Wednesday, December 3

Borrowed lines









Borrowed from Basho:


見るところ花にあらずと云ふことなし、
Miru tokoro hana ni arazu to iu koto nashi,
There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;


My interpretation:



a day without flowers
is like a year without sun
a life without love





This is all very nice and sweet, but...doesn't tally with the Jane Reichhold essay.
So, I'll start again:





bitterly cold
the North wind does not reach
where the pheasant sits





Now I have the two parts. Still a mental connection between the single and the double though.
bitterly cold sets the scene and gives the reasoning behind the pheasant sitting in its preferred spot.


Often these 'dabs of paint' inside a translated haiku seem to have little or no connection. Obviously cultural differences between the Japanese and European societies play an important role here. There can be so many inside jokes that we as outsiders are not aware of. But I feel certain that for us writing these gems there is absolutely no reason to introduce deliberate obscurities of understanding and relationship between the fragment and the phrase.


Reading one of J.Reichhold's translations I once more tumbled into a quandary:

old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water


Yes, but.....
here we have one of the vagaries of English syntax:
these lines can be read two different ways:

old pond (that) a frog jumps into------ [ phrase 1]
the sound of water----------------------[ fragment 1]
or:
old pond--------------------------------[ fragment 2 ]
a frog jumps into the sound of water----[ phrase 2 ]

I hope this mirror image juxtaposition is a mere fluke, and not a requirement, or this whole thing would be out of my reach.

















Written for a prompt at CarpeDiem

4 comments:

B i r g i t t a said...

I like the first one a lot :)

PirateGunn said...

A very interesting treatise and study. Enjoyed very much.

rallentanda said...

flowers and love
not much of a life
without them

Anonymous said...

Hello Girl Friday --

Not a requirement, but it shows Basho's genius, doesn't it? :)

Having that interchangeable 1st/3rd line makes it more likely though.

Really enjoyed the pheasant haiku -- has all the feel of a classical haiku. Very nicely done!

And it's good to follow along with a poet's thinking processes -- very enjoyable.