THE SADNESS IN THE GRASSES

A hokku by Bashô in unusual 7-7-5 form in Japanese:

Hana mina kare-te aware o kobosu kusa no tane
Flowers all wither (-ed) sadness o drop grass ’s seed

Flowers all have withered;
The sadness in the grasses
Shedding their seeds.

Bashô is expressing the feeling common to most Japanese “Autumn” verse — the sense of things withering, dying, coming to an end.  He sees the cycle of life continuing in the grasses (“grasses” in hokku means not only grass but also other plants and weeds) dropping their seeds, but he knows too that this is just another part of the turning Wheel of Existence, birth and death, birth and death, on and on.  The “sadness” he feels is a sadness for the fleeting Nature of all existence, “…one season following another, laden with happiness and tears.”  In the autumn, it is the tears we often are most aware of, the endings rather than the beginnings.

This hokku is titled (but hokku should not require titles!) “The Old Garden.” It is not only very much like waka in tone and feeling, but also reminiscent of Chinese verse.

David

HOKKU THAT DO NOT TRAVEL

There are large numbers of Japanese hokku best read in Japan.  By that I mean that they are so very culturally Japanese that they make little sense and have little effect outside of Japan.  They “do not travel well,” as we say in the hokku community. 

On the other hand, there are some Japanese hokku that — by chance — fit a circumstance in another culture that, while not identical to the Japanese circumstance, nonetheless corresponds enough in some respect to make the verse effective.  An example is:

Furu inu ga saki ni tatsu nari haka-mairi
Old dog ga head at going is grave-visiting

The old dog
Leads the way;
Visiting the graves.

Though this verse by Issa refers to the August O-Bon celebration, it could easily transfer to America as referring either to Memorial Day (“Decoration Day” as it often used to be called) or to any visiting of a family grave.  But it is of course more in harmony in a late summer or autumn setting.

And then there are verses which, though Japanese, are so universal that the following hokku by Gyôdai could have been written in Appalachia:

Aki no yama tokorodokoro ni kemuri tatsu
Autumn ’s mountain (s) here-there at smoke rises-up

The autumn mountains;
Here and there
Smoke rises.

Incidentally, the word tatsu, used in both verses, has a range of meanings including “stand,” “rise up,” and in the combination saki ni tatsu it means to “go at the head,” “to lead.”

When we write new hokku, we should of course write within our culture.  As I always say, American hokku should be thoroughly American, Japanese hokku thoroughly Japanese, Finnish hokku thoroughly Finnish.  Hokku written today should never try to pretend to another culture.  Instead they should express the language and culture and geo-biological  environment in which they are written.  But when translating old Japanese hokku — particularly those that do not travel well, one must pay very close attention to the cultural context.  It is of course perfectly acceptable to adapt a given verse to another culture — translating “floor” instead of tatami for example — as I often do for teaching purposes.   But generally the reader should be made aware in such cases that the translation is an adaptation that does not precisely reflect the original.

David

WITHERED SHIKIMI

I hope the reader has gathered from previous postings here that there is nothing mysterious or esoteric or difficult about cutting words.  To translate them one must simply consider both the cutting word and the syntax of the Japanese in the verse — this will tell us where to cut in English.

Further, there is really nothing done by a cutting word in a Japanese original that cannot be conveyed in English through appropriate punctuation and the use of vocabulary.  English provides punctuation and emphatic words, and either or both may be used when appropriate.  But one must also keep in mind the tendency among novices to overestimate the effect of certain cutting words such as kana, which can vary from nil to the mildly emphatic.  In this as in translation in general, much will depend upon the innate sensibilities of the translator to understand not only a single hokku, but more importantly to understand hokku in general and its underlying principles and techniques.

And now a simple and apparently anonymous hokku:

Furu haka ya aka-tombo tobu kareshikimi
Old-grave ya; red-dragonfly flies dry-shikimi 

This is a very good hokku and simple in construction. 

Furu is “old,” haka is “grave.”  Ya indicates a strong pause so that the reader may see and experience the setting.  Aka is “red,” tombo “dragonfly.”  Tobu is “flies” and kare “dry,” “withered.”  Shikimi (Illicium anisatum) is little known in America and Europe, but in Japan it is a shrub to tree-sized plant with sweet-smelling white blossoms; flowering sprays of Shikimi are customarily used as Buddhist offerings and in cemeteries. 

