Spliced In Day 1

During the month of July, there will be featured here at Lunch Break, haiku related essays; the original copyright remains with the websites and to their respective writers.

Spliced In - Day 1
In 1916, Julien Vocance published “Cent visions de guerre” followed in 1917 by ninety haikai in La Grande revue. In the middle of World War I, this soldier decided to materialize his emotions and impressions of life in the trenches in the form of haiku.

Ma tête à peine rentrée,
Un moustique siffle et soudain
La crête de terre s’éboule.

My head hardly inside
A mosquito whizzes and suddenly
The tuft of earth falls in.


Dans les vertebres
Du cheval mal enfoui
Mon pied fait: floche…

Among the vertebrae
Of the badly buried horse
My foot goes: flosh…

¸.•´¯)¸.•**•.

“A haiku can be compared neither to a Greek or Latin distich, nor to a French quatrain. It is neither a “thought”, nor a “word”, nor a “proverb”; an epigram in neither the modern sense nor in the antique, which is rather an inscription. It is the simplest picture, in three movements of the brush, a sketch which is a brief touch or impression…In his study of the haikai, Mr Basil Hall Chamberlain calls
them “the lyric epigrams of Japan”. read the essay The Development of French Haiku in the First Half of the 20th Century: Historical Perspectives by Bertrand Agostini