A Poem by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

This year I’ve taken a challenge to try to memorize at least one (short) poem each month. I’ll do my challengers one better: whenever the poem is in a language I can read other than English, I’ll (do my best to) translate it.

I’ve started with this well-known poem by Masaoka Shiki, probably Japan’s best-loved and most influential exponent of the haikai or haiku form since the country rejoined worldwide political and economic systems in the 1850s and 1860s. Like many luminaries of his period, Shiki died very young of tuberculosis, a disease that he had for much of his writing period and living with which he saw as a key point of his personal identity; this perhaps renders his innovative handling of Japanese poetry’s traditional focus on sense-media especially poignant.

柿くへば鐘が鳴るなり法隆寺

Kaki kueba

Kane ga naru nari

Hōryūji

“At first bite of this persimmon, the bells toll—the Temple of the Waxing Law.”

(Hōryūji is customarily rendered “Temple of the Flourishing Dharma.” I’ve gone with a different translation of this seventh-century Nara landmark, which contains the world’s oldest wooden building still in use, to defamiliarize it for readers who may already know of it.)