Today I will briefly discuss a rather well-known hokku that I talked about in an earlier posting. My feeble excuse for this is that it is snowing where I am this morning, and there are crows out in it.
Bashō wrote:
Higoro nikuki karasu mo yuki no ashita kana
Usually detested crow too snow ‘s morning kana
The usually detested crow too? What does that mean? The crow also is what? As I mentioned in the earlier posting, Bashō leaves out a word that one is supposed to intuit, and that word in English could be “beautiful,” “attractive” “appealing,” “striking,” etc. etc.
Though he was probably just expressing general public feelings in his time, I have never cared for calling the crow “detested,” or “hated,” or “hateful” as some translations have it. There is something about the “detested” combined with implied “beautiful” (“beautiful” is actually used in some translations) that just does not seem quite right, though something detested can also be beautiful.
I think that what Bashō was feeling was something more like
A snowy morning;
Even the common crow
Becomes interesting.
Interesting, of course, because of the striking contrast between the whiteness of the snow and the deep black of the crow. One could call that “beautiful,” but it seems like saying too much — which is perhaps why Bashō left an unspoken adjective up to the mind of the reader.
David
HOKKU 