ALL AROUND

This hokku attributed to Bashō is not easily translated into English.  It uses a Japanese word for an emotion that we all feel at some time, but the English language has no precisely equivalent term.  So it is very easy to give the word too much emphasis in translation.

Traditionally it is said that Bashō wrote it recalling the death of a sister of one of his students, but here we will look at it very literally as a hokku of autumn, with no other association.

Here it is:

東西 あはれさひとつ 秋の風
higashi nishi aware sa hitotsu aki no kaze

East  west  aware sa one autumn’s wind.

Leaving the word in question and the particle following it untranslated,  a rather literal rendering would read:

East — west —
One aware;
The autumn wind.

The closest we can come in English is perhaps this, which is still inadequate:

East and West
A single sadness;
The autumn wind.

it is  a tranquil sadness however, the kind one feels when looking out on the falling leaves of autumn.  As you already know, in hokku autumn corresponds to the afternoon in the day, and to growing old in human life.  It is the time when things begin to wither and reveal their ultimate impermanence.

Because of that, this hokku might call to mind the lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

That addresses a girl who feels a kind of sadness just at the sight of a grove of trees dropping their golden leaves in autumn.

In Bashō’s verse, whether one looks east or west, left or right, one sees only the impermanence revealed by autumn, and added to that is the slight chill of the autumn wind; and that awakes a slightly sad emotion in us.  Some like to use “pathos” to translate aware, but that seems to me a bit too strong and fancy for hokku.

Of course this would be the experience of someone surrounded by Nature in the form of trees and plants.  It would be difficult to feel this delicate sensation in a treeless city, though it might be aroused by other factors.

One could even give the verse a rather loose Buddhist rendering:

East and west
The same transience;
The autumn wind.

Put that way, we need not use an “emotion” word at all, because it is the experience of transience that arouses the emotion of aware — that delicate aesthetic emotion that borders on sadness without becoming too “emotional.”

And we could be even more inclusive in making it an autumn hokku:

(Autumn)

All around
Is only transience;
The autumn wind.

David