80 words of your own content along with the quotes.

Post your responses below by 23:59 HOL-time on the 20th of August to earn 20 beans!

[Anne-Marie Gagne]

I feel like haikus are a hard poem to pull off while giving enough imagery that the reader can see it in their mind’s eye while also keeping to the 5-7-5 format.

I feel this poem lost a lot of meaning when it was translated from Japanese to English. Japanese has a lot of characters that can mean similar things but have a different intention when using one over the other. I think a lot of the emotion got lost in translation.

[Dibyarup James Potter]

The poem "Over the Wintry", by Natsume Sōseki, talks about a forest during the winter, where strong winds are blowing, possibly indicating a blizzard, and when the poet says that there are no leaves to blow, he is referring to the bare trees whose leaves have shed during the winter, thus describing a perfect scenery for a beautiful snowy white forest and a harsh and powerful blizzard.

In my opinion, this poem is a perfect example of how we can describe a lot with just a few words. In only 3 very short lines, the poet has managed to paint a picture that is both vivid and beautiful yet so very sad and lonely. Reading the poem made me feel very melancholic for a moment simply because it portrays one very harsh reality of life and that, just how by the end of each year during the Winter, trees lose all of their leaves one by one only to get new ones in Spring, similarly as we move on in life, we lose a lot of people one-by-one but only to find new ones later.

Hence, this poem can often be treated as a reminder that we should cherish the moments we get to experience with the people we meet, especially the ones whom we might never see again, for example our parents or grandparents or other loved ones who will eventually pass away, long before we do.

[Janne Halla]

I'm not much fan of haikus. They're incredibly hard forms of poetry to do well, I agree with Anne-Marie on that.

Sometimes, I feel like the poets are cheating when they move certain words a line lower, just to obey that 5-7-5 format.

A nice example is the ''forest'' word in this haiku. If we wanted the reading to flow, it should have been in the first line.

Maybe I just don't understand haikus in general. I do wonder whether I'd feel different if I read it and understood its meaning in Japanese.