Old graves;
Red dragonflies flit
Above the withered shikimi.

“Above” is of course implied in the original.  We do not translate tobu literally and simply as ”fly” because that would be an awkward repetition of the “-flies” in “dragonflies,” and “flit” is appropriately descriptive; but in addition,  the repetition of “f” sounds in the English translation gives us the faint sound of their wings.

The shikimi here is in the form of withered sprays left as offerings on the graves.  That, along with furu — “old,” contributes to the overall feeling of age, of the declining yang and growing yin of autumn — the transience and passing of all things; and in harmony with these is the autumnal color of the red dragonflies dryly flitting to and fro above the tombstones.

David

 

CUTTING AND “KANA”

Those who have followed this site up to now may sometimes wonder why a “cut” is found in a given hokku when no internal “cutting word” is obvious in the original — yet the verse ends with the particle kana.  An example is Ryôkan’s

Taku hodo wa kaze ga mote-kuru ochiba kana
Kindle that-much wa wind ga brings-to fallen-leaves kana

In Japanese, the natural grammatical break occurs after mote-kuru – ”brings in” or “brings here,” loosely.   We can see that the verse ends with the conclusive particle kana (which can also function as a cutting word), and as a general rule of thumb,  when kana is found at the end of the final line, the internal break in English is to be placed just before the noun preceding kana. 

So we can translate Ryôkan’s verse now, though we shall have to move things around a bit:

The wind
Brings enough for a fire –
Fallen leaves.

Very simple, very straightforward.

The same occurs in this verse by Bashô:

Ochikochi ni taki no oto kiku ochiba kana
Far-near at waterfall ’s sound hear fallen-leaves kana

That translates in the same manner, with syntax and the conclusive particle again pointing to the position of the cut, which as in the previous example is found just before the noun preceding kana.

Far and near
The waterfalls’ sound is heard;
Fallen leaves.

We could also, of course, make “waterfall” singular.

And of course the same arrangement is found in Buson’s

Nishi fukaba higashi ni tamaru ochiba kana
West blow-if east at gather fallen-leaves kana

If the west blows,
They gather in the east –
Fallen leaves.

There again the cut comes just before the noun preceding kana.

That is something we see over and over again in hokku, for example in Bashô’s verse in a previous posting:

Kumo oriori hito wo yasumuru tsukimi kana
Clouds sometimes people wo rest moon-look kana

In that, just as in the preceding examples, the final kana correctly points us to the correct position for the cut — again preceding the noun followed by kana — in this case tsukimi  “moon viewing,” which here functions as a noun.

So we get:

Clouds sometimes
Give people a rest;
Moon viewing.

Of course that is a rather literal translation.  Instead of “sometimes” we could say “now and then,” “from time to time,” “off and on,” etc., just as we could say “give people a pause,” “give people a break,” and so forth.  But our purpose here is to convey the meaning of the originals, and when I give a loose translation departing substantially from the original, I will generally say so.

Now let’s take a look at another kana variation.  We have seen that in general, a cut should come before the noun preceding kana.  That is the case in many hokku.  But what about a case in which several words — generally three — form a syntactical whole, yet precede a final kana.  Where does the cut appear in such a case?  Here is an example by Kyoroku:

Kankin no ma wo asagao no sakari kana
Chant-sutra ’s time wo morning-face ’s height kana

Obviously we cannot simply cut before the noun preceding kana because “asagao no sakari” –”morning glory’s height” is not separable.  Nonetheless we can see that the ending kana still reveals that there is a break before the syntactical whole preceding it — before “morning glory’s height” (asa = morning, gao = face,  together meaning “morning glory”).  We cannot use the particle no, which ends the element of seven phonetic units — because to do so would make no sense in English.  So instead we look to the natural break the final syntactical whole provides, and work from there:

While chanting sutras,
The morning glories
Are at their peak.

