Haiku by Basho

Shake even the grave,
My wailing is
the autumn wind

塚も動け我が泣聲は秋の風 (tsuka mo ugoke waga naku koe wa aki no kaze): grave-mound, move too: my weeping voice is the autumn wind. 塚 is the burial mound and も makes it *too*, so the mound is to be shaken along with everyone at the graveside; 動け is the command, *move*; 我が泣く聲 is *my weeping voice*; 秋の風, the autumn wind, is the season word. The voice does not resemble the wind. It is the wind, and the wind is told to move the mound. Bashō spoke it in Kanazawa on 5 September 1689, on the journey of Oku no Hosomichi, at a memorial for Kosugi Isshō, a tea dealer and the most prolific poet in Kaga, dead the winter before at thirty-six. The two had never met; Isshō had hoped to, and Bashō arrived to find him gone. The verse stands in Bashō's own travel book with its occasion in his own prose, and its oldest witnesses are two memorial anthologies of 1691. On one of the designs Master Takase brushes うごけ and わが in kana; the words are the same. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

Calligraphy Notes:

1) In older works, one most commonly sees waga written as a single kanji 我. The modern form adds the hiragana が which makes it 我が. As an example, Miyamori has 塚も動け我泣聲は秋の風 and Blyth has 塚も動け我が泣聲は秋の風. We consider both to be correct and use both.

Translation Notes:

塚も動け
我が泣聲
は秋の風

1) 塚 (tsuka) means "(1) mound; heap; hillock; (2) burial mound; tomb; tumulus; barrow;". The particle も (mo) means "also" or "even". This is important and is not reflected, in our opinion, in most of the translations. We capture this by using "even" as in "shake even the grave" 塚も動け. Basho is angry at the world.

2) 動け (ugoke) is the imperative form of 動く (ugoku) meaning "to move".

3) 我が (waga) means "my; one's own; our". As a fun fact, by itself 我 has eight different readings!

4) 泣聲 (naku koe) would today be written 泣き声 (nakigoe) meaning "cry; crying voice".

5) 秋の風 (aki no kaze) meaning "autumn wind" is composed of 秋 (aki) meaning "autumn" and 風 (kaze) meaning "wind".