The hokku of Issa is a very mixed bag. Often it is too emotional, or says too much. There is, for example, this verse:
Snow sparsely falling;
A splendid
Moonlit night.
The problem here — aside from the rather awkward arrangement (it is not quite so awkward in Japanese) — is the word “splendid,” which brings up the old writing adage, “show, don’t say.” That means we should just present the experience and let the reader experience it without telling him or her that it is “beautiful” or “splendid.”
There are many ways of re-writing this hokku to eliminate that problem, and this is only one:
(Winter)
Lightly, sparsely,
Snowflakes drift down;
The moonlit night.
What we want to convey is the cold night, with the moon shining on the snow, and a few flakes gently falling now and then, here and there. The original Japanese just says yuki, meaning snow, is lightly falling (chirari chirari), but we want to emphasize the fewness of the random flakes that fall, because the snow has let up and the moon is shining between scattered clouds overhead. It would not be shining if the snowfall were thicker and more regular.
The overall feeling is rather similar to the lines from Clement Moore’s The Night Before Christmas:
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below….
David
The original:
Yuki chirari chirari migoto na tsukiyo kana
Snow lightly-lightly-falls splendid moon-night kana
HOKKU 