When Japanese Senryū Learned to Smile in Hungarian: On Interlingual Adaptation, Irony, and the Hungarian Haiku Tradition
When Japanese short-form poetry found its way into the Hungarian language and poetic tradition, there was a collapsing of distinction, as various short forms all came to be known under the singular label haiku. In this essay, Hungarian poet, writer, and artist Zsolt L. Rakusz traces this blurring of traditional boundaries, while also demonstrating that this shift is not a mis-recognition but the fluid movement of forms between languages.
CLOSED CIRCLE
Your language and mine
talk it over—
what has no word.
—Ákos Fodor
Try asking for a senryū in a Budapest bookshop. You will meet the polite blankness reserved for foreign words without a shelf of their own. Ask for a haiku instead, and the clerk walks you straight to it. In Hungary, for nearly a century, short poems in this tradition—whether translated from Japanese originals or written by Hungarian poets under their influence—have often been grouped under the single, friendly, catch-all label of haiku, a term which traditionally describes verse of quiet, seasonal contemplation. Whether senryū—its sharper-tongued cousin, built for irony and human folly rather than cherry blossoms—actually belongs under that label is another question.
Specialists know the difference, of course, but the distinction has never fully escaped the seminar room. It certainly has not reached the street. I did not learn the difference myself for years, and not for lack of interest. I was reading, and eventually writing, short poems the entire time—first only in Hungarian, then submitting them abroad, where English-language journals sort haiku and senryū into separate categories as a matter of course. It was there, filling out submission forms, that I first had to decide in which box a given poem belonged. At home, in Budapest, no one had ever asked me to. I’d called almost everything a haiku, the way many readers still do.
The single, blanket label “haiku” is something of a misnomer—it folds an entire family of short forms, senryū among them, into one word and hides a complex and rich relationship between Japanese and Hungarian poetic forms. Japanese short poetry entered Hungarian literature through a back door, traveling first through Western European translations before colliding with an old native appetite for ironic compression—a Hungarian poetic tradition that was, in its own odd and slightly cynical way, already waiting for it. The nominative carelessness displayed in the collapsing of Japanese short forms into a single label belies a deep recognition evident in the Hungarian relationship to the poems themselves. Not imitation, but adaptation: an eventual discovery of a home away from home.
※
Judit Vihar—a pioneering scholar of Japanese literature, translator, and haiku poet—traces this roundabout migration back to Dezső Kosztolányi, the modernist writer who introduced Japanese poetry to a broad Hungarian readership with his landmark 1931 anthology Kínai és japán versek (Chinese and Japanese Poems). Kosztolányi did not know Japanese. A central figure of the Nyugat literary generation, he nevertheless relied on intermediary translations when working with East Asian poetry. For his 1933 Nyugat selection he drew directly on A. Miyamori’s English anthology; the exact sourcing of the earlier 1931 volume is less settled, with scholars pointing to a wider set of European intermediary texts. Either way, his volume was, from the beginning, an interpretation of interpretations.
When he published thirty more Japanese poems in Nyugat in 1933, Kosztolányi described his task as translating “from the Asian into the European.” The phrasing sounds heavy today, but his working methods were surprisingly practical. He did not attempt to reproduce the Japanese 5–7–5 pattern. He added end-rhymes, supplied titles where the originals had none, sometimes expanded three lines into four, rearranged lineation, and generally treated the source material with the authority of a poet who believed that a foreign form mattered only insofar as it could work in the target language.
As Vihar points out, much of the essential atmosphere survived this handling: suggestive silences, spatial economy, the sense of an observation caught mid-motion. Kosztolányi’s translations were not simply technical failures. They revealed a persistent instinct in the way Hungarian literature absorbs foreign forms: take what the native language can naturally hold, retool it for local ears, and let the rest fall away. He did not import a pristine museum artifact. He built a local hybrid.
