Three Haiku by Kobayashi Issa

Commentary

Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828) was born in Kashiwabara (Shinano, Japan) to a family of middle-class farmers. His pen name, Issa, means “a cup of tea,” and he wrote more than twenty thousand haiku during his lifetime, including fifty-four snails.

The roots of haiku go back to the 15th century, when it was part of the tradition of linked poems, renga. In keeping with contemporary Japanese usage, a haiku is a self-contained poem of 5-7-5 syllables, and eight to ten million people in Japan today write haiku. Haiku is also very popular in the United States, and schools probably put too much emphasis on syllable count over how to write in that form.

I would like to highlight the importance of seasonal reference, institutionin haiku. Transience, the matter of a single moment is essential, the immediacy of haiku, the present tense, the focus on deep observation – these are all essential features that give strength to one of the world’s shortest poetic forms. There is also debate as to whether a haiku is best translated with three short phrases or one continuous movement. Hiroaki Sato points out that haiku in Japanese are printed in one continuous line, and argues that haiku translated into English are better rendered as such. When translating haiku into English, I recommend trying to do them in three lines and then in one line to see what works best.

My interest in Issa’s haiku came from my personal relationship with the poet and translator Nanao Sakaki. Nanao used to live in Taos, New Mexico, and we were lucky enough to have lunch together in Santa Fe once and only once. Nanao said that he was a lieutenant in the Japanese Navy during World War II and worked as a radar specialist. On the morning of August 6, 1945, he saw a single plane on his radar approaching the coast of Japan. He looked out and saw a huge eruption in the sky and thought that Mount Fuji had erupted. It turned out to be the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I mention this incident because it changed Nanao’s life. He became a wandering poet and led an ecologically conscious life; He also translated forty-five of Issa’s haikus into English. During lunch, Nanao praised Issa’s humility and humanity, and when I read Nanao’s Issa translations, I became an admirer of Issa’s work.

In the first haiku, I want to point out Issa’s use of juxtaposition. Sakaki decides to translate Issa’s haiku in three lines, adding each line to the previous one to make a picture. The opening image of the “blooming plum branch” embodies kigo, the seasonal reference. The second line places a warbler on this twig, and the third line completes the juxtaposition, contrasting the beauty of the blossoming plum branch with the warbler’s muddy feet.

Issa uses scale contrast to reinforce the second haiku. The snail embodies the quigo. I don’t know what month snails usually hatch in Japan, but I see the small snail as a seasonal reference to spring. In spring, nature rises and blooms, and Issa focuses on a small snail crawling up and up—not a tree trunk or a stone wall, but Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji, which holds spiritual weight in Japan, adds surprise and emotional power to the ending of this haiku. Some commentaries like to overlap the interpretation where the snail can be seen as persistence. In Spanish you could say “Poco a poco se anda lejos”. Little by little goes a long way, but I think reading this poem as a praise for perseverance is a disservice to the poem. The snail does what it does, it crawls, and the context, the scale of the climb up Mount Fuji, is best experienced as part of a deep surprise.

I may have embellished Nanao’s commentary, but I think she said during lunch that in the third haiku, Issa is traveling and looking for a village. On the country road, Issa sees someone picking daikon, Japanese radish, in a field. When Issa asks the way to this village, the daikon picker doesn’t use words. Staying in sync with what he’s doing, he pulls a daikon out of the ground and nonstop leads the way. In this fluid movement, the daikon picker not only gives directions to the village, but also follows the Dao 道 and shows how to live. This reading is supported by the fact that Kanji, a Chinese character incorporated into the Japanese language, shows the character Dao 道 in a line of the Japanese language; thus, layering of meaning is another powerful technique used in haiku to create depth and emotional power. If a given word has meaning on two or more levels, it deepens the experience of the poem.

Interestingly, Nanao chose to use three English lines for each Issa translation, and I’d suggest that three lines work well based on the increment. In the third translation, he uses a dropped line to create some tension before showing how “the daikon picker shows the way.” Nanao makes the alien accessible in all three translations, and the visual images become vehicles that move emotionally and touch the universal.

♦

From Transitional Worlds: On the Translation of Poetrycopyright 2026 by Arthur Wed. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. “Three Haikus” was published Inch to inchtranslated by Nanao Sakaki (La Alameda Press, 1999). Text courtesy of La Alameda Press and publication Inch to inch.