by Philip Gambone

In 1900, a young Mexican poet named José Juan Tablada traveled to Japan, a visit of several months that made a profound impression on him. He began collecting ukiyo-e, woodblock prints, many of them depicting the "floating world" of the pleasure-seeking Japanese urban scene. Tablada eventually assembled a collection of more than a thousand of these prints, kept in his house in Mexico City's Coyoacán neighborhood. He wrote a book on one of these printmakers, Hiroshige, which revealed a deep familiarity with Japanese culture, including Noh theater and haiku. He also published an anthology of his essays on various Japanese subjects.

Tablada was born in Mexico City in 1871. By his late teens, he was contributing to journals as a correspondent, poet and essayist. With the publication of his first book of poetry, Florilegio (1899), he was hailed as one of Mexico's leading modernist poets. Today, Tablada is considered one of the forerunners of modern Mexican poetry. "One of the most fertile and questioning minds of his generation," Octavio Paz called him. Like his contemporaries—the poets Ramón López Velarde, Carlos Pellicer, and Salvador Novo—Tablada embraced the avant-garde, breaking with the Frenchified poetic sensibilities so popular during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diáz.

In 1919, Tablada published Un día, a collection of his haiku, the first such poems ever to appear in Spanish. The book was an immediate hit. Later generations were less appreciative, dismissing him as "the naïve, semieducated victim of an absurd infatuation with all things Oriental." He was seen as a mere exoticist, one of his era's "renegade sensualists, dancing smartly to the swirl of geishas," writes Bart L. Lewis in Mexican Literature: A History.

Octavio Paz did much to resurrect Tablada's reputation as a poet in general and a haiku writer in particular. In a lecture delivered at Harvard in 1970, Paz said, "His highly concentrated little poetic compositions … were something truly new in his time. Their novelty and intensity were such that even today many of them still preserve their original freshness, their ability to take us by surprise. Of how many more pretentious works can the same be said?"

Basho by Hokusai
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In his introduction to an anthology of modern Mexican poetry, Paz rather extravagantly embellished on his praise: "Tablaba, curious, passionate, never looking back, his feet winged, heard the grass growing and scented the new beast before anyone else, the magnificent, ferocious beast which was to devour so many slumberers: poetic imagery."

Imagery is, of course, at the center of haiku, and Tablada's images are often striking:

Tablada generally adhered to the three-line structure of a traditional Japanese haiku, though he often deviated from the syllabic structure of 5-7-5 syllables. Here's one with 8-10-10 syllables:

Ukiyo-e print in the Tablada Collection at UNAM
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Like the haiku master Matsuo Bashō, who wrote, Paz noted, with "an alert serenity that unburdens us," Tablada, too, displays that "alert serenity," keenly observing, rather than analyzing:

As fine a haiku poet as he was, Tablada could, on occasion, resort to commonplace, even clichéd images:

Ukiyo-e print in Tablada Collection
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Indeed, some critics have concluded that Tablada never really went "beyond a surface picturesqueness," as Jean Franco writes in An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature. Not so, Paz countered. At his best, he said, Tablada's intense, sharp gaze conferred on anything his eyes saw "the religious character of an apparition."

For example, in one haiku, Tablada achieves what Paz called the "allegiance of the everyday and the unusual":

In another, Tablada presents us with a willow tree, whose radiant solidity "almost" metamorphoses into the insubstantiality of light:

Tablada could also be funny, as in this haiku:

Or this one:

I'll end with one more of my favorites, this one written in four, rather than the standard three, lines:

Tablada caligrama
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Tablada went on to write a few other volumes of poetry, including poems, which he called caligramas, inspired by the French poet Apollinaire, in which the typeface and arrangement of the words on a page are as much a part of the "meaning" of the poem as are the words. Here he was aiming for "the union of avant-garde innovation with the poetry and calligraphy of the Far East," observed Paz.

Tablada's last collection of poems was published in 1928. From then until his death in 1945, he devoted more and more time to journalism, including the editorship of the short-lived American magazine, Mexican Art and Life.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarns Press and is available on Amazon and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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