露の世は 露の世ながら さりながら tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara issa 一茶 This dewdrop world, is a dewdrop world, and yet

This dewdrop world,
is a dewdrop world,
and yet ^[1]

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら (tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara): a world of dew is a world of dew, granted; and yet.

A father's verse on the death of his child, by Kobayashi Issa. It says what his faith taught, that this world is as brief as dew, and says it twice, granting it. The last word, さりながら, and yet, is the one word in the verse that is not doctrine, and the verse stops on it. Nothing follows, and the child is not in it: the grief is in the grammar, a sentence a believer leaves unfinished. R. H. Blyth heard Issa, almost unconsciously and in his anguish, doubting one of the tenets of his Pure Land faith. Read closely, it is a grief that grants the teaching and will not be consoled by it.

References:

^[1] After Robert Aitken, The River of Heaven (Counterpoint, 2011).

Issa first wrote the line in his diary in the fifth month of 1817, under the one word in mourning and naming no one; it was the month in which his infant son had died the year before, though the diary does not say whom the line mourned. He reworked it for his infant daughter Sato in おらが春, his book of the year 1819, and signed it there.

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