My little dragonfly hunter, where has he gone today, I wonder^[1] tonbo-tsuri kyō wa doko made itta yara 蜻蛉釣り 今日はどこまで 行ったやら chiyojo 千代女

The verse given to Kaga no Chiyo is what a parent says at dusk with a child not yet home. The child is out at a game, and the question stops there. A book printed long after her death says she wrote it when her child died, and readers have heard that grief in it since. The Japanese references hold the story as legend. The grief readers hear is real, but it is the reader's, carried in by that story. In our reading, the verse is a parent's ordinary worry, with the loss in the silence after the question.

In the Japanese, 蜻蛉釣り, tonbo-tsuri, is the children's game of catching dragonflies, a season word for autumn. The game was played with a decoy on a thread or a pole tipped with birdlime. 今日は is today. どこまで is how far, and 行った is went. やら is the particle of wondering aloud, and I wonder is its exact English. None of the words says my, little, son or death. Two of the hands write 蜻蛉 in kana, as とんぼ, and one of them also writes 今日 as きょう.

The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

Translations of this poem tend to be either too literal or too detached. The last two lines are a single sentence that is simply spoken words - words you could imagine any mother muttering to herself a thousand times: "I wonder where he has gone today?" I think this is important to preserve in the translation and that it is essential to the beauty of the poem.

Chiyojo must have felt this a hundred times when her son was alive - that of simple motherly concern that her little boy was out somewhere, she didn't know exactly where, out hunting dragonflies. Indeed, the poem stops with the simple expression of concern on where he might have gotten off to. What is left unsaid is the moment after, when the reality bites. In my opinion, she is capturing two things: the first is the obvious pride and seriousness that her boy felt for dragonfly hunting and the second is the concern she felt when he was outside and she would worry until he was again safely home.

What is left unsaid by the poem is the instant after. When she realized all of this was gone.

In my opinion, in this poem, Chiyojo is a mother, not a philosopher.

Calligraphy Notes:

1) For the designs I used hiragana for Dragonfly (tonbo). This is a very feminine poem and I think the cursive, and more so the designed cursive using hentaigana convey the emotions.

Translation Notes:

蜻蛉釣り
今日はどこまで
行ったやら

1) 蜻蛉釣り (tonbo tsuri) - composed of 蜻蛉 (tonbo) meaning "dragonfly" and 釣り (tsuri) meaning "fishing; angling". So the term literally means "Dragonfly fishing".

Today we use the expression "tonbo tori" catching dragonflies with a net. But the game in the poem was played with a decoy dragonfly tied by a thread to a pole, or with a pole tipped with birdlime, and that is much more like fishing - so "tsuri" was used rather than "tori".

Lafcadio Hearn discusses this a bit on page 118 of A Japanese Miscellany (full text available online). This is a great read - did you know Japan use to be known as Akitsushima and was written with the kanji literally meaning "Island of the Dragonfly"? Akitsu being an ancient word for "dragonfly". The version in the dictionary has the same pronunciation, but different kanji ... too bad.

Notice that dragonfly is written in romaji as both tombo and tonbo. Technically Japanese does not have a single character "m" only an "n", but in this situation the "n" is often pronounced like an "m" and so the romaji reflects this. A dictionary would use tonbo.

Finally the "My Little" is not in the original Japanese. Chiyojo is talking about her little boy and this sentiment fits the poem. A more direct translation would be:

Dragonfly hunter.
I wonder where he is
off to today.

2) 今日 (kyou) - means "today; this day".

3) は (wa) - Written as "ha" but it is read as wa. This states "today" as the topic.

4) どこまで (dokomade) - "how far; to what extent".

5) 行った (itta) - past tense of the verb 行く (iku) meaning "to go".

6) やら (yara) - yara is a particle denoting uncertainty. I think the translation of "I wonder" fits this well.

References:

[1] Translation by Timothy L. Jackowski, Takase Studios, LLC.