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Transformations

akadana no   kiku kazashi yuku   nezumi kana

RHBlyth’s translation of this haiku by Takamasa reads:-

   A rat goes on to the Buddhist altar
His head ornamented
   With chrysanthemum flowers.

The image of the rat on the Buddhist altar is an exciting one and we wonder what the next image will do to heighten the tension. We then learn that the rat’s head is ornamented with chrysanthemum flowers. This image adds a picturesque touch of colour and beautifies the rat, but is otherwise pointless, since the rat has already been ‘beautified’ by its contact with the Buddhist altar.

The original sequence of images is:-

The Buddhist altar -
its chrysanthemum flowers crown
the rat.

In Blyth’s version the point is disclosed in the first line; and yet even there the point is a weak one. Why? Because the image awaits transformation. All the ‘earth line’ does is state a simple fact: there’s a rat on the altar.

In Takamasa’s poem the image of the ‘earth line’ is transformed in the second line (the ‘line of action and feeling’): on the altar there are chrysanthemum flowers which crown - what? The revelation, in line 3, that it’s a rat, injects an emotional shock into the pleasant picture we have composed for ourselves in our inner eye. The meaning has been revealed where it should be revealed - at the end. The pyramid is complete.

yukiore ya    mukashi ni kaeru    kasa no hone

This haiku by Shoi becomes in Blyth’s translation:-

       Broken with snow,
The frame of a bamboo umbrella
       Reveals its original form.

The picture undergoes a very suggestive transformation in this haiku. The snow has broken a bamboo umbrella, but the snow also allows the original form of the umbrella to re-emerge. The umbrella is first deformed and then reformed before our inner eye, although in reality the broken frame lies abandoned in the snow and beyond repair. The whole transformation takes place in the reader’s mind.

The sequence of images in the original is another, but in this case I wonder whether Blyth’s version is not preferable. The original, so it seems to me, requires a mental leap backwards, to the second line, before the point can be fully grasped:-

Broken with snow
the form reappears
of the umbrella frame.

Let us next look at a haiku by Issa:-

hana no kage    aka no tanin wa    nakari ken

of which Blyth makes:-

     Under the cherry blossom
None are
     Utter strangers.

The second line is left hanging in the air. Our thoughts find no foothold until the third line. The last word, strangers, leaves us with a negative impression. The original sequence of images is:-

In the shadow of the cherry blossom
complete strangers
there are none.

The point is in the transformation of the picture: in the second line we see ‘complete strangers’, but in the third line their strangeness is swept away.

The words in the first line (no kage = in the shadow of) can also mean ‘protected by’ or ‘thanks to’. The word ‘shadow’ is thus more ambivalent in Japanese than in English. Henderson has taken both these meanings into account in his interpretation:-

Thanks to cherry blossom,
            in its shadow utter strangers -
                         there are none.

This attempt to derive two concepts from one word is not particularly successful, since the first concept neutralises the second: ‘thanks to’ cancels out the dark threatening element in the idea of ‘shadow’. The point in the original is that the ‘shadow’ is coloured by its surroundings. Together with hana no (cherry blossom) the shadow is light and dancing. It grows darker with aka no tanin (utter strangers), only to become lighter again in the final line.