ABSTRACT
The most fertile patches for the cultivation of Japanese verse in the first decade of the twentieth century were in non-anglophone areas. The Mexican poet José Juan Tablada steeped himself in Japanese poetry and painting during visits to Japan in 1900 and in 1910. The early French haikuists were particularly attracted by the exoticism, succinctness, and impact of what they saw as a variety of vers libre, and their influence resonated throughout poetic circles in Germany, Spain, Eastern Europe, and overseas for years to come. It was the French-inspired view of Japanese tanka and haikai as vers libre, plus a burgeoning interest in ethnography and the literatures of Asian and Caucasian peoples, that attracted leading Russian poets to tanka and haikai as early as 1905. Haiku came to Brazil across two bridges, one leading directly from Japan in 1911 in the satchels of workers arriving to labor on the sugar and coffee plantations, and another via the salons of Paris and the publications of French poets, where Lusophone intellectuals learned more formal conceptions of haicai. This chapter documents the import of haiku from Japan into Mexico, France, Russia, and Brazil and lays out the specific aspects of Japanese short verse that appealed to each and provided the foundations for lively haiku traditions around the world.
