A Selection of Haiku by Buson

Landscape with a Solitary Traveler
BY Yosa Buson
c. 1780, Japan, Edo period
Hanging scroll
Ink and light colors on silk
Kimbell Art Museum

Translator’s Note

In the Vegetable Root Discourses or Saikontan written by Kōjisei in perhaps the sixteenth century, the author says: “When in the mood, I take off my shoes and walk barefooted through the sweet-smelling grasses of the fields, wild birds without fear accompanying me. My heart at one with nature, I loosen my shirt as I sit absorbed beneath falling petals, while the clouds silently enfold me as if wishing to keep me there.”[1]

Yosa Buson (1716-1783), Japanese poet and painter of the Edo period, though certainly influenced by Bashō who was in turn under the sway of the epigrams in the Saikontan, does not give us such an idealized picture of the wandering nature lover, the itinerant lay Buddhist enthusiast that he was. In an epigraph to this hokku

do cuckoos
fly about the heads
of patch-robed monks?

Buson writes: “Master of the brushwood hermitage, the little cuckoo. Two cuckoos emerge, at any rate, even if there is only one in the hokku — darting across the sky, mingling more with princes, loathing the patchrobed, dishevel-haired ones who seek fame and fortune in the mountains.”

A Little Cuckoo Across a Hydrangea
(38.7 x 64.3 cm)
BY Yosa Buson
Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art

Indeed, Buson’s attention to the mundane, his unsentimentalized portrait of the traveler’s world leave us space for meditation and contemplation:

evening coming on
and the roof of the inn leaks
a drooping cherry tree

But for every verse of such pathos, resignation, and indeed beauty, Buson has ten that aim to delight through humor and paradox, the heart of Zen. This selection of haiku I have translated bear those traits in mind.


鯰得て帰る田植の男かな

having caught a catfish
he goes back to rice planting
what a man

なれ過ぎた鮓をあるじの遺恨哉

toward the too-familiar sushi
the ill will
of the proprietor

鮓つけて誰待としもなき身哉

soaking the raw fish
some wait even a year
not me

酒十駄ゆりもて行や夏こだち

saké, ten horseloads
swaying step by step
a leafy grove

みちのくの語友に草扉をたゝかれて / 葉がくれの枕さがせよ瓜ばたけ

giving the boot to the poet Goyû of Michinoku at the door to the hut

hidden among the leaves
of the melon patch
find yourself a pillow

書生の閑窓に書す / 学問は尻からぬけるほたる哉

a student takes a break from writing under the window

as for scholarly attainments:
slipping from his backside
a lightning bug

かはほりやむかひの女房こちを見る

A bat flits by
the neighbor’s wife
glances over here

垣越えて蟇の避け行かやりかな

seen from over the hedge
a toad creeping out to avoid
a smudge fire

蠅いとふ身を古郷に昼寝かな

silently
in the gap between visitors
a peony blooms

蠅いとふ身を古郷に昼寝かな

sick of the flies
in my hometown
I need a nap

HEADER DETAIL FROM A PAINTING BY BUSON (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art)
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REFERENCES

  1. Blyth, R.H. Haiku. Volume I. Eastern Culture. Hokuseido, 1964, 75.

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