Birds at a Shrine

#shiki wrote a #haiku depicting #birds at a #shinto #shrine that can be read two ways

mi+yashiro ya
niwa hi ni tooki
ukine dori

depending on whether you read niwa and hi as one word or two
this reads

 prefix honorable shrine shinto

garden/yard/enclosed space light / fire being at distance tooki is a verb! toku !
floating - sleeping implied birds ukine = sleeping in a ship or floating object or uneasy sleep

Why are the birds sleeping in the shadows so far away from the light?

They should be safe on the grounds of a shrine?

I thought they were simply avoiding being disturbed and that Shiki was creating a word picture of birds barely visible but recently I found niwahi can also mean bonfire so there's a note of anxiety and sympathy ... the birds have perhaps moved as far as they can across a pond away from the noise of humans celebrating some kind of fire ritual?

Poor birds!

SHIKI ON SUMMER

#shiki #haiku #summer

SHIKI Masaoka

A HAIKU about SUMMER

#Hiragana #Romaji

くんぶぅゃ Kumpū ya!

せんざんのみどり Senzan no midori

てらひとっ Tera hitotsu

Kumpū also written kunpū

Kun 薰 Fragrance + Fu 風 Wind Breeze

Sen 1000 Zan is San Mountain of greem midori

Tera buddhist temple hitotsu one single

Fragrant Breeze !

Amidst a thousand green mountains

A single temple.

He must have been somewhere very remote for there to have been just one small temple and not a whole complex given the fondness of the Japanese for building temples and shrines atop mountains.

Fragrant breeze is a KIGO for summer or late spring so while I've seen one translator suggest pines for the source many trees flower in summer.

Perhaps a remote valley too small to be worth farming but just enough room for a shrine and trees?

kumpuu ya

#haiku #shiki #romaji #unihan

Kumpuu ya is the first line of a haiku by SHIKI.

It reads like this in Romaji  kumpuu ya senzan no midori tera hitotsu

Buchanan translates kumpuu as summer breeze but in the kanji its KUN plus FUU.

Something like fragrant wind?

fragrant wind ! 1000 mountains of green temple single / only one

Shiki seems to  have very deliberately chosen a certain word to express fragrance.

The Kun reading is kaoru or kaori also written by a different character but take a look at the hanji of the text.

Copyright Julie Vaux 2016 

Grass over smoke literally!

So is the fragrant wind coming from the green mountains or the temple?

And note its a single temple perhaps a very small one away up in the mountains not one of the greater monastic complexes but somewhere unnamed and genuinely remote deep in the mountain ranges of Japan's highlands?

Whether you're Japanese or Chinese or anyone who likes haiku studying hanji  really helps to deepen one's understanding and appreciation tho I'ld be a lot more fluent than my mere smattering in modern asian languages if I spent less time reading classical verse?!


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