A Poem by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

Matsuo Bashō is one of the most famous, popular, and influential poets in Japanese history, one of the early masters of the haiku form as a sort of truncated waka (5-7-5 rather than the traditional 5-7-5-7-7). He is a philosopher of some stature due to his poetry’s tendency to capture the sublime in the particular and immediate. His best-known writing is probably found in Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to Oku), a prose travelogue interspersed with haiku about the sights and culture of what was at the time far northeastern Japan.

Currently I miss my parents’ cat, Papako, herself named after a cat whom we met at a hotel in more or less the same part of Japan in 2013. (I highly recommend visits to Aomori especially for people who, like me, like snow, apples, and dramatic seaside landscapes.) Thus I decided to translate a Bashō haiku about a cat. This one touches on cats’ tendencies to be finicky about their food, one of the first things I ever noticed about them when my family got our first cat in my early childhood. It’s also arguably a bit sexist, but that’s a problem with most older literature in general, Japanese or otherwise. The poem appears in Aya Kusch’s lovely collection Cats in Spring Rain: A Celebration of Feline Charm in Japanese Art and Haiku. Her translation philosophy is a bit different from mine but still well worth a look.

麦飯にやつるる恋か猫の妻

A cat’s wife—has a lean diet worn thin her love?