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父ありてあけぼのみたし青田原 chichi arite akebono mitashi aotabara Issa - Were my father here, At dawn we would gaze, Over the green fields

This is a philological study of the haiku 父ありてあけぼのみたし青田原 (chichi arite akebono mitashi aotabara), the last line of Issa's own diary of his father's death. It examines the diary's close, the year 1801 and the years in which the diary was written up, and the verse's English renderings, from Mackenzie's of 1957 onward.

Japanese Scroll of Issa - Were my father here, At dawn we would gaze, Over the green fields (chichi arite akebono mitashi aotabara) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Issa - Were my father here, At dawn we would gaze, Over the green fields (chichi arite akebono mitashi aotabara)

Haiku by Issa on a traditional Japanese Scroll by Master Eri Takase.

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Abstract

父ありてあけぼのみたし青田原, if my father were here, I would want to see the dawn over the green rice fields, is Issa's, the last line of his own diary of his father's death in the early summer of 享和元 (1801), a manuscript he left untitled and is thought to have finished six or seven years later. It stands at the seventh-day memorial, where, after some in the house had feigned not to hear the father's wishes, the family agreed to keep his will. The tradition has never had two readings of the verse: a wish for the living man that a translator may push past death without the Japanese ever saying so. Mackenzie rendered it in 1957, Blyth twice in 1963, and five more English renderings followed, all keeping the counterfactual and the dawn.

Overview

The text. The scroll carries 父ありてあけぼのみたし青田原, with the middle phrase in kana, in most of its designs; two write 明けぼの見たし, with 明 and 見 in kanji, and one of those two writes あ, り and の with kana made from 阿, 里 and 能. The editions divide. The 1908 全集, the 1927 selection, the two dated editions of 1925 and 1935, the 1909 encyclopedia and the 1916 biography print the kanji: 父ありて曙見たし靑田原. The one edition set from Issa's manuscript, 束松露香's of 1922, prints 父ありてあけぼの見たし青田原, the kana of the scroll [1]; so do the popular books of 1933 and 1936, あけぼの見たし and あけぼのみたし, and the 1928 index under チチア. 曙, 明けぼの and あけぼの, 見たし and みたし, 靑 and 青 are one word each in different writings. One witness stands apart. The 1921 全集 prints 父ありて曙見たし靑田面, the face of the green paddies, where every other witness prints 原, the plain; the same editor's own index of 1928 reads 原, and no later book follows 面, so it is most likely a compositor's slip and is recorded here as the one variant on the record. The prose before the verse also differs by a word between the two full printings, 其日はやみぬ in 1908 and 其夜は止みぬ in 1921, that day or that night the matter was let rest; nothing in the verse turns on it. The meter is five, seven, five: ち・ち・あ・り・て, あ・け・ぼ・の・み・た・し, あ・お・た・ば・ら.

The sense. The tradition holds one sense and has never argued it. The verse is the grief of a son who could not keep his father alive, written on the day the father's word was, for that day, kept: the family agreed to the will at the memorial, and the agreement was not carried out afterward [2][3]. Every Japanese reader who quotes it quotes it for that: the 1909 encyclopedia as the emblem of the year that sent him wandering again [4], Numanami 沼波 in 1913 as the tender side of a spiteful man [5], Yoshida 吉田 in 1935 as the diary's true close [6], the 1936 biography as the moment before he left for Edo [7]. Blyth in 1963 says the same and adds a reservation about the poet, not the poem: Sometimes Issa has too much sentiment, and falls into the sentimentality [8]. Hass in 1994 lets the diary carry it and adds nothing [9]. The only motion in the reading is what the counterfactual is made to hold. Read as were my father here, it is a wish for the living man; read as Blyth's second version, with my dead father, it is a wish addressed past death. The Japanese ありて allows both and states neither.

The words. 父ありて is if my father were here, ありて the counterfactual, not the narrative my father was there; Blyth's second rendering, with my dead father, is the sense, and Hass's with my father keeps the grammar but drops the death [8][9]. あけぼのみたし is I would want to see the dawn; たし is the desiderative ending of classical Japanese, the wanting of a thing one cannot have. 青田原 is the plain of green rice fields, the paddies in early summer when the transplanted rice has taken and the whole valley is one green; Handa 半田 files it under the season word 青田, summer. The father died toward dawn at the end of the twentieth day of the fifth month, 卯の上刻, the diary says [10], and the fields outside the sickroom were that green. As words the line says: Were my father here, I would want to see the dawn over the green fields.

The verse in English. Mackenzie rendered it first, in 1957 [11]; Blyth rendered it twice in his one book of 1963 [8], and Lewis [12], Hass [9], Corman [13] and Karas [14] followed; every one keeps the counterfactual and the dawn, and none but Blyth's second version says the father is dead.

The historical record

1801. Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶, the diary of his father's last illness, as first printed in 1908 in 俳諧寺可秋's 一茶一代全集 under the heading 父終焉の記. Issa's father fell ill on the twenty-third of the fourