梅が香に のっと日の出る 山路かな mume ga ka ni notto hi no deru yamaji kana bashō 芭蕉 In the plum blossom scent, the sun pops out, a mountain path

In the plum blossom scent,
the sun pops out,
a mountain path ^[1]

梅が香にのっと日の出る山路かな (mume ga ka ni notto hi no deru yamaji kana): in the scent of plum, all at once the sun comes up; a mountain path.

Matsuo Bashō's verse is a walk at dawn in the cold of early spring. The scent of plum is in the air, and then the sun is suddenly there. It does not rise because of the scent but where the scent is, and the path under the walker's feet comes last. A disciple read the morning sun as winter's last cold, and Bashō said that was very good. Readers have called the verse light and plain, and some say the poet smelled the sun.

In the Japanese, のっと, notto, is suddenly, with a lurch, a common spoken word with a round, warm sound. 梅が香, the scent of plum, is the season word for early spring, and かな closes the verse in wonder.

Plum blossoms are the harbinger of spring. In this poem, I can imagine that Bashō is walking head down along a cold, misty mountain path. He smells the fragrance of the plum blossom and looks up and, suddenly, there is the sun. After a long winter, the fragrance of the plum blossoms contains all the promises of spring.

Calligraphy Notes:

1) The kanji 梅 is today read ume. In Bashō's time, the reading was mume which we use here. This does not change the calligraphy, only how the poem is read.

2) This poem predates the modern introduction of the "small tsu" in hiragana. At the time the poem was written, the word and the context determined the pronunciation so today we write のっと (read notto) but the original poem wrote のつと (also read notto but written as notsuto). In these designs I have opted to use the modern form.

Taken together then, the modern reading of Bashō's haiku is ume ga ka ni notto hi no deru yamaji kana.

References:

^[1] After Haruo Shirane, Early Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 201.

The verse is the hokku of a two-poet sequence Bashō composed with his disciple 野坡 in Edo in the early spring of 1694, published that summer in 炭俵 with 素龍's dated preface.

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