Haiku, haikai, and tanka in Guatemala: Popular poetry or intellectual game?

Abstract

Between the 12th and 16th centuries, three short lyrical genres developed successively in Japan: tanka, haikai, and haiku. Since Japan‘s political and cultural opening in the mid-19th century, these genres have been adopted, maintained, and developed by poets around the world. This work examines the use and design of these lyrical forms in Guatemala, whose cultural background and literary tradition have had very little contact with Japanese literary culture. The following questions are considered: How do Guatemalan poets of the 20th and 21st centuries use and develop the characteristics of Japanese tanka, haikai, and haiku poems in their own poems? Are Japanese-style poems for them mainly intellectual games, or are they part of popular Guatemalan poetry? This analysis will be carried out on the works of Viveka Mazariegos Jofre, Carmen Matute, Flavio Herrera, and Humberto Ak‘abal, four Guatemalan poets who wrote tanka, haikai, and haiku on a larger scale in the 20th and 21st centuries.

References

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