World of Dew

I just set up a blog. Out of pure boredom. But I thought I would kick it off with the haiku that gives rise to the title.

Japanese:
tsuyu no yo wa
tsuyu no yo nagara
sari nagara

Donald Keene's translation:
The world of dew
Is a world of dew, and yet
And yet...

The author is Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) and he wrote this haiku after his child, a daughter named Sato, died of smallpox. She was just over one year old. His life was a long itinerancy, full of hardship which he both realized and infused with tongue-in-cheek humor. I remember reading his book The Spring of My Life one late night alone in the NYU library when I was supposed to be studying law.

The translator is Donald Keene, a professor at Columbia University and a sensitive and prolific translator of Japanese literature. I've read some of his other translations-- the titles escape my mind at present, although it might have been Mori Ogai's "Vita Sexualis". His translations stand out in my mind as some of the best of Japanese, akin to Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives one a profound sense of insecurity about both one's ability to be comprehensive and to remember anything. No matter how much I remember about Issa (and it's not much), there's some PhD student studying Issa's use of geese imagery that has posted a critical analysis of his life and work that far outshadows anything I could offer.

And no matter how much one can pretend that a blog is a journal, it's not. It's blatantly exhibitionist and at least at the opening stages, it's awkward as hell.

But I will soldier on and offer some other Issa, because one poem in isolation is like a wave without its fellows-- it feels lonely:

Issa:
ware to kite
asobe ya oya no
nai suzume

Keene's translation:
Come with me
Let's play together, swallow
Without a mother

Issa:
ore to shite
niramekura suru
kawazu kana

Locked in a staring contest
me . . . and a frog

Issa:
suzume ko mo
ume ni kuchi aku
nebutsu kana

The little sparrows
They open their mouths at the plum tree—
This too is worship.

Issa:
uguisu ya
doroashi nuguu
ume no hanaa

The nightingale wipes
His muddy feet . . .
Plum blossoms

Issa:
yo no naka wa
jigoku no ue no
hanami kanain

This world
Over hell, viewing
Spring blossoms

Issa:
negaeri wo
suru zo soko noke
kirigirisu

Look out!
I’m going to turn now—
Move over, Cricket!

Issa:
yasegaeru
makeru na
kore ni ari

scrawny frog, fight on!
Issa Issa
to the rescue

For more information on Kobeyashi Issa, see http://www.modernhaiku.org/bookreviews/IssaBooks2004.html