Leaning megalith
all that remains
a civilisation’s entire dreams
Now to be gawped at by tourists.
Nobody really knows how old the Bada megaliths are, or who made them, or even why they're there. They date anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 years old. The locals don't have a clue – 'They've always been here,' is the most common response if you ask someone where the statues came from. They seem to pre-date the current Bada people. Adding to the mystery, all the objects in the area are made from a type of grey stone of which there are no deposits in the vicinity. cf. Stonehenge or Easter Island, The statues are huge, heavy, and in the middle of nowhere, a long way from any stone which could make them….
…I ponder what this era will leave behind and what will be remembered. Bringing me back to the haiku poet,
Basho…
…Having left Edo in late spring of 1689, Matsuo Basho and Sora travel north, arriving at Hiraizumi on June 29th. Once the seat of the Northern branch of the Fujiwara family, it was destroyed in 1189. As the poet gazes down at the old battlefield, he hears in his head the words of the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu and explains:
“In the space of a dream, three glorious generations of Fujiwara vanished; two miles in the distance are the remains of the Great Gate. Hidehira’s headquarters have turned into rice paddies and wild fields. Only Kinkeizan, the Golden Fowl Hill, remains as it once was.
First, we climbed Takadachi, Castle-on-the-Heights, from where we could see the Kitakami, a broad river that flows from the south. Nearby, Koromo River rounds Izumi Castle and at a point beneath Castle-on-the-Heights, it drops into Kitakami. The ancient ruins of Yasuhira and others, lying behind Koromo Barrier, appear to close off the southern entrance and guard against the Ainu barbarians.
With his most loyal retainers, Yoshitsune fortified himself in the castle, but his dreams of glory quickly turned to grass.
“The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain. / The city walls return to spring, / grasses and trees are green. “
With Du Fu’s lines in my head, I lay down my bamboo hat and let time and tears flow.”
I once adapted a Noh play. It happened to win a prize. Was performed in London (at the Gate theatre) and garnered good reviews.
I’ve loved Scrabble and word play from a young age. Translation and adaption - across a language and culture - is one of those satisfying puzzles.
Let’s look at this poem. First consider for Basho - or any poet in this style - the calligraphy or writing style adds to the impact of the poem. You can compare this, for instance, to the hand written poems of Emily Dickinson.
For the average English poet, the hand writing form or written form in general matters less - another exception would be the typewriter form of ee cummings.
In Emily Dickinson - to my mind her hand written forms are a superior art to the typed page form. The length of her “dash line” varies, and the vigour of its stroke conveys a sense of pause and fluidity that the standardised text does not.
The same for Basho. Even more, Basho’s writing would often be intertwined with ink drawing for an even more complex impact. As the below (the writing itself seems to be falling quietly at the start)
horo horo to / yamabuki chiru ka / taki no oto
quietly quietly / yellow mountain roses fall / sound of rapids
I can not find Basho’s original calligraphy here but we need to possibly imagine the flow of ink.
Take the first line - ignoring the syllable structure at first - the syllable in Japanese being different to english.
夏草や
Natsukusa ya
Natsukusa - those characters conjure a specific image of fields of grass - almost weed like. Most translators say summer grass but it’s not quite as evocative as the original to my mind. That is also to do with the sound and the visuals.
And then we come to the “ya” or や
There is nothing close in English which can represent this character. In poetry, it has both a sound use and a slight technical conjoining use -
Going back to the sound - you have
a - u - u - u - a
Some translators put “Ah” or “O!” to give some sense of this sound and character
Summer grass - Oh -
Ah - Summer grass
Summer grass - sigh -
Or - some other punctuation - perhaps a flourishing Emily Dickson long dash with a curl - would represent this better - or a squiggly ampersand -
Although to do this - you lose the sound pattern…
Look at line 2:
兵どもが
Tsuwamonodomo ga
兵 tsuwamono is an old term for a soldier - suggesting a lowly soldier - a foot soldier - it also has a plural form
This is an image of “ranks of foot soldiers” as opposed to single well-armoured samurai - (although the Basho diary note does refer to Yoshitsune more precisely (along with his retainers)
The plural form adds sound
u - a - o - o - o - o- a
And note already the lack of “e” sound
And we have “ga”
Again this is a post-preposition word in Japanese that has no good English equivalent - it tends to denote the “subject of the sentence” or to give some word or idea extra emphasis -
This potential puts the soldiers at the heart of the poem considering the poem started with the summer grass
The technical meaning adding an emphatic touch and the “a” sound adding more. There is also - to my mind - a visual break stop with the character - the line break adds a stronger break | caesura - but this character itself also issues a break - we might expect a new idea, linked but separate
And we do, we have:
夢の跡 yume no ato
The mark, trace - vestiges of a dream. Not the middle clear lucid vision you can have. But the decaying echoes of a dream you might have on w
aking, and one that vanishes out of mind, or is going to vanish.
This is a stronger image than “dream” and doesn’t need the potential clumsy english parts such as “remains of”, “traces of” to give the impression of a fading ideal.
Then we have the meaning behind the poem. The first order meaning seems clear given Basho’s travel entry.
But now time has passed, and the poem has left its original context, many people today (and in the future) can read this as poem that critiques wars in general. Implying life is lost, dreams are lost, and all that remains of those lost humans are grass and weeds.
