Akutagawa & Autumn at Sankeien

Loose Leaves – Essays on Haiku

 

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:

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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)

 

 

*R.H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 4, Autumn-Winter (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1982 [1952]), pp. 1008-1009.