The Paraverse of Robin D. Gill - countless haiku and various intercultural musings

The publishing industry is unfair, especially in our day, when only superficial bestsellers count. There is only one solution for serious authors: self-publishing. That is what Robin D. Gill has been doing with a vengeance and so far he has seven beautiful books to his account. They are a mixture of Blyth, the proliferous haiku translator of the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, and Laurence Sterne, known for his endless notes and asides. In other words, if you like big, wide-ranging and intellectually stimulating books, this is your fare!

Robin D. Gill is an American who for a long time lived and worked in Japan as acquisitions editor and translations checker. During that period, he learned perfect Japanese and published seven books in Japanese mainly about intercultural misunderstandings based on mistranslations and differences in language. Since then back in the U.S. (Florida), he is spending his time writing immense books for that self-publishing venture, Paraverse Press.

One of his earliest and most interesting books is RISE, YE SEA SLUGS! In this hefty tome he compiles and translates 1,000 (yes, one thousand) haiku on a single natural theme, the sea slug (namako, as Gill discusses more aptly called "sea cucumber" but that is an awkward term in translation). Here and in his other translations he follows the golden rule set of

• providing the Japanese version of all translated haiku
• a romanization
• a literal translation
• and finally, often not one translation, but several possible versions, all in beautiful English (this is what he calls "paraverse").

This is even better than Blyth! Gill's comments are always intelligent and enlightening. Thanks to this book, haiku on the humble sea slug are now the most translated category in the world! Gill has brought together holothurian haiku from the past, but also adds modern and contemporary ones (from haiku sites where he exchanges information and verse with Japanese participants). He also includes his own haiku written under the name Keigu - something wholly in the tradition of Japanese authors on haiku. The book is divided in chapters of each about 30-40 haiku which address one particular aspect of the sea slug, such as its formlessness, its slipperiness, its taste etc. Here is one by Shiki:

mui ni shite namako ichiman hassen sai and the translations: dolche far niente idle sea slug lives for eons longevity staying put the sea slug makes it a long way sage government doing nothing the sea slug rules a million years

But I will say no more about it here as I intend to write a full review after I finish (and digest) this huge book. You can find parts of the book here on Google Books to try it out.

 Robin D. Gill's next blockbuster was TOPSY-TURVY 1585, 611 ways Europeans and Japanese are contrary, a translation and of course explication with countless notes and asides, full of humor, of Luis Frois's famous intercultural treatise (Tratado) - the first look at Japan from an European point of view. Luis Frois was a 16th c. Portuguese Jesuit who spent all of his adult life in Japan and wrote from a standpoint of cultural relativity, with lots of appreciation for Japan. Gill examines the validity of his "topsy-turvy" claims and then plays around with them - as the author himself proclaims:

"Readers with the intellectual horsepower to enjoy ideas will be grateful for pages discussing things like the significance of black and white clothing or large eyes vs. small ones, while others who seek quirky facts will be delighted to find, say, that the women in Kyoto were known to urinate standing up, or Japanese horses had their stale gathered by long-handled ladles, etc., [..]"

To give another example, from "We eat everything with our fingers; The Japanese, men and women, from childhood, eat with two sticks" I learned that our modern cutlery dates from well past the 16th century - it only became common in the 19th c., and initially forks were considered as decadent instruments of the devil as I discovered when I delved even more deeper into it myself - Gill's musings can be great jumping-off points to other discoveries. This is the perfect book to dip into now and then, but you may find it so interesting that you keep reading longer than you intended to!

 Robin D. Gill wrote five other books which I will just mention briefly, as I hope to come back to (most of) them at some other time: FLY-KU! about just one haiku, the famous verse about "to swat or not to swat" by Issa:

yare utsu na hae ga te wo suru ashi wo suru and here is the translation by the author: lord, don't swat! the fly prays with his hands and with his feet!

Gill discusses many translations by other authors and introduces hundreds of other haiku about flies and fly swatters. His discussions range from natural history to haiku history (who was the first to notice that flies rub their limbs together?), but his "most important accomplishment is demonstrating how translation into English must either ruin poems by stripping words of their meaning or anthropomorphize them." In other words, there is nothing maudlin about Issa's haiku, it is purely an observation - and Issa did swat flies! Sample it on Google Books or buy it via Amazon!

 The next book was as a gimmick published under two different titles: The Woman Without a Hole & Other Risky Themes from Old Japanese Poems and Octopussy, Dry Kidney & Blue Spots. So be careful that you don't end up buying both, because they are exactly the same - just select one with the title you prefer! This is a collection of 1,300 senryu, again with original texts, translations and explanations. The theme is "dirty" - very much so, so skip it when you have sensibilites that can be offended! - the senryu that Blyth in his two volumes with senryu translations could not publish (by the way, why are these books by Blyth never republished? I have been waiting for them for decades!). These senryu with their obscure obscenities are very difficult and Gill has again pulled off a terrific feat. From the insatiable sex drive of Empress Shotoku (with her priestly lover Dokyo) to Ono Komachi, the famous poetess who was considered as "holeless" by senryu authors - this is the perfect literary pendant to shunga. The book can again be sampled on Google Books or bought at Amazon.

Gill has compiled to more haiku books, one on sakura, cherry blossoms (Cherry Blossom Epiphany), the other on the theme of the Fifth Season, New Year (The Fifth Season). I am still waiting for them to arrive and really looking forward to them, but for now I can't say more about them.

 Finally, his first book was a smaller volume on intercultural stuff (and the impossibility of translation), called Orientalism and Occidentalism, where he also draws attention to the Occidentalism from the side of the Japanese. In comparison with the other heavy salvos, this is the slightest volume, but especially the notes are interesting. If you like Blyth, you will also enjoy Robin D. Gill - even more so, as he is more humorous and challenging. If you feel smothered by long asides and digressions, you can easily skip them as there will be enough book left - and the prices are very reasonable anyway. But you will loose something good as well: Gill's references include interesting artifacts of obscure Japanese lore.

 Why isn't this amazing scholar with his deep knowledge of Japanese culture on the payroll of a major university? Why are his books not published by Harvard or Stanford UP, or even Hawai'i UP? And why, once published, doesn't one major "established" reviewer bother to review them? Check it out and if you like his books, you can support Robin D. Gill in his further publishing ventures (I have had no contact with him yet, but on his website he says he needs it!) by actually buying the books - they are all available on Amazon Japan and Amazon.com, as well as on the B&N website! What do you think about these books?

Here is an interview with Robin D. Gill at Simply Haiku. When you check out the archives, you will see Gill also wrote a column for this magazine, Haiku in Context.