I have always been very fond of the hokku of Onitsura, the other of the two “patriarchs” of our kind of hokku. Onitsura’s verses have a very simple elegance, like that found in an old person who, however poor and mended his clothes, is always immaculately clean and mannered. In Onitsura we do not find the kind of obsession with verse that we sometimes sense in Bashō, and it adds a quietness to them that is very pleasing:
Hana chitte mata shizuka nari Enjō-ji
Blossoms fallen again quiet is Enjō Temple
We can translate it as:
Blossoms fallen,
Again it is quiet;
Enjō Temple.
or as:
Quiet again,
With the blossoms all fallen;
Enjōji Temple.
The noisy, trampling crowds that came for the annual viewing of the cherry blossoms have departed. With their leaving, everything has reverted to the stillness present before their coming. It is a refreshing, peacefully pleasant quiet.
It has none of the dark and ghostly silence found in the last lines of Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners“:
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Those of you who pay attention to the Japanese transcriptions of the original verses that I sometimes give (and you need not pay them the slightest attention if you do not wish) may want to know that in words with a macron above a vowel — as in Enjō or Bashō, etc. — that vowel is to be pronounced twice as long. So the first is not simply Enjo, but rather En-jo-o, the second Ba-sho-o, not Basho. It is not the difference between “long” and “short” vowels in English, but rather the amount of time taken to say the vowel, which is twice as long if the vowel has the macron.
I want to emphasize again, however, that one need not know a single Japanese word (except of course, hokku) to learn hokku, because we write in English here. And of course how we write hokku in English is also applicable to other languages such as Spanish, German, Dutch, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, etc. etc. etc., which is probably why speakers of various languages read this site.
David
HOKKU 