Description

EXTREMELY RARE FIRST EDITION OF THE SECOND COLLECTION OF HAIKU WRITTEN IN FRENCH. Copy of the current edition on papier bouffant after 6 copies on Montval, 5 copies on papier d'Arches, and 102 copies on Chine (including 2 hors-commerce). Despite the announced print run of 613 copies, the great rarity of the work suggests that most copies were either never printed or were destroyed: only one other copy is known to exist, preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
INTERESTING MODEL The book, with its Japanese-style "Fukuro-toji" binding, is unique in that it reads in the Japanese style, from right to left. The typefaces are also arranged vertically on the pages. Title vignette by A.P. Gallien.

In 1905, the three young poets Paul-Louis Couchoud, André Faure and Albert Poncin published 30 copies of the first collection of French haiku,  As the water flowsa set of 72 'haikai' inspired by a cruise from Paris on the canals of France. Others, such as Paul Eluard, were quick to try their hand at this new form. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, several suites of haiku appeared in magazines (La Grande Revue, For your pleasure, La Gerbe), including the highly influential One hundred visions of war, composed in the trenches and in hospital by the Poilu Julien Vocance. However, it was not until 1922 that a second collection of poems was published, composed entirely of French haiku: Haikais, by Mexican poet and translator Rafael Lozano.

He now lives in Paris, where he directs the international poetry review PrismaAt the time, Lozano had already published two collections of poems in Spanish. The second, La Alcondra Encadilida (1921), includes a section of short Japanese-inspired poems entitled "Libro de Estampas"Lozano did not yet use the term haiku, although the form was already immensely popular in Mexico, thanks in particular to the work of the poet José Juan Tablada.

While Couchoud and his cohorts claim that ". practise making French haikais, without prosodic rules, imitating not the Japanese originals but the French translations "For his collection, Lozano uses the form 2 [title]/6/ 6. Divided into 6 sections (Idyll, Daydreaming, Vision, Landscape, Seasons, Philosophy), Haikais contains 51 haiku, 47 of which are original and 4 are translations by Japanese poets (Arakida Moritake, Kagami Shikō, Bashō, an anonymous "GEISHA / She comes out of her dress / she's a beautiful butterfly"). Borrowings from the imaginary world of Japonisme ("SILENCE / You stare at me, ecstatic, / like Buddha in the temple") sit alongside poems of quasi-gothic inspiration (Lozano was one of Poe's translators) incorporating references to Shakespeare ("COUCHANT / The pond covered in roses... / It's Ophelia passing by." ; "DONJON / Midnight the old owls / roam like ghosts.")
Sections of the collection are dedicated to close friends or French poets: Nicolas Beaudin, Paul Fort (whom Lozano translated into Spanish), Marcello Fabri, Alexandre Mercereau.

One year on Haikais appears in issue 10-11 of the magazine Le PampreAn anthology of "French haikai", edited by René Maublanc, brought together 48 poets, although Lozano was not among them; Haikais is not mentioned in his bibliography. More generally, this collection seems to have remained fairly confidential throughout the twentieth century: Luis Alberto Arellano Hernandez, Lozano's biographer, states that he only knows of the copy kept at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Rafael Lozano, Mensajero de vanguardiasEl Colegio de San Luis, 2018); this is probably the same copy that was used for the reissue of the collection in 2011 by 1001 Nuits, with As the water flowsin The first French Haiku.