Haiku for Vilnius

Abstract

In 2008, a volume entitled Haiku for Vilnius Book was published. It features a selection of the best texts submitted by participants in a literary campaign promoting Vilnius through Japanese poetic form of haiku. This article addresses the central question – the extent to which the works included in the volume conform to the formal and aesthetic criteria of the haiku genre. The aim was to demonstrate that these texts represent creative transformations of the haiku genre, generating novel artistic qualities. While the authors of these Japanese-inspired poems to the Lithuanian capital attempted to conform to the formal conventions of haiku, they did so without substantive engagement with Japanese cultural or aesthetic contexts. Nevertheless, the poems partially replicate traditional haiku imagery, retain a marked stylistic simplicity, and simultaneously depart from Far Eastern poetics in various ways, to reflect and convey distinctly Lithuanian realities to the reader.