loneliness lies within the listener— a cuckoo’s call — Chiyo-jo tr. Ueda
This English version is also attributed to Patricia Donegan by Gabi Greve, but I can’t find it at all in the hundred of Chiyo’s haiku in Donegan and Ishibashi’s well known book. Nor can I find an attested text matching the unsourced one Gabi gives in Japanese and romaji: “nan to naki mono no isami ya hototogisu.” Search requests for which in Chiyo’s collected works returned a blank. Nor could I contrive to decode Gabi’s texts to fit the English translation above (according to the dictionary, ‘isami‘ (いさみ) isn’t loneliness at all, but over-eagerness, elation, excitement. I read: “an ineffable thrill of things!—hototogisu”). So that’s a mystery. Solutions welcome.
However, I did find a different, attested, text via Makoto Ueda’s “Far From the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women“. As Ueda sourced his text to the Kaga no Chiyo Zenshū 1955, ed. Nakamoto Jōdō, and the text makes a perfect fit with the translation above, I’ve taken that one:
さびしさは聞く人にこそ閑古鳥 sabishisa wa / kiku hito ni koso / kankodori — Chiyo-jo Chiyo of Kaga, Lady Chiyo (Chiyo-jo), later dedicated herself to Buddhism as Chiyo the nun (Chiyo-ni).
さ sa び bi し shi =sabishi: lonely さ sa: nominalizes, makes the noun loneliness は wa: topic/subject particle, “as for..”
聞 ki: hear, listen, plus く ku verb ending: kiku, to hear, to listen 人 hito: person, (here, one who listens: the listener) に ni: here the dative particle, to, for こ ko plus そ so: こそ koso, emphatic particle: precisely, exactly.
so far: loneliness precisely for one who listens (to)
閑 kan: quiet 古 ko: old 鳥 dori: bird = kankodori: cuckoo (the common cuckoo, cuculus canorus, not the hototogisu, the little cuckoo). Literally “quiet old bird,” a summer kigo symbolic of deep loneliness, isolation, and quietude.
There’s no cutting-word or kireji. There is a clear semantic cut, though, after the emphatic particle ‘koso,’ which Ueda has marked with an em-dash as a grammatical ‘cut.’ Chiyo was, it seems, known for letting the grammar do the work. Two jobs are done by ‘koso:’ it marks the listener (one who listens) as precisely where the feeling lies, and it creates the break in rhythm that a kireji would do.
The assertive statement that comprises the main part of this haiku carries a deep insight: that the feeling of loneliness associated with the cuckoo has everything to do with how we humans react and feel, but nothing intrinsically to do with the cuckoo. This appeals particularly to me as a biologist by formation and a poet by visceral feeling. The songs of the nightingale, the skylark, the blackbird, the robin, all sorts of birdsong, have nothing to do with us as far as the birds are concerned —except their alarm calls! They are not singing of Shelley’s sweet sadness. The skylark is not worshipping the dawn nor is the blackbird feeling poignant in the dusk or the moonrise. They are saying: here I am, this is my territory, if you’re the same sex then push off or fight me for it, if you’re the opposite sex, come hither to mate. The ineffable feelings that we have lie entirely (‘precisely’) within ourselves. And that is very hard to explain rationally! Indeed, not just birdsong, but ethereal music in general and its visceral effects on us, can be among the hardest of all things for a scientist to explain.
A companion poem to this one might be Buson’s: sennin wa hito / kankodori wa tori / nari keri
The cutting-word’s at the end, signalling realization and inviting us to contemplate his thought:
the hermit’s human the kankodori is a bird—ah!…
He’s playing on the ‘quiet old bird,’ the kankodori, as compared with the traditionally quiet and old sage, the hermit, of course, but beneath the play there’s a similar message. “Just a bird…I now realize.”
Anyway, there you have two for the price of one: that is, two haiku with assertive statements, one of which (Chiyo-ni’s) I think is a fine insight. It reads as an aphorism: “a principle or precept expressed in few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of general import.”
That concludes our week of statements, assertions, epigrams, maxims, aphorisms &c. All ‘telling’ the reader something—but still leaving space for the moment of realization, the shared insight. All great haiku.
