Loose Leaves – Essays on Haiku
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| Akutagawa Ryūnosoke (1892-1927) |
Last December, during a visit to
Sankeien, near Yokohama, I came across a haiku written by a famous Japanese
writer, Akutagawa Ryūnosoke (1892-1927). The haiku was about a visit he made to
these lovely gardens in the autumn of 1915. Akutagawa included the poem in a letter
he wrote to the son of the garden’s founder shortly after his visit:
ひとはかり浮く香煎（こうせん）や白湯（さゆ）の秋
ひとはかり | うくこうせんや
| さゆのあき
Hito
wa kari | uku kousen ya | sayu no aki
-
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 1915. 三溪園 (さんけいえん)
I found the haiku reproduced on an
information board about the Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋),
a small hexagonal wooden teahouse in Sankeien, where a black iron pot used to hang
from the ceiling, heated by a fire. Here, Akutagawa notes in his letter, tea
was served during his visit by a woman, as shown in the accompanying postcard:
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| Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋) |
The information board provides a
translation of his haiku in English:
A
spoonful of tea / herbal tea and hot water / float through autumn air
However, this is an inelegant, and
somewhat tautological, translation of what I think is a very deftly and densely-layered
haiku. I asked my wife, who is Japanese, what she thought of this translation.
She agreed, there’s a lot more going on in the original Japanese. But, how to
capture all of the elements of Akutagawa’s haiku in English?
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| Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋) Information Panel |
Modern English haiku, as it is
represented in most of the leading contemporary English language haiku
magazines and journals, tends to eschew the 5-7-5 syllable structure as “too
wordy” and cumbersome when compared to Japanese haiku. But here, as I soon
discovered, we have a haiku in Japanese which is so tightly and compactly layered
it is supremely difficult to render it into English and do the original poem
justice. Consequently, it posed a challenge to me which I simply could not let
go. Over the course of the next week or so, I kept coming back to the haiku and
tinkering with it – trying to see if I could come up with a better English version.
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| Yoshida Hiroshi - Sankeien (1935) |
Checking the website of Sankeien, I
found there the original poem was given again. When I clicked on the automatic
translation function of my web browser my computer rendered the haiku into the
following English version, which was a slight improvement on the one printed on
the information board:
Autumn
of floating incense and white-hot water
This prompted me to try using
Google Translate, which perhaps fared slightly better still, giving me:
A
delicate incense floats, and plain hot water — autumn
These two computer translations
succeed in giving the haiku a more poetic tone, perhaps – but they are still
too literal. In essence, neither of them is poetry. So clearly, we need
to start afresh. And the best way to do this is to begin with a genuine literal
translation:
one
small-scoop/measure | floating kousen | hot (white) water of autumn
Two points to note here are as
follows: 1. 香煎茶 kousencha is tea made from powdered green tea or roasted
barley flour, with spices and herbs (such as kelp, red shiso, and dried plum),
and 2. ひとすくい [一掬い] hitosukui
is a small ornamental spoon (usually written using kana alone). These two
elements each convey a wealth of input to the original haiku. One implies a
small measure [a spoonful] of something [tea] which expands out into something
far larger and more diffuse, hence the poem speaks of ‘floating’ – which is
perhaps why the automatic translations appear to default to the term ‘incense’
even though the word incense is not actually used in the poem. My wife thought this
aspect of the poem referred more to the very small grains of powdered tea which
were ‘suspended’ in the ‘sayu’ or ‘white-hot’ water, perhaps suggesting both
fresh, pure water and white steam at the same time. Consequently, reading this
haiku in Japanese, we get a double suggestion of the fragrance of the tea as
well as the visual of watching the tea slowly dissolving into both the hot
water and the air, most likely in the form of the rising steam and smoke
from the fire boiling the water in its iron pot. As such, the tea and the
open-sided wooden teahouse become the essence of autumn itself as it is experienced
by the senses of sight and smell. In this manner, the haiku makes us feel
autumn.