That gives us the break in English precisely where the cut signalled by taking the ending kana would come, in this case considering asagao no sakari –  “morning glory’s height” as the syntactically-whole ”noun” in our usual rule of thumb that to find the cut, we simply place it before the noun preceding the final kana.

Nonetheless, one must examine hokku case by case.  There are more complex examples in which Japanese syntax must dictate the cut rather than this simple rule of thumb.

David

CLOUDS SOMETIMES….

An autumn hokku by Bashô:

Kumo oriori hito wo yasumuru tsukimi kana
Clouds sometimes people wo rest moon-look kana

It is important to mention that when literally translated word-for-word, as above, hokku usually look remarkably dull and uninteresting.  That is because even a literal translation does not give the effect of reading in Japanese — and hokku is primarily a read, a visual rather than a heard or aural verse form. 

In Japanese we can follow the flow of the hokku through the guidance of grammatical particles and grammar in general; in English, which is structurally quite different and is governed more by word order, that is not possible or practical.  That is why I think some translators of old hokku, influenced by modern haiku practice, make a fundamental error in omitting punctuation, which provides the necessary guidance in English.  They assume, incorrectly in my view, that syntax alone will adequately guide the reader.  But only a little experience in reading modern haiku demonstrates that this does not and has never worked well, and that it is disastrous when applied to the translation of old hokku

So knowing this, there are two things to keep in mind:  First, reading a word-for-word translation does not mean one is getting the same effect as reading it in the original language.  And second, when translating hokku from one language to another, one must follow the structure and grammar and other guiding elements of the language into which the verse is translated, including punctuation, to properly convey the original. 

Hokku consist of two parts, one longer and one shorter.  The shorter part is often the setting, meaning the wider environment in which something happens.  In many hokku the setting comes first; but in this one, instead of short/long, we have long/short.  So in translating we must begin with the longer part, which is:

Kumo oriori hito wo yasumuru

Kumo means “cloud,” but we usually translate it as “clouds” because they tend to manifest in multiples; oriori means “sometimes,” “now and then”; hito means “person” or “people.”  Wo is a grammatical particle indicating that the word preceding it, hito or “people” is the object of the action of a verb, and we see that the verb is yasumuru, meaning to “give a rest” or “give a pause.”

Now we are ready to begin assembling our translation:  Our first two lines — the longer part of the hokku — will read

Clouds sometimes
Give people a rest;

Note that we follow the longer part with appropriate punctuation to divide it from the shorter part.   Then we move on to the third line, which provides the setting and pulls the entire hokku together:

Tsukimi kana

That first word is composed of tsuki, “moon,” and mi, the Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese character that means “to look.”  So Tsuki-mi, “moon looking,” means actually looking at the moon, watching the moon, moon viewing.  Moon viewing was a popular pastime in the Japan of Bashô’s era; people would gather to appreciate the beauty of the full moon of autumn.

We need only mention the final kana, which is often used as a “cutting word” in hokku.  It has no inherent meaning of its own other than drawing attention to what precedes it — adding a feeling of emphasis in other words, but I also think that many writers used it simply to fill out the requisite number of phonetic units required for a hokku in Japanese.  As it is used here, it is described as a “conclusive” or “ending” particle.

Our entire hokku can now be seen as:

Clouds sometimes
Give people a rest;
Moon viewing.

The hokku shows us people who have gathered in the evening to watch and appreciate the moon; they are so intent in their appreciation — really working at it – that when a cloud momentarily passes over the face of the moon, it allows them a few moments to relax their attention before the beautiful moon appears once more. 

This hokku enables the reader to appreciate that, as pleasant as beauty is, there is pleasure too in its absence.  As the Dao De Jing says in so many words, it is only by its absence that people can know beauty, and also

 “…by the existence of things we profit.
And by the non-existence of things we are served.”
(Lin Yutang’s translation)

And yet this hokku is not a moral or ethical lesson. It has no meaning beyond this simple fact:

 

 

 

 

Clouds sometimes
Give people a rest;
Moon viewing.

David

DREAM PEOPLE PASS

Buson was a painter, and unfortunately his painting at times too strongly affected his hokku, making them fanciful and “romantic.”

