Free Haiku

Fri Haiku (Free Haiku), is one of Sweden's most prestigeous Haiku magazines. It is published on-line four times a year and edited by two of Sweden's most prolific Haiku poets, Lars Vargö and Lars Granström. Every year, a printed edition of the best poems from the on-line version is published. The 2010 year book will be called Vandrarens Boning (Dwelling of the wanderer) and is due out shortly. The first issue of Fri Haiku 2011 has just been published and has a number of great Swedish Haiku and a few good English and Danish ones too! Well worth a visit www.frihaiku.se. 

I was very pleased to get one published (translated below)

det forna hemmet                                                  former home

vårdträdet mitt på gården                                      the courtyard tree

växer ensamt kvar                                                 grows on alone

Haiku by a former UN General Secretary

Dag Hammarskjöld was born in 1905. The youngest of four brothers, he was by far the most academic son to his father, a former Education Minister of Sweden and Govenor of Uppsala. Hammarskjöld is internationally known as the Swedish Secretary General of the UN 1953-1961, although he had a number of posts in Swedish public life, as a civil servant of the national bank and the cabinet. He died in 1961, after the aeroplane of which he was a passenger, was shot down over the Congo. 

After his death 110 short poems, mainly aphorisms and philosophical thoughts where published, amongst them also some haiku. This is a bit peculiar as the haiku form was not very well know in the US in the 1950s, and even less so in Sweden.  Another curious thing about Hammarskjölds haiku is that they are written in the past tense. Hammarskjöld was born 106 years ago, yet his haiku feel very contemporary, dispite their quirks of obsolete grammatical forms, such as "slöto". 


I slottets skugga                               In the castle shadow
slöto sig blommorna                        the flowers closed
långt före aftonen                            long before the evening


Hammarskjöld loved nature and was a highly spiritual person. His philosophy on ethics and social justice prevails through the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. He was reputedly a reserved, compliated man, said to have an extremely high work ethic. He never married or had a family of his own. His estate, a traditional and modest Swedish farmhouse in Backåkra, with its amazing nature, perched on the shore of the Baltic sea, says something about the man he was. 


Ännu långt från stranden               Still far from the beach
lekte havets friskhet                       the sea's freshness played
i bronsblanka löv                            in bronze-shining leaves


In 2006  Swedish diplomat and haiku-poet Kai Falkman, who had been lecturing on Dag Hammarskjöld, edited a book explaining these haiku and putting them together with previously unpublished photographs, taken by Hammarskjöld himself;
A String Untouched - Dag Hammarskjöld's life in haiku and photographs.


www.daghammarskjold.se
www.dhf.uu.se

Result! (or, A very Swedish haiku)

I got a haiku published in Sydsvenska Dagbladet (www.sydsvenskan.se) on Friday. You don't get paid, but as encouragement, they send you a scratch-lottery-ticket. And I won 75 kronor! (A hundred thousand would have been good too, but mustn't grumble...). 


vår genom fönstret                                   spring through the window
isvindar i rockärmen                                ice-winds up the coat-sleeve
solskenet bedrar                                      betraying sunshine

The last line is somewhat difficult to translate, as it is a play on words. The Swedish turn-of-phrase "skenet bedrar", literally "the shine betrays", meaning that something is not what it makes out to be. You cannot say the sunshine betrays - hence the wordplay, but neither works particularly well in English, I'm afraid...

Why Swedish haiku?

I have never been to Japan. Yet, I live a wabi-sabi lifestyle, enjoy zen inspired blogs, love sushi, wado ryu karate, the books of Haruki Murakami, the films of Hayao Miyazaki. And I write haiku every day. I am Swedish. From a country at the other end of the world, with its own culture, customs and traditions. But the attraction of haiku writing is universal. The enjoyment of the changes of the seasons (even if we neither have cicadas nor fireflies), the humbling force of nature and seeing beauty in the small things of everyday life. To be given the ability to catch and preserve precious moments of what is most beautiful in this world. And to share it with others. This must be why haiku is so popular, not just in Sweden.