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Previous: Introduction au tanka et explications

21 February 2021

Introduction to tanka and explanations

For technical explanations of what tanka are, wikipedia provides exhaustive information, which is undoubtedly clearer than I would be able to provide:

gemini://wp.glv.one/en/Tanka

As a beginner, I'll probably make some mistakes in style and take some liberties at the beginning. I don't intend to respect all it's codes anyway: I understand that some rules are necessary but when you provide a too rigid framework, you end up with systems that are completely closed to any novelty and accessible only to an arbitrary "elite" (hello the French academy!), which deeply annoys me.

TLDR

It is love for a language and a mode of expression linked to it, and practical considerations (I have recently realised that it could be an excellent tool to better understand and express my emotions) that drive me to write.

Detailed explanations

To make a rough summary, Japanese is a very minimalist language, and natives tend to express themselves in the shortest possible way. The result can therefore sometimes be very clear, since one tries to get straight to the point, and sometimes very ambiguous because, among other things

there is no gender (to be more precise, there is only a distinction between living and non living things)
singular/plural and personal pronouns are incidental since they are often deductible from the context
the grammar is quite simple
vocabulary, although much richer than Indo-European languages, can be sometimes equivocal and require context for clarification

When I didn't speak Japanese yet, the only form of Japanese poetry I knew was Haiku, which I still find excessively short, and it never made me feel like it. With time and a better understanding of the language for which Japanese poetry were conceived, I ended up developing a growing interest in these modes of expression. This remains and will probably always remain very disturbing for me, being a native of a very descriptive language, and having an attraction for a kind of poetry that is really far removed from them (I love 19th century cursed poets like Rimbaud), but just as I love some aspects of Japanese, I have come to glimpse the beauty behind classical Japanese poetry in general (和歌: waka), and the tanka in particular.

Funny little detail: it was largely the game Ghost Of Tsushima, in which the hero (a samurai) can, in specific places, sit down, contemplate the surrounding landscape and compose a tanka according to selected elements of the setting, that made me decide to write some. I found that the game made superb use of the environment at its disposal (music, landscape, aesthetics, cultural elements...), and the composed poems, which perfectly captured the ephemeral feeling of the moment, really moved me.

As for my personal reasons for wanting to write, it's a jumble that's not yet very clear, so I'll just quote in bulk the theory of mind, autism and gendered constructions. Understand who can.