An example is his verse:

Asagiri ya e ni kaku yume no hito-dôri
Morning-mist ya picture in paint dream’s people-street

Asa is “morning”; giri/kiri is “mist” or “fog”; ya is a cutting word that makes us pause to see and experience the morning mist, which becomes our first line in English:

Morning mist;

An e is a picture or painting; ni is a locative particle meaning generally “in,” “at,” ”on,” or “with this circumstance.”  Kaku means ”write,” “draw,” or “paint”; yume is ”dream”; no is a genitive particle, like “-’s” in English; hito is ”person, people,” and dôri means “street”; when we combine the latter two into hito-dôri, the meaning of the compound is “pedestrian traffic,” or as we would say today, “foot traffic.”

Now we can translate the entire verse into English:

First, a more literal version:

Morning mist;
Painted into a picture –
Dream people passing.

And more fluidly:

Morning mist:
Dream people pass
In a painting.

The mist becomes the “canvas” on which we see a dream painting of people passing by, partly hidden by the mist, partly revealed – all silent and ghost-like.

As poetry it is not at all bad, but as hokku it is too much of an involved simile — “People passing in the morning mist are like a painted picture of people in a dream.”  In short, it makes a better Western “romantic” poem than a hokku. 

Buson was not the last to mix painting and hokku, in fact it was his later admirer, Masaoka Shiki, who decided near the end of the 19th century that a hokku — or rather his newly created version of it which he called “haiku” — should be a kind of illustration or sketch from Nature.  It was a wrong turn in history that nearly destroyed hokku.

David

AUTUMN HOKKU BY VARIOUS WRITERS

There is a pleasant verse by Baikin:

Meigetsu ni nani wo isogu zo hokakebune
Bright-moon at why wo hurry zo sailing-ship

Mei means “bright,” and getsu “moon.”  But that alone does not tell us all we need to know, because that term is specifically used for the Harvest Moon of autumn.  If we add the locative (think of it as “locator”) particle ni, we have the first line:

Meigetsu ni = Bright moon at

That means what follows takes place under the condition of a bright Harvest Moon (remember that ni, can mean “at,” “on,” “in,” or even ”with a certain circumstance”  That circumstance here is the moon in the sky.  So we can translate simply:

The Harvest Moon;
or
A Harvest Moon;
or we could be more lengthy:
Beneath the Harvest Moon;

Usually shorter is better, and it will be obvious from the three-word version that what follows is taking place beneath that moon, so we need not say it in full.

The second line begins a question, so we know immediately that this is a “question” hokku, one that does not expect an answer.  And that question starts with

nani wo isogu zo
why wo hurry zo

Wo is a grammatical particle with no real meaning, and zo is a particle indicating emphasis.   So we can see a question is being asked as to why someone or something is hurrying.  To find out what that is, we must go to the last line:

Hokakebune = sailing (hokake) ship (bune/fune)

Now we can translate the hokku completely:

A Harvest Moon;
Why are you hurrying so,
Sailing ship?

The writer is looking down on the sea with the bright Harvest Moon shining on its waters.  In the moonlight he sees the sails of ship hastening from somewhere to somewhere, and a question comes — where is it going and why so quickly in the peaceful moonlight of autumn?

Blyth, in discussing this hokku, quotes a similar, beautiful, and very Tolkienesque line from English verse:

Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding….

And he could have added another, also from the same poem (A Passer-By, Robert Bridges):

 Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?

***

There is a very good hokku by Ryuho:

Tsuki-kage wo kumi koboshikeri chôzubachi
Moon-light wo scoop spill hand-water-basin

Tsuki is the moon; kage is light, but it can also mean a shadow or reflection; wo is a grammatical particle indicating that what precedes it is the object of an action. 

To find out what that action is, we must go to the second line,

kumi koboshi-keri

Kumi is to scoop something up; koboshi is to spill it, and keri can indicate a completed action, but it also functions as a cutting word separating the last line from the rest.   So now we are ready to translate the first two lines:

Moonlight –
Scooping it up and spilling it;

And then comes the final line:

chôzubachi

Literally chô is “hand”; zu is “water” ; but together chôzu means washwater, water used for washing. A bachi/hachi is a bowl or basin or pot.  We can translate it simply as

The washbasin.

