Usjek u hrvatskom antologijskom haikuu

Abstract

The article deals with the Japanese poetic and conceptual terms kire and kireji, situating them within Croatian literary theory and practice. It consists of three parts: the first is titled “Signifier” and it focuses on the delimitation of both key terms and their reception in Croatia. Based on the analysis of the current situation, a suggestion to use „usjek” and „usječnica” as translations is made, while elaborating on the link of both terms with caesura as a close literary phenomenon. The second part (“Signified”) discusses the specifics of the kire with examples selected from Japanese literature. Special attention is paid to contemporary cognitive-literary theories and the characteristics which kire shares with metaphor and blending. The final part (“Corpus Analysis”) uses examples selected from three anthologies of Croatian haiku poetry to demonstrate some possibilities of distant reading (searching for kire, vector word models) in order to completely define and rehearse kire within domestic literary theory.