梨さくや 戦のあとの 崩れ家 nashi saku ya ikusa no ato no kuzure ie shiki 子規 A pear tree is blooming, By a collapsed house, on an old battlefield

A pear tree is blooming,
By a collapsed house,
on an old battlefield ^[1]

梨さくや戦のあとの崩れ家 (nashi saku ya ikusa no ato no kuzure ie): pear trees in bloom, and a house fallen in, after the battle. 梨 is the pear, whose white blossom is a spring season word; さくや, blooms, and, is the cut; いくさ is battle, and the second の binds after the battle to 崩れ家, a house fallen in. Nothing in the Japanese says old: あと is after, and the after was five months. The word also means the trace of a thing, the ground where it stood; prints of 1908 and 1910 write it 趾 and 跡, as in Bashō's 夢の跡. At Jinzhou (金州), on the Liaodong peninsula, Shiki stood where the battle of the previous November had been fought. The verse stands in his manuscript collection Kanzan Rakuboku under the headnote two verses at Jinzhou. Beside it is its pair, an old pear tree sparse in flower by a leek field. Hekigotō, commenting on the selection Shiki made himself, granted that a real battlefield might have borne grieving words. Then he praised these for their calm: scenes after a war, with nothing pressed. On two of the designs Master Takase brushes いくさ in kana, as Shiki's manuscript does; the words are the same. On two designs she writes 崩家 without the れ, an artistic choice; it reads the same.

In reading this poem I always think of the landmarks in central Virginia indicating important battles from the civil war. Each time the landscape before me is breathtakingly beautiful. And it is so hard to imagine what had happened there in the past.

People are this way too. Everyone has had difficulties even though the scars don't always show. Many times we only see the person as they are now, a pear tree in bloom, and we forget that each person has fought their share of battles.

Calligraphy Notes:

1) ikusa is commonly written in kanji as 戦 and in hiragana as いくさ. I have used both in the designs.

2) Similarly I have used kuzure in both kanji as 崩れ and in hiragana as くずれ.

Translation Notes:

1) 梨 (nashi) means "pear" and, specifically, "pear tree".

2) さく (saku) in this case means "to bloom".

3) 戦のあと (ikusa no ato) meaning "ruins (remains) of a battle". 戦 (ikusa) means "war; battle; campaign; fight". あと (ato) in this case means "ruins; remains".

4) 崩れ (kuzure) meaning "crumbling; collapse; ruin".

5) 家 (ie) meaning "house; dwelling".

References:

^[1] After R. H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 1 (Hokuseido Press, 1949), p. 177.

The verse is Shiki's own, written in his own hand at 金州 in the spring of 1895, where he had gone as a war correspondent as the Sino-Japanese War was ending, and first printed in 1902 in the selection of his verses he made himself.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 梨さくや戦のあとの崩れ家.

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