Taneda Santōka

Taneda Santōka

Taneda Santōka ( Japanese 種田 山頭 火 ; * December 3, 1882 in Nishisabarei (today: Hōfu ); † October 11, 1940 in Matsuyama ), actually Taneda Shōichi ( 種田 正 一 ), often only called by his pseudonym Santōka , was a Japanese Haiku poet of the Meiji , Taishō and early Shōwa periods . He is one of the most famous representatives of the free haiku . He was ordained a priest in 1925 in the Hōon temple ( 報恩寺 , Hōon-ji ) in Kumamoto and took the name Kōho ( 耕 畝 ).

Life

Taneda Santōka was born on December 3, 1882 as the son of a large landowner in the village of Nishisabarei ( 佐波 令 村 , Nishisabarei-mura , now part of the city of Hōfu ), Yamaguchi Prefecture. At the age of 11 he lost his mother, who took her own life. After attending what was then Yamaguchi Middle School , he began to study literature at Waseda University , but dropped out of the course due to a weak nervous system, returned home, received medical treatment and also helped in the local sake brewery.

He married in 1911. Also in 1911 Taneda Santōka began to write articles for the magazine Sōun published by Ogiwara Seisensui , then became Seisensui's pupil in 1913 and from 1916 took an active part in the design of the magazine.

The family brewery soon went bankrupt because of the dissolute lifestyle of the father and his own behavior when drunk, whereupon Santōka moved with his wife and child to Kumamoto . After he did not succeed there in a book antiquarian, however, the divorce followed in 1920, after which he ran away alone to Tōkyō . His father and younger brother then committed suicide.

After the Great Kantō earthquake in 1923 he fled Tōkyō and returned to his divorced wife in Kumamoto. Out of desperation, he made a suicide attempt, but Mochizuki Gian ( 望月義庵 ), the ruler Zentempels Hoon-ji in Kumamoto helped him, and he was temple servants. In 1924 he was ordained a priest and called himself Kōho ( 耕 畝 ).

In 1925 he left the temple and wrote haiku while traveling in priestly dress through western Japan.

In 1932 he settled in the city of Ogōri of his old homeland, Yamaguchi Prefecture , and lived in a hut that he called Gochūan ( 其中 庵 ). In 1939 he moved to Yamaguchi and named his hut there Issōan ( 一 草庵 ). In this, his life ended the following year. He was 57 years old.

literature

• Taneda, Santoka: I'm alone too. Haiku. German by Guido Keller. Angkor Verlag 2014. E-Book (Kindle).
• Wittkamp, ​​Robert F .: Notes on onomatopoeia and sound processing in Santōka's poetry. In: "Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens" (NOAG), 155–156, pp. 79–94, 1995.
• Wittkamp, ​​Robert F .: "Santōka - Haiku, wandering, sake" (OAG paperback no. 66). Tokyo: Bunkenseihan 1996.
• Wittkamp, ​​Robert F .: "Pine wind and green mountains. The wandering monk Santōka and the free form". Ahrensburg: holistic living 2011.
• Böhm, Rita: "The wandering monk". Sumi-e by Rita Böhm, Haiku by Taneda Santōka, translated and given an introduction by Robert F. Wittkamp. Bonn: Bier'sche Verlagsanstalt 2015.

Web links

• Life dates (Japanese)
• Digitized works at Aozora Bunko (Japanese)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Taneda is the family name, Santōka the first name.