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When His Excellency Dr Drago Štambuk suggested that the International Academic Forum consider launching a haiku award in memory of Vladimir Devidé, it did not take much convincing. IAFOR is dedicated to the promotion of international, intercultural and interdisciplinary research, dialogue, and understanding, and Vladimir Devidé would have identified strongly with this mission, for in many ways it was also his own. He was a mathematician, a Japanologist, a translator, and a poet, who through haiku accessed another culture and built bridges between Croatia and Japan, and within Japan. After his death, those bridges continue to develop between exponents of classical and modern haiku as the award recognizes excellence regardless of whether submitted haiku are in the traditional or more modern style, and indeed has been generously backed by the two principal haiku associations representing these schools: the Haiku International Association and the World Haiku Association.

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The award also reaches out to practitioners around the world as it both promotes understanding of the commonality of shared experience, excellence within the art form, as well as the wider work of the organization, for while haiku is a quintessentially Japanese form of poetry, it has become a global art form due to its universal appeal. No other form can so convincingly celebrate banality and frivolity; convey a moment of giddy happiness, or a lifetime of pain. It can offer humorous asides, throwaway puns, and yet also touch the depths of profundity. In their small, unassuming way, haiku can, at their best reflect and inspire the shared experiences of people throughout the world. Poets from twenty-nine countries submitted entries to the inaugural Vladimir Devidé competition, and the quality of their entries was consistently high. I trust you will enjoy the following haiku, selected with great care by Dr Štambuk.

Joseph Haldane Nagoya, January 2013

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Acknowledgements The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) would like to thank the many poets and other lovers of haiku who supported the award and haiku reading event, including Akito Arima, President of the Haiku International Association, Hana Fujimoto, the organization's Secretary, Shokan Kondo, President of the Japan Renku Association, and Ban'ya Natsuishi, President of the World Haiku Association, as well as Her Excellency Mira Martinec, Croatian Ambassador to Japan, and Hiroshi Ojima, Honorary Croatian Consul in Osaka. The organization would like to thank the delegates who made the haiku and poetry reading event so enjoyable, including the founder and judge of the Award, His Excellency Dr Drago Štambuk, and poets Kazuko Shiraishi, and Dr Bashabi Fraser.  

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Foreword By definition, the haiku is brief; even tiny. Yet in three short lines, a vast metaphysical expanse opens up: this is the paradox, the shock and the achievement of the haiku. A minimal amount of text charged with infinite space and time. I call this open space, this arena of metaphysics, the haiku consciousness. It is a way of being in harmony with nature, and with one’s own nature. It’s a way of connecting between the world inside and the world outside; of joining our own internal light with the exterior illumination. Haiku acts as a harmonising force on man’s relation with nature, with the outside world. ……. Haiku is something more universal than its mere formal rules: it is a state of mind and an approach to thought, and as such it cannot be confined to a certain amount of syllables or morae. ……. Haiku leads us in the right direction, homewards, in a process of rediscovery and reassimilation of our compelling and inherent universal values.

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……. Let's celebrate its ethical purity, its metaphysical austerity; let's become the priests and followers of religion called poetry.

Drago Štambuk Fragments from Dr Štambuk’s keynote speech, ‘Haiku Consciousness’ at the Inaugural Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship 2011; LibrAsia conference in Osaka, Japan, May 28, 2011.

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vladimir devidé haiku award selected haiku 2011

Founder & Selector: Drago Štambuk, Croatia

   

           

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1st Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2011 Founder & Selector: Drago Štambuk, Croatia

Number of Entries:

166, from 29 countries (the highest from Croatia: 57; 35%)

Organizer: The International Academic Forum as Part of

LibrAsia 2011: The 1st Asian Conference on Literature and

Librarianship Osaka, Japan, May 27-30, 2011

 

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Table of Contents

一 Vladimir Devidé 4 二 Drago Štambuk 9

三 Grand Prize 19

四 Runner Up 23

五 Commended 41

 

   

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VLADIMIR DEVIDÉ Despite a successful international academic career as a renowned mathematician, with professorships in Australia and the US, as well as his native Croatia at the University of Zagreb, it is primarily as a Japanologist and haiku poet that Vladimir Devidé is now remembered. Devidé was not only one of the world`s most celebrated haiku poets, but a tireless promoter of Japanese culture. If Croatia is now considered a Haiku “superpower”, with more poets practicing the art per capita than any other nation, it is largely thanks to his efforts. A full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Vladimir Devidé has won a number of awards and honours, including the Le Prix CIDALC (1977), the Prize of the City of Zagreb (1982), and for his work as a promoter of Japanese culture, the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure (1983). Vladimir Devidé died in August 2010.

