Before being hung on a rope, they left 17 syllables.

They wrote three short lines, like the life they had left.

They chose words to compose an intangible inheritance of agony, shame, regret, love, peace ... It depends.

It happened in Japan, where death deserves a previous act of honor. «Are you worried because you are about to die leaving so many things unfinished? Then, be courageous and compose a poem about death, ”slips an ancient Japanese tradition, which when fulfilled in a haiku lives in 17 syllables and (almost) always winks to nature.

So, before the abyss of disappearing, the prisoners sculpted in pencil their epitaph of sentenced.

If I had not been born ...

I think.

Long night.

They were in the cell or path of the gallows and gave birth to a poem.

A haiku

A haiku before hanging .

A haiku in death row, the last ink of the condemned.

"When I translated the book, I thought: 'What would I write if I were in death row?'" It is Elena Gallego, a Spanish philologist with 30 years of life and university in Japan that still shivers with the intimate metrics of the premuertos. Because, along with her PhD colleague in Philology Seiko Ota, this Burgos woman with a homeland in her passport and two in the bowels spent many months adapting an overwhelming book to Spanish: Haikus in the death row .

"Yes, after analyzing, understanding and translating it, I think I know the human soul better."

Several years ago, the Japanese publisher Kaiyosha compiled this handful of poems prior to hanging, a gigantic little book that Ediciones Hiperión later put to the shot of Spanish readers. «The Japanese publisher was interested in spreading the book and gave us the rights for free. You don't get rich with this, you almost have to invest. But it is so worth it that we embark on the adventure, ”says Gallego on a trip that has brought her to Spain.

We are facing 36 sentenced to death who fulfilled that so-called mandate of honor.

In 17 syllables.

As the philologist Fernando Rodríguez-Izquierdo suggests in the prologue, "it is equivalent to leaving a testament of the spirit (...) the human voice, rising in a song to life, before the proximity of the beyond". And as Gallego deduces here, «it reflects the last thought with the sword of Damocles on top, the torture of not knowing if they will be executed tomorrow or the day after, because some are notified hours before they are hanged (...) It is the mystery of the soul at the gates of death ».

In Japan no convict knows the date of his gallows. He can spend years in the corridor until one day an official enters the cell and tells him that he has hours left , something his family will know when he is already a corpse. The prisoner goes to a room where there are religious songs and is confessed by a priest.

Then he crosses the last door of his life: the execution room.

It is a room with wooden walls and padded floor. In the center there is a trapdoor with a rectangle painted red on the floor. The guard places the condemned on top of that gloomy geometry and knots a rope that hangs from a pulley fixed to the ceiling.

And from an adjoining room, three officials activate the trapdoor.

The law mandates that the executed must be hanging between one and five minutes, although they can be more. It is a time on demand of death .

This is how Japan runs, which since Shinzo Abe is prime minister (2012), has revived the death penalty and has been hanged for 38, the last two on August 2. No one knows if they wrote a final poem.

Haikus 36 in death row, yes.

The book orders the haikus by their theme, the marrow that each sentenced person chose for his farewell . And, inside, in the guts of each chapter, this chill manual discovers the haikus, their authors, the age at which they were executed and the misfortune of their torments, an explanation at the foot of the poem that Gallego and Ota also translated To help us understand better.

Rope, not to make it dirty]

I clean my neck.

Kan water.

He wrote it in the gelidity of the kan, the coldest time of the year, Kazuyuki, executed at age 31. Page 108: «The official to whom the shikishi was given (cardboard to write poems) felt that whoever wrote it was no longer a human being, but a divine existence, and his hands trembled inevitably. Everyone present at the execution was praying.

Elena Gallego says that this haiku sums up well the assumption of death. «It could be comic or cynical, but Kazuyuki writes from the bottom of his heart , because for some aggressors death is a liberation. It is a way of spitting out the poison they have been swallowed throughout their lives.

There are haikus about loneliness, like Kiyoshi's, hanged at 42:

Waiting

it's terrible;

spring darkness.

There are haikus about family ties, like Hatsuhisa's, executed at age 36:

Kaeribana

My son doesn't know

that I am sentenced to death].

There are haikus about guilt, like the one he wrote before the Kooyoo noose, hanged at age 28:

The water is tempered.

It can't be taken away from me

The dirt of the hands.

There are haikus about life, like that of Gyuuho, who obtained a postponement thanks to the abolitionists of the death penalty, but who ended up being executed at age 54:

The silence

he asks me about life].

Frost Night

There are haikus about the farewell, like the one Gyuuho wrote after hearing thunder at three in the morning and watching the rain hours before his execution:

Bad omen

inflames it raining

vertical rain and summer.

And, sometimes, there are haikus against transcendence, black humor to the Japanese, like the poem that Uichi wrote on the last day of his life, hanged at 27:

Execution tomorrow;

I even cut my nails],

Spring night

In this book there is only one exception. A gender exception. Not a woman's haiku because none appeared in the original book.

For everything else there is everything: executed 25 or 77 years old, men who killed their mother or put a bomb without discrimination, marginalized or integrated ...

But the same way to die: state execution.

- Can poetry be made against the death penalty?

- While working on the book I felt choking and suffocation . Sometimes I had to stop because it was so distressing. I have lived through the death penalty through literature and the book is a cry against it and the social conditions that generate violence and criminality, a cry for human rights.

I would like to shout ...

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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