This week I’ve been reflecting on a haiku that I have returned to over and over across the years. 

summer grass

all that remains of

soldiers’ dreams

夏草や　兵どもが　夢の跡

Natsukusa ya | Tsuwamonodomo ga | Yume no ato ~ Basho (c. 1689)

I first came across it at 14 years old as I stumbled across Japanese and Chinese literature. I encountered  old pond / Frog  leap / splash  around the same time. The frog haiku also comes back to me in quiet / surprising moments in nature.

古池や蛙飛こむ水のおと Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya, ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into) mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound)

Old pond

Frog leaps

Ker sploosh

But summer grassses haunts me more.

I was reminded of this in a recent exchange with a philosopher. I mentioned I was cycling across London. He recalled a terrifying taxi ride when young. This triggered my memory of my most terrifying vehicle ride.

The scariest vehicle ride I had was in Indonesia. In 1998, I was travelling in Sulawesi. We heard about puzzling megaliths in the Bada Valley. Getting to the valley would involve a jeep ride. This jeep was stacked seemingly with the possessions of 3 families, their chickens and their wares, and us. My travel companion thought we would die as the jeep careened around the crumbling path that clung to the slopes. The burned out car wreckages lining the slopes did not allay our fears. Amongst the fear, I do recall an impression of beauty about the valley.

I remember this trip, not so much for the jeep ride, but because in the Bada Valley we trekked to see these mysterious statues. (also see Moxon, link below). This statue (locally named, Palindo “the entertainer”)

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.

My further travels in Indonesia in the 1990s here when I went to visit the Wana tribe.

I found this account from Moxon, and his one of the funerals of Toreja land similar to my experience and one year earlier then my visit.