14 Japanese rhythms. — San Francisco: Author's Edition, 1916. — 40 p.
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born in 1867 in Japan to a Japanese woman, Osada, and Carl Herman Oscar Hartmann, a German government and business official. Since his mother died a few months later, the young Hartmann was sent to Hamburg, Germany, with his brother Tanu, to be raised by his paternal grandmother and uncle. He came to the United States in 1882. In 1884 he met Walt Whitman, and in 1898 he met Alfred Stieglitz, two major influences on his life and work. Writing also under the name of Sydney Allen, beginning in 1902, Hartmann was prolific as a critic, poet, and dramatist. Many of his signficiant pieces appeared in Sticglitz’s Camera Notes and Camera Work. In 1902 his well known two volume, A History of American Art was published. In 1923 Hartmann moved to Los Angeles and attempted to become part of the Hollywood crowd. In 1938–1939 he built himself a small place near his daughter, Wistaria, in the California desert. He died on November 21, 1944, on a visit to his eldest daughter, Atma, in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The first of what was by 1950 dozens and by 2000 thousands of monographs devoted to English-language haiku or tanka. If Rexroth and Knox and Lawton are correct, at least some of these poems were written before the turn of the century, but if earlier versions exist they are in archives or the lost ‘fly-by-night periodicals’ mentioned by Pound (see above). The 1926 edition, limited to 100 copies, consists of mimeographed sheets of Hartmann’s rhymed versions of 11 tanka, 12 ‘haikai’, and 3 ‘dodoitsu’, with brief notes about each form. The copy at the Lilly Library at Indiana University is signed by Hartmann and inscribed in his hand, ‘To Ezra Pound. Greetings!’ Among the ‘haikai’ included is ‘Butterflies a-wing / Are you flowers returning / To your branch in spring?’
Hartmann was born in Japan of a Japanese mother to a German father, and was well educated in the waka of his country. I say 'waka' on purpose; his work shows no awareness with the reforms of Shiki, the Tekkans, or other modernizers who transformed waka into tanka. What we have here is Hartmann's attempt to adapt the highly mannered waka of his day into English-and he succeeds. Painfully well.
Hartmann regarded tanka solely as a literary form defined solely by the pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, what we call 'sanjuichi' ('thirty-one') these days. Unfortunately, a mere five years later, Jun Fujita, also born in Japan and well educated, would criticize those who count syllables for having adopted the 'carcass' but not the 'essence' of Japanese poetry.
Hartmann correctly identified lyricism as essential to the classical Japanese waka, and his works in English are beautifully metered and rhymed lyrics that are lush and beautiful-until one stops to contemplate the banal, hackneyed, mannered, and utterly irrelevant content. His adoption of an artificial and archaic poetic diction perfectly mirrors waka as it was written at the end of the 19th century, before the tanka reforms transformed this zombie literature into a living and breathing creative art form.