But that makes for a lot of separate
elements to cram into an English translation of this haiku! – Breaking the
haiku down, we need to include the following: 1. The smallness of a measured
spoonful; 2. The spiced tea powder (kousencha); 3. The expansive notion
of floating or suspension; 4. The white-hotness of water; 5. The association of
the water (and all these separate elements) with autumn (kigo). Given
the quantity and complexity of these components, I found it very hard to distil
everything down into a suitably brief and spare, free-form haiku. But, wanting to
avoid excessive “wordiness”, I decided it was best to add the limitation
of crafting the translation into a 5-7-5 structure. In doing so, I thought that
this would give the poem some sort of order as well as limiting its length
within the somewhat traditional confines of a 5-7-5 haiku. Within those
confines, of course, as always with haiku there are further divisions which
need to be employed for greater expressive effect, such as splitting the haiku
either into units of two (using a kiregi), or three (the standard three
lines of 5-7-5), or, ideally a combination of both. Working five elements into such
expressive divisions is the real challenge in translating this particular
haiku. In the end, I went through more than 33 iterations before I settled on a
version which I thought worked reasonably well. This took me from my first
spare and impressionistic (free-form) rendering of:
Scent
and sediment / suspended – / autumn’s hot water.
To my final, 5-7-5 rendering of:
Infused
with white steam – / a pinch of spiced tea gently / drifts into Autumn.
I’ve anguished a lot over whether
nor not ‘drifts’ should be ‘floats’ – and it could easily be either; but, in
the end, I felt that ‘drifts’ better serves as a bridge between the parallel
inference of both the water-soluble and the airborne aspects of
the poem’s central allusion. To my mind, ‘floats’ works well for the air, but
otherwise it rather implies something simply borne on the surface of the water,
rather than something equally suffused or suspended within the water and
the air. Hence, recalling that old nostrum of earth and heaven: “As above, so
below,” – to my mind, in both eye and
ear – ‘drifts’ successfully carries both connotations; as well as perhaps also a
third, which is that sensual experience of the two combined in a feeling,
as I described it earlier on, when I first broke down the essential elements of
the original poem, i.e. – its autumnal essence.
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| Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋) |
In his letter to his friend,
Akutagawa described this haiku as being ‘commonplace,’ meaning he thought it too
conventional or unoriginal. Nevertheless,
110 years after it was first written, I think his poem is actually a very
subtle and deft work of art. It is an exemplary haiku. It manages to do what
the most challenging haiku strive to achieve, which is to embody and express a multitude
(of images, ideas, and/or sensations through associations, suggestions, and allusion)
in the simplest and sparest of forms.
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| Yoshida Hiroshi - Teahouse (1938) |
In concluding his pioneering four-volume
survey of Japanese haiku, the scholar, R.H. Blyth, observed: “The three-line
translation [of haiku] obscures something fundamental in the originals,
something that belongs to the Japanese mind, the Japanese language and the
literature it produced and which produced it. We see it in linked poems, in the
puns of the language of Nō[h], in the empty spaces of pictures,
the absence of things in rooms, the silences of conversation. This ‘something’
is a certain continuity, a lack of division, a feeling of the whole when
dealing with the parts.”* – I think this reflection sums up very well the
challenge of translating Akutagawa’s haiku about a simple little wooden tea
house at Sankeien into English in a way which attempts to do justice to the dense
complexity, and yet also the light and buoyant subtlety, of his original poem.
ひとはかり浮く香煎（こうせん）や白湯（さゆ）の秋
Infused
with white steam –
a
pinch of spiced tea gently
drifts
into Autumn.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 1915. 三溪園 (さんけいえん)
translated by Tim Chamberlain, 2025. 三溪園 (さんけいえん)
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*R.H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 4, Autumn-Winter (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1982 [1952]), pp. 1008-1009.
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