The Three-line Stanza

Contrary to Kerouac’s suggestion, the three-line stanza is hardly essential. As Nobuyuki Yuasa writes in the introduction his translation of Bashō’s The Narrow Raod to the Deep North, haiku “consists of seventeen syllables, divided into three sections of five-seven-five.” Yuasa, however, translates haiku into English using a four-line stanza because haiku is “based on colloquialism, . . . the closest approximation of natural conversational rhythm can be achieved in English by a four-line stanza rather than the constrained three-line stanza.” He also did not attempt to restrict his translations to seventeen syllables. Thus, Bashō’s most famous haiku [Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto] is rendered as:

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into the water—
A deep resonance.