And now we can put it all together for the complete hokku:

Moonlight –
Scooping it up and spilling it;
The washbasin.

We could also move things around a bit and translate it like this:

Scooping up moonlight
And spilling it;
The washbasin.

In my book I did a very loose version more applicable to other kinds of pots and basins:

Moonlight;
It fills and spills
From the basin.

That is actually a kind of variation on the original.  But we can be a bit more faithful to Ryuho’s basin and yet be fluid in our translation:

Scooping up
And spilling the moon;
The washbasin.

We are standing at the washbasin by night.  The moon shines in its water.  We dip our hands in, and holding them together, we lift the shivering moon out of the basin, and then let it spill back.

There is something very profound about a verse like this that we sense on reading it but cannot put into words; it has to do with the nature of reality and our perceptions of it, but talking about it only takes us away from the effect of the hokku, and the effect is where we should stay on reading it.

***

A verse by Issa:

Mi no aki wa tsuki wa mukizu no tsuki nagara
Life’s autumn ya moon wa perfect no moon and-yet

Mi can have a range of meanings from body to thoughts to self to life.  It reminds one, in fact, of the description of the “self” as a psychophysical construct, a combination of body and thoughts.  But we will simplify it here to “life,” because that is apparently how Issa used it in a number of hokku.  Ya as you have seen from previous postings is a cutting word giving the reader a pause in which to take in and experience what has been presented.   So we may translate the first line as: 

The autumn of life

And yet that is not entirely what Issa meant; one might mistake it as signifying the twilight years of Issa, yet it is more than that.  What he really means is ”this is my life in this particular autumn.”  So it would be better understood as:

My life this autumn;

Then he goes on to say,

Tsuki wa mukizu no tsuki

Tsuki is “the moon”; wa is a particle referring us back to tsuki — “the moon” as the subject of discussion; mukizu means “perfect,” “flawless”; no is a particle linking the adjective to tsuki, so a mukizu no tsuki is a “perfect moon.”  We can translate the first and second lines together as tentatively:

Life this autumn;
The moon is a perfect moon,

We did not really need the “my,” which Issa himself did not include here, because we understand it is the writer referring to his own life.  And then comes the usual Issa feeling that the football is likely to be pulled away before the foot of the kicker touches it:

Nagara….
And yet….

So all together we have:

Life this autumn;
The moon is a perfect moon,
And yet….

That “and yet” is the perpetual cry of the unenlightened mind.  It is the “Et in Arcadia ego” found inscribed on stone in what seemed to be a paradise – ”I am also in Arcadia” — meaning there is always a fundamental flaw, always something to go wrong.  It is like the person who says all biographies end the same — with a death.  And that is the world as it is, as Issa knew full well.  It is a beautiful autumn; the moon appears to be a perfect moon; and yet….

Blyth very wisely tells us that this hokku “is to be completed entirely in the feelings, not by any intellectual cogitations.”  He is exactly right, because any explanation fails to give us the full effect of that simple nagara — “and yet…” that Issa used in a number of verses for precisely that effect.

In my view we can simplify the hokku further, can make it perhaps a bit less of Issa but a bit more as a hokku:

This autumn;
The moon is a perfect moon,
And yet….

In Buddhist literature the moon signifies enlightenment, but Issa’s hokku is the unenlightened mind that always wants more; yet more, even if one were to have it, is ultimately never enough, and as Issa knew through his difficult life, one is unlikely to get it in any case.

 
***

 

BEGINNING AN ARCHIVE OF HOKKU

In the next few days I hope to begin posting articles here that will function as an archive for those who want to better understand old Japanese hokku and how they are translated into English.  Such information, while not at all necessary for those who want to write hokku in English today, is nonetheless useful in showing what the old hokku really was, and in dispelling many of the myths about it put forth by the self-created pundits of modern haiku, who for far too long have promoted modern haiku at the expense of what was really hokku — the brief verse form written by Onitsura and Bashô in the 17th century and practiced all the way up to the end of the 19th century, when the revisionism of Masaoka Shiki began the great confusion that resulted in hokku being nearly forgotten and abandoned.

David Coomler