Summer Grasses

I first became fascinated by "things Japanese" when, aged 10, I began attending judo classes at a local community centre. In the 1960s judo (or rather, "judo") held the place in the popular imagination that more sophisticated (and violent) martial arts like kung fu do now. For Emma Peel in The Avengers to throw some burly opponent to the floor, effortlessly, was "because she knew judo" (and not because the script demanded a spectacular tumble from a stunt man). I was surprisingly good at it and progressed through the junior grades but, also being a bookish little chap with a fascination for languages, parsing the Japanese names of the throws and holds led me to an interest in the wider culture of those intriguingly "other" people.

Fast forward a decade on from then, and a westernised version of Japanese culture and spirituality – encompassed by the ubiquitous buzz-word "zen" – seemed to lie at the heart of the burgeoning counter-culture. The distilled economy of a verse-form like the haiku, so prevalent (and yet so misunderstood) at the time, seemed like a direct challenge to the wordiness of the western poetry I was studying in the 1970s. At university, a powerful indication that I might have found a partner for life was that, on the improvised brick-and-plank bookshelf beside her bed, I discovered the four-volume set of R.H. Blyth's Haiku, the various Penguin Classics anthologies of Japanese and Chinese verse, and Matsuo Basho's classic, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Sadly, despite a lifetime's fascination, I have never got around to studying the Japanese language, and probably never will, now. I am too firmly embedded within the European languages and their grammars, and the sort of thing that delights a true linguist just makes me feel tired. To quote Wikipedia:

Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with relatively simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or form questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics, with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.

Bad enough, but then:

The Japanese writing system combines Chinese characters, known as kanji (漢字, 'Han characters'), with two unique syllabaries (or moraic scripts) derived by the Japanese from the more complex Chinese characters: hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名, 'simple characters') and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名, 'partial characters'). Latin script (rōmaji ローマ字) is also used in a limited fashion (such as for imported acronyms) in Japanese writing. The numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals, but also traditional Chinese numerals.

Hey, I learned Cyrillic and can fumble my way through Ancient Greek, so leave me alone. I'm sixty-nine, FFS.

That said, I am always intrigued by the linguistic and poetic journey from the original Japanese text of a haiku to its rendering in English. A recent walk that took me through a cemetery where long grass has been left to flourish around the gravestones put me in mind of a classic and much translated haiku by Basho. In Blyth's version:

Ah! Summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors' dreams.

Blyth comments, somewhat provocatively, "Basho's short verse contains the whole of Sohrab and Rustum" [a very long poem by Matthew Arnold]. A romanised rendering of the Japanese goes as follows:

natsukusa ya  /  tsuwamono domo ga  /  yume no ato

which seems to mean something like "summer grass – common soldier of – dream(s) trace/ruin", words which have been generously, sometimes wildly over-interpreted.

Some context helps, of course. The haiku occurs in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is a sort of travel diary recounting part of the nine-month journey in 1689 of Basho and his companion / disciple Sora through the back-country and mountains north of Edo (Tokyo). On June 29th they reached the former seat of the northern branch of the Fujiwara clan, Hiraizumi, where in 1189 they were defeated in the Battle of Ōshū. If you've watched something like the Netflix series Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan, you'll have a vivid feel for the sort of bloodletting that will have taken place there. Basho is moved by the way the ancient battlefield is now grassed over, and some commentators have suggested that he is referring obliquely in the poem to the grass that would have stuffed the pillows of the common soldiers. Here is the Penguin Classics translation of Basho's words by Noboyuki Yuasa:

It is here that the glory of the three generations of the Fujiwara family passed away like a snatch of empty dream. The ruins of the main gate greeted my eyes a mile before I came upon Lord Hidehira’s mansion, which had been utterly reduced to rice-paddies [...] Indeed, many a feat of chivalrous valour was repeated here during the short span of the three generations, but both the actors and the deeds have long been dead and passed into oblivion. When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.

A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.