Apologies for the confusion in the title and URL! This was occasioned by my growing suspicion that the Japanese text given for this translation in English at the World Kigo Database was not in fact the right one. This led to last-minute changes in the post already scheduled by the HOTD team. A further slight complication was that Chiyo was known by three variations in name during her haiku career: Ueda, whose sourced translation is used, gave the attribution as Chiyo-jo. We generally know her under her final alias, Chiyo-ni, as appears in the post title and URL.
loneliness
lies within the listener—
a cuckoo’s call
— Chiyo-jo tr. Ueda
This English version is also attributed to Patricia Donegan by Gabi Greve, but I can’t find it at all in the hundred of Chiyo’s haiku in Donegan and Ishibashi’s well known book. Nor can I find an attested text matching the unsourced one Gabi gives in Japanese and romaji: “nan to naki mono no isami ya hototogisu.” Search requests for which in Chiyo’s collected works returned a blank. Nor could I contrive to decode Gabi’s texts to fit the English translation above (according to the dictionary, ‘isami‘ (いさみ) isn’t loneliness at all, but over-eagerness, elation, excitement. I read: “an ineffable thrill of things!—hototogisu”). So that’s a mystery. Solutions welcome.
However, I did find a different, attested, text via Makoto Ueda’s “Far From the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women“. As Ueda sourced his text to the Kaga no Chiyo Zenshū 1955, ed. Nakamoto Jōdō, and the text makes a perfect fit with the translation above, I’ve taken that one:
さびしさは聞く人にこそ閑古鳥
sabishisa wa / kiku hito ni koso / kankodori
— Chiyo-jo
Chiyo of Kaga, Lady Chiyo (Chiyo-jo), later dedicated herself to Buddhism as Chiyo the nun (Chiyo-ni).
さ sa び bi し shi
=sabishi: lonely
さ sa: nominalizes, makes the noun loneliness
は wa: topic/subject particle, “as for..”
聞 ki: hear, listen, plus く ku verb ending: kiku, to hear, to listen
人 hito: person, (here, one who listens: the listener)
に ni: here the dative particle, to, for
こ ko plus そ so: こそ koso, emphatic particle: precisely, exactly.
so far: loneliness precisely for one who listens (to)
閑 kan: quiet
古 ko: old
鳥 dori: bird
= kankodori: cuckoo (the common cuckoo, cuculus canorus, not the hototogisu, the little cuckoo). Literally “quiet old bird,” a summer kigo symbolic of deep loneliness, isolation, and quietude.
There’s no cutting-word or kireji. There is a clear semantic cut, though, after the emphatic particle ‘koso,’ which Ueda has marked with an em-dash as a grammatical ‘cut.’ Chiyo was, it seems, known for letting the grammar do the work. Two jobs are done by ‘koso:’ it marks the listener (one who listens) as precisely where the feeling lies, and it creates the break in rhythm that a kireji would do.
The assertive statement that comprises the main part of this haiku carries a deep insight: that the feeling of loneliness associated with the cuckoo has everything to do with how we humans react and feel, but nothing intrinsically to do with the cuckoo. This appeals particularly to me as a biologist by formation and a poet by visceral feeling. The songs of the nightingale, the skylark, the blackbird, the robin, all sorts of birdsong, have nothing to do with us as far as the birds are concerned —except their alarm calls! They are not singing of Shelley’s sweet sadness. The skylark is not worshipping the dawn nor is the blackbird feeling poignant in the dusk or the moonrise. They are saying: here I am, this is my territory, if you’re the same sex then push off or fight me for it, if you’re the opposite sex, come hither to mate. The ineffable feelings that we have lie entirely (‘precisely’) within ourselves. And that is very hard to explain rationally! Indeed, not just birdsong, but ethereal music in general and its visceral effects on us, can be among the hardest of all things for a scientist to explain.
A companion poem to this one might be Buson’s:
sennin wa hito / kankodori wa tori / nari keri
The cutting-word’s at the end, signalling realization and inviting us to contemplate his thought:
the hermit’s human
the kankodori
is a bird—ah!…
He’s playing on the ‘quiet old bird,’ the kankodori, as compared with the traditionally quiet and old sage, the hermit, of course, but beneath the play there’s a similar message. “Just a bird…I now realize.”
Anyway, there you have two for the price of one: that is, two haiku with assertive statements, one of which (Chiyo-ni’s) I think is a fine insight. It reads as an aphorism: “a principle or precept expressed in few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of general import.”
That concludes our week of statements, assertions, epigrams, maxims, aphorisms &c. All ‘telling’ the reader something—but still leaving space for the moment of realization, the shared insight. All great haiku.
Apologies for the confusion in the title and URL! This was occasioned by my growing suspicion that the Japanese text given for this translation in English at the World Kigo Database was not in fact the right one. This led to last-minute changes in the post already scheduled by the HOTD team. A further slight complication was that Chiyo was known by three variations in name during her haiku career: Ueda, whose sourced translation is used, gave the attribution as Chiyo-jo. We generally know her under her final alias, Chiyo-ni, as appears in the post title and URL.