稲妻に こぼるる音や 竹の露 inazuma ni koboruru oto ya take no tsuyu buson 蕪村 A flash of lightning! The sound of dew Dripping down the bamboos

A flash of lightning!
The sound of dew
Dripping down the bamboos ^[1]

稲妻にこぼるる音や竹の露 (inazuma ni koboruru oto ya take no tsuyu): at a flash of lightning, the sound of dew spilling from the bamboo.

Yosa Buson's verse is about the edge of hearing. Lightning is the loudest thing in the sky, and here it makes no sound at all. What is heard is dew, the quietest thing in the bamboo grove. The flash has made the listener still enough to hear it. Some Japanese readers have called it too clever. Others hear the whole poem in that joining: two things came together, and the mind linked them.

In the Japanese, the words come in the order they were felt. The flash comes, then a sound of spilling, and at last what spilled: the dew on the bamboo. 稲妻, lightning, is the autumn season word.

References:

^[1] After R. H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 3, Summer–Autumn (Hokuseido Press, 1952), p. 69.

The verse is Buson's, first printed in 1784 in the 蕪村句集, the selection of his verse that his disciple Kitō 几董 published the winter after the poet's death; no witness dates its composition.

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