※
Before senryū blurred into haiku in Hungary, however, the two traditions had developed along distinct paths in Japan. Both ultimately belong to the broader tradition of haikai linked verse. Modern haiku developed from the hokku, the opening stanza of a haikai no renga sequence. Because the hokku opened the chain, it established the scene and often indicated the season, while also creating the first poetic turn.
Senryū emerged from a different practice within the same broader tradition: maekuzuke, a popular Edo-period capping-verse game. A judge supplied a short maeku, conventionally a 7–7 verse, and participants composed a tsukeku, usually a 5–7–5 response that completed it. Out of these standalone tsukeku responses, a distinct genre eventually crystallized—one that, instead of the strict formal conventions and solemnity of traditional haiku, employed an anonymous, urban corrective focused on human behavior and irony.
Some of these responses were eventually published on their own, where they could be understood without the original prompt. The first major anthology of these verses, Haifū Yanagidaru, appeared in 1765. It was associated with Karai Hachiemon, whose pen name, Senryū, eventually became the name of the genre itself. The poems were largely anonymous and drew heavily on the lives of ordinary townspeople: merchants, artisans, samurai, husbands, wives, servants, gamblers, lovers.
The distinction between the forms is not simply a question of subject matter, and it has never been as absolute as later Western descriptions sometimes make it sound. Traditional haiku is strongly associated with kigo, the season word, and kireji, the cutting word or grammatical marker of a poetic break. Senryū, by contrast, developed around human behavior, social observation, irony, and humor. Yet both forms have evolved, and modern senryū need not be comic while modern haiku need not mechanically reproduce every classical convention. The Haiku Society of America has long acknowledged that, at the margins, the line between them can be genuinely hard to draw—even as journals, out of practical necessity, still ask submitters to choose one label over the other.
In Japan itself, the line between the two forms has remained relatively stable, even as scholars continue to debate its edges. It is only once the form crossed linguistic and cultural borders that its categories became porous and the distinction less clear.
In Hungary, this consolidation has an identifiable source. Judit Vihar describes senryū in her own writing not as an independent tradition, but simply as haiku’s comic counterpart, its “humorous” register. When she founded the Hungarian Haiku Club in 2000, in the wake of that year’s World Haiku Festival, the country’s new institutional home for short-form poetry carried, from its very name, only one label.
※
What matters, in the movement of Japanese short forms into Hungarian, is not the question of whether Hungarian poets violated a Japanese rulebook, but that they arrived, by their own route, at something recognizably akin to what Japanese critics call ugachi—literally “piercing through”: the reflex of turning an ordinary moment against itself, training attention on human folly rather than the passing season.
A classic example from Karai’s own anthology captures this ugachi spirit directly:
Catching him—
you see the robber
is your son.
The joke turns not on nature or season, but on the shock of misplaced intimacy: an ordinary bond, parent and child, colliding with a criminal act. It is this same reflex—training attention on the awkward particulars of a life rather than the turning of a season—that resurfaces, transposed into an entirely different grammar, in Hungarian hands.
Senryū’s social attentiveness is one reason the form proved influential for Hungarian short verse. But Hungarian practice does not simply reproduce the Edo-period comic mode. It often turns the joke inward, toward metaphysics, melancholy, and the uneasy business of being human.
Take Ákos Fodor’s brief poem titled simply A haiku, from his 1989 volume Akupunktúra:
lábam előtt ült
egy madár, majd felröppent —
Nehezebb lettem.
A bird sat before my feet,
then flew up—
I grew heavier.
The poem has something of senryū’s comic machinery: a setup, a swift pivot, a landing. Yet the tone is quiet. The bird leaves, and the speaker absorbs the unexpected weight of that departure. An object disappears from the scene, and the void it leaves behind seems to pull on the scale.
Fodor uses the compactness and reversal associated with comic short verse to arrive somewhere entirely meditative. The joke does not disappear; it changes temperature.
※
As Makoto Ueda’s research demonstrates, early senryū was largely anonymous popular poetry. Precisely because classical scholars often regarded it as inferior entertainment, it preserved something other literary forms did not: the voices of ordinary people, their anxieties, jokes, domestic conflicts, petty rivalries, and observations about power.