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VLADIMIR DEVIDÉ HAIKU AWARD The competition was founded by his fellow countryman and haiku poet, Dr Drago Štambuk, as a tribute to Devidé's vision and passion for haiku. The award is based on literary merit, regardless of whether in the traditional or modern style. As such, it aims to transcend haiku divisions in the unifying spirit of Vladimir Devidé.

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DRAGO ŠTAMBUK His Excellency Dr Drago Štambuk is the Croatian Ambassador to Brazil, a post he took up in early 2011, after five years as Ambassador to Japan and the Republic of Korea. Dr Štambuk is a widely published and acclaimed poet, and is now recognized as one of Croatia's most distinguished men of letters. His writing career began in 1973 and has grown to include more than 40 collections of poetry in Croatian, English, French and Spanish, and his work has been included in all relevant anthologies of Croatian contemporary poetry. The ambassador has received numerous literary awards in his native country and abroad, and was the first recipient of Dragutin Tadijanović Award established in 2008 by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is also a founder and director of the All-Croatian Poetry Festival on the Island of Brač, founded in 1991. As well as his writing, Dr Štambuk has had two  

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separate careers as both a medical doctor anda diplomat. A graduate of Zagreb University's Medical School (1974), he went on to specialize in internal medicine, gastroenterology

and hepatology at the Clinical Medical Center in Zagreb, before moving to London in 1983 to continue his medical career at both the Royal Free Hospital and St Stephen's. Following the independence of Croatia in 1991, he became a diplomat, and has served as the Croatian ambassador to various countries, including India and Egypt, and from 2005 was named as Croatia's representative in Tokyo. His brief was expanded to include the Republic of Korea in 2006. The ambassador was a Fellow at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002. He was appointed to the IAFOR International Advisory Board in 2010 as the conference chair for the first Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship 2011, and instituted the Vladimir Devidé Haiku award as a tribute to Devidé,

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who had died earlier in 2010, serving as the judge for the 2011 award.

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The Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award is for haiku regardless of whether it is traditional or

modern; it transcends haiku divisions and is based only on literary merit.

The following haiku have been commended by the competition, and the winner and runners up were announced by Dr Drago Štambuk on Saturday, May 28, 2011 at the occasion of the

Poetry Reading.

 

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Grand Prize

late autumn sun the field too small to hold

my shadow

Jim Kacian, USA 19

 

Runner Up

spring bud the mother’s womb

soon to open

Ernesto P. Santiago, Greece 23

Runner Up

a ray of sunshine on its way to darkness -

mole’s fur

Nada Jačmenica, Croatia 25

Runner Up

autumn twilight - a bit of stone flakes off

& becomes a moth

Timothy Russell, USA 27

Runner Up

A distant meadow Hallowed ground of the vanquished

Vultures fill their crops

Jesse Willett, USA 29

Runner Up

hot tea-pot on the garden table -

camellias in haze

Tomislav Maretić, Croatia 31

Runner Up

flowering cherry in my orchard of one tree

my Yoshino

Willy Cuvelier, Belgium 33

Runner Up

The Day of the Dead is celebrated every day -

Ciudad Juarez

Jack Galmitz, USA 35

Runner Up

digging up my cat to bury her deeper…

Daniel Gahnertz, Sweden 37

 

Commended

broken flower-pot the wounded orchid goes on blooming

Smiljka Bilankov, Croatia 41

Commended

president’s face - on the yellowed envelope

one-cent stamp

Krzysztof Kokot, Poland 43

Commended

sunset a bird on the meadow

dies with its song

Malvina Mileta, Croatia 45

Commended

Snow falling - a gentle blanket

covers Japan’s victims

Kate Prendergast, Australia 47

Commended

weeping willow each branch weeping

in its own way

Nada Zidar-Bogadi, Croatia 49

Commended

funeral cortege recalling

wedding procession

Tanja Cilia, Malta 51

Commended

late autumn fountain spurts are meeting

the first snowflakes

Željko Funda, Croatia 53

Commended

airport carousel a butterfly arrived riding a suitcase

William Hart, USA 55

Commended

after the wedding white butterfly clinging

to the ivy

Anthony Kudryavitsky, Ireland 57

Commended

I put down the axe A turtledove is cooing from a barren fig tree

Borivoje Sekulić, Serbia 59

 

   

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