春の海 終日のたり のたり哉 haru no umi hinemosu notari notari kana buson 蕪村 The spring sea all day rising and falling rising and falling

The spring sea
all day rising and falling
rising and falling ^[1]

春の海終日のたりのたり哉 (haru no umi hinemosu notari notari kana): the spring sea, all day long, swelling and falling, swelling and falling.

Yosa Buson's verse puts the slow motion of a calm sea into its sound. The doubled word のたりのたり takes as long to say as a swell takes to pass, and the sea keeps at it all day. Readers have praised it as plain and calm. They have not agreed where to look: at waves on the shore, farther out, or across the whole face of the sea.

In the Japanese, 春の海 is the spring sea, the season word. 終日, hinemosu, is all day long. のたりのたり is a slow heave of the water, moving at ease, and 哉 closes the line. Some of the hands write words in kana: one gives 終日 as ひねもす, and another ends on かな for 哉.

Translation Notes:

This haiku by Buson consists of the words 春 (read haru) meaning "spring", 海 (read umi) meaning "sea; ocean", 終日 (read hinemosu) meaning "all day long; the whole day", and のたりのたり (read notarinotari) meaning "undulating; rolling slowly; gently swelling". Also notice that the final 哉 (read kana) is often written in either hiragana or kanji and this does not change the meaning.

References:

^[1] After Haruo Shirane, The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 412.

The verse is Buson's, from the Hōreki years that ended in 1764, and it was first printed in 1763 in the appendix of Shōzan's anthology 俳諧古選.

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