Hungarian poetry absorbed this hybrid sensibility easily because it already had a native counterpart: the epigram. Vihar explicitly identifies the epigrammatic tradition as one reason Hungarian poets felt an affinity with Japanese short forms. Epigram and senryū share no common ancestor, but both place considerable trust in compression, reversal, and the power of the final turn. Senryū, then, was not simply an alien concept imported from across the globe. It offered Hungarian poets another dialect for an ironic game they already knew how to play.
This is partly a matter of political history. In Hungary, living through the mid-twentieth century, particularly during the government of János Kádár from the 1950s through the 1980s, meant living within a culture of censorship and controlled publication. Zsolt Czigányik has documented the mechanisms through which ideological considerations shaped Hungarian publishing and literary reception during the period. It would be too simple to claim that this history produced this broader Hungarian haiku tradition. It is more reasonable to ask whether habits of indirectness and attentive reading may have helped create a receptive environment for highly compressed poetry.
Whenever speech becomes fraught or public discourse carries a cost, the instinct to convey meaning through absence quietly returns. A readership already trained to hunt for subtext was uniquely prepared for a poetic form built around what is left unwritten.
Fodor’s famous piece Zárt kör (Closed Circle) plays directly on this instability:
Nyelved és nyelvem
megbeszélik egymással,
hogy mire nincs szó.
Your language and mine
talk it over—
what has no word.
In English translation, the poem appears to be a playful statement about two languages negotiating the limits of expression. But the Hungarian original carries another, more physical layer. The word nyelv means both “language” and “tongue.” And megbeszélik suggests an active negotiation: they “talk it over.”
Read this way, the poem stops being an abstract statement about linguistics and begins to describe two physical tongues attempting to work something out without words. Even the title refuses to settle into a single meaning. A closed circle can describe two cultures caught in mutual incomprehension; it can also evoke the shape made by two mouths meeting.
The poem does not specify what “has no word.” That silence is not merely an omission. It is the poem’s subject.
※
Grammar does a remarkable amount of work in these short texts. Hungarian is an agglutinative language: grammatical information such as possession, case, and derivational meaning can be attached directly to a word stem. In a very short poem, this can create forms whose semantic density would require a phrase in English. This grammatical compression turns out to be a natural ally of ugachi’s piercing economy: where Japanese senryū earns its ironic turn in a bare handful of syllables, Hungarian can fold an entire reversal into a single suffix.
Consider György Vermes’s piece published in kontinuum in 2021:
Őszülésemet
magam kopaszodással
ellensúlyoztam.
I myself countered
my graying
with going bald.
The single word őszülésemet can be analyzed as ősz (“gray”) + -ül (“become”) + -és (nominalizing suffix) + -em (“my”) + -et (object marker). English needs a phrase such as “my turning gray” or “my process of graying” to express roughly the same grammatical package.
Then kopaszodással performs a related trick: kopasz (“bald”) + the verbal/derivational material of kopaszodik (“become bald”) + the nominalizer -ás + the instrumental suffix -val/-vel, realized here as -sal.
The result is grammatically elegant and comic at the same time. Hair loss becomes the instrument by which the speaker claims to have counterbalanced his graying. Baldness is not presented as passive physical decay. It becomes a practical solution. Compressed into three lines, morphology itself becomes comic timing.
Ákos Fodor made an art of precisely these linguistic traps. Although he began publishing in the late 1970s, Akupunktúra established him as one of the defining practitioners of Hungarian short verse. The book contains 125 haikus, many of them operating like miniature philosophical mechanisms: a simple premise is laid down, and then a word, a line break, or a grammatical ambiguity shifts the ground beneath it.
