Haiku by Basho

Summer grass,
all the warriors are,
but the remains of dreams

夏草や兵どもが夢の跡 (natsukusa ya tsuwamono domo ga yume no ato): summer grass; the trace of the warriors' dreams. 夏草 is the summer season word; 兵ども, tsuwamonodomo, is the warriors, an older word for a fighting man; 夢の跡 is the trace, the site, the aftermath of a dream, and the phrase stays open in the Japanese. Bashō wrote it at Hiraizumi on the thirteenth day of the fifth month of 1689, the day he climbed Takadachi, the hill where Yoshitsune died with his retainers. His travel account, Oku no Hosomichi, gives the sentence before it: he quoted Du Fu, the country broken, the hills and rivers remain, spread his hat on the ground and wept until time passed. The same year he wrote the verse into a short prose piece for Yoshitsune and signed it the traveler, so he thought of it as a verse for the dead prince and not only for the view. By the end of the Edo period it was the Japanese phrase for any ruin. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

Translation Notes:

夏草 natsukusa - summer grass 兵 tsuwamono - soldier 夢 yume - dream(s) 跡 ato - remains, ruins