The Intuition of the Real and the Aesthetics of Silence in Japanese Haiku

The premise of the present study is identifying the main characteristics that render the haiku poem perceptible as “artistic peak” of Japanese language potentialities. By turning poetic and cultural-semiotic perspectives to advantage while discussing a literary text, the following analysis tries to probe the way in which haiku retrieves a world of concentrated emotion and of creative spark created by trivial facts, and transforms them in poetry capable of orienting the spirit towards satori, or Zen enlightenment. All this is done using an extremely reduced lexical inventory. Through the diffuse and ineffable, but especially through silence, a unity between the never ending, varied and complex “seen”, and an enlivening, simple and impenetrable “unseen” is realised within the haiku. Also called “a model for an aesthetic of silence”, the haiku proposes living and intuitively discovering reality which unfolds infinite silences by recording a graceful moment, and thus offers the reader considerable freedom in his own intervention to create meaning. Only a language characterised by “ambiguity” and “high dependence on context”, together with a culture highly imbued by Zen philosophy could create, we believe, a favourable context for the birth of a type of poetry whose shortness could guarantee formal perfection and whose simplicity could stand proof for semantic depth.

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