One of his most quoted pieces carries its conceptual trap in its title:
3 negatív szó (3 Negative Words)
nincs
semmi
baj
(not / nothing / trouble)
Spoken aloud as a continuous phrase, nincs semmi baj is one of the most ordinary reassuring sentences in Hungarian: “there’s nothing wrong,” “don’t worry.” Broken across three lines and stripped of punctuation, those same words slow down. Nincs: there is not. Semmi: nothing. Baj: trouble.
The reader has to reconstruct the sentence one word at a time. Before the final word arrives, the three fragments can almost look ominous: absence, nothingness, trouble. Then the ordinary sentence snaps back into place.
The poem’s joke depends less on formal negation than on the collision between grammar and visual arrangement. Hungarian negative concord allows nincs and semmi to reinforce one another rather than cancel each other out. The title calls all three “negative words,” but the joke is precisely that only two are grammatically negative. The third is simply the thing being negated.
Fodor turns an entirely ordinary reassurance into a miniature suspense plot. The sentence is harmless. The lineation makes it briefly sinister.
Zoltán Kállay Kotász uses a similar economy in another poem:
„Menj a nagy kőig!”
Azóta is megyek, egyik
sem elég nagy.
Go as far as the big stone!
I’ve been walking ever since—
none of them big enough.
Literalism becomes a lifelong predicament. The speaker follows a casual instruction with unblinking dedication, continuing to walk because no stone he encounters seems quite large enough to qualify. He never questions the command. He questions the stones.
Read side by side, these four Hungarian poems share a single reflex, however different their subjects: a mundane premise, set up plainly, then turned—swiftly, drily—into something closer to senryū’s irony than to haiku’s contemplative pause.
※
Senryū’s institutional life has developed unevenly across the languages that adopted it. Japan established organized senryū associations in the twentieth century, including the Japanese Senryu Association, later reorganized as the All Japan Senryu Association. The English-language scene developed its own infrastructure: the Haiku Society of America has awarded prizes specifically for senryū since the 1980s, and Prune Juice, founded in 2009, became an international journal devoted to English-language senryū and related forms.
In Hungary, senryū has generally remained within the broader culture of haiku rather than developing a comparably strong separate institutional identity. There is, notably, the Hungarian Haiku Club—which carries no separate name for senryū, even as poets and scholars within it continue to recognize the distinction.
That may be less a failure of classification than a clue to something real. Many of the hallmarks of Hungarian short form in the Japanese tradition—the ironic turn, the piercing look at human folly, the swift grammatical reversal—would, by rights, be called senryū rather than haiku. The label suggests one thing. What Hungarian poets actually built underneath it suggests something else. A foreign poetic form becomes local not when writers reproduce its original conventions faithfully, but when they discover what the form can do in a new language—and in Hungary, what it did was quietly become senryū in every way but name.
Japanese short poetry did not simply preserve its ancient conventions. It encountered a literary environment already fluent in irony, epigrammatic compression, linguistic play, and the quiet art of knowing when to leave things out.
Two languages, as Fodor wrote, are still talking over what has no word.
Translation does not close the gap between them. It cannot, and probably should not try. What it can do, if it is any good, is make the gap visible—giving the reader a reason to stand there and look at it for a moment. Japanese short poetry did not learn a new trick in Hungarian so much as find a language already comfortable with leaving things out.
Somewhere inside that closed circle, the joke is still being told. No one has finished the last line—and perhaps no one was ever meant to.
All translations of the poems from the Hungarian are the author’s own.
Zsolt L. Rakusz is a Hungarian poet, writer, and visual artist based in Budapest. His work moves between hybrid prose and haikai forms shaped by Japanese tradition, attentive to the small shifts and quiet thresholds of everyday life. His English-language poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prune Juice Journal, Modern Haiku, Kingfisher Journal, Cattails, and Frogpond, and his haiga have appeared in DailyHaiga. He also serves as co-editor for the Hungarian section of Prune Juice’s upcoming language-themed issue.
In 2026, his haiku was named a Laureate in the “Arthropod Recyclers” category of Penn State’s international Hexapod Haiku Challenge.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
