Haiku in English
I have the habit of writing haiku when I need to “vomit” strong emotions, much like the character in Cortázar’s Carta a una señorita en París (A Comentary in English, a short film, very faithful to the text) was vomiting rabbits:
Nunca se lo había explicado antes, no crea que por deslealtad pero naturalmente uno no va a ponerse a explicarle a la gente que de cuando en cuando vomita un conejito.
Recently I had a number of very strong emotions while speaking mostly in English, something that never had happened to me before. The result is that I started “vomiting” haikus in English, of which I’m going to give you a number. Not all are conventional haikus, as the haiku metrics, but not the tone or conventions, is rather similar to the Spanish seguidilla. /me being andalúz I have a trend to mix haiku with seguidilla from time to time. What I would be glad about is correction or links about how to metter and understand metrics in English. Spanish is very easy to meter, and I have serious problems understanding the rules for English. Those are all supposed to be “classic” 5/7/5 ones, though not all of them are “moments”, or refer to nature or seasons.
A tango poem: While the music is flowing We stand together.
No moon, no kisses. Just a couple that dances. The world keeps turning.
Your eyes are closed April rains while you whisper: pouring illusions
T.S. Elliot should probably wake up and kill me on this one:
Seasons are mixing. Memories and desires Dancing around us.
What are my tears for? Flowers blossom so healthy! April is caring.
Madrid is dying: Four million corpses walking After you left me.
If you read the commentary about Cortázar’s story, one should accept the vomiting of rabbits as something that is part of us, and something that we should actually desire, or at least accept grateful for the gift we got. Else bad things happens... Though Cortázar’s story is more about how this “production” is forced to modify the world (the apartment) and thus makes us sometimes guilty of breaking the pristine order of nature.
The frontiers between “aesthetic” arts like poetry and “practical” arts like software engineering are very fuzzy, so I don’t find strange that lots of us get involved into other arts out of work hours. Specially as software is a very special art, much like music it expresses a structure with words, and allows the result to be “interpreted”, not just imagined.
Posted by Santiago Gala atInstrucciones para cantar
Es posible que alguien lea lo que escribo, tanto aquí como en twitter , y es también posible que ese hipotéticamente curioso y algo obtuso alguien no haya entendido por qué, cuando tengo emociones que vomitar, no sólo produzca haikus, de cualidades...Excerpt from El agente secreto at
Alguien se muere de amor
Muchos de nadas , me alegro si sirve para algo. Explico un poco cómo llegué ahí: Llevaba dos semanas con la canción dándome vueltas y ganándome poco a poco. Lo había oído antes, pero sólo en estas dos semanas me dí cuenta de la fuerza de la letra y...Excerpt from Comentarios sobre 'El agente secreto' at
Santiago, Thanks for posting these. It’s great to see the artistic side of my technical colleagues, and it encourages me to continue down that road myself.
Posted by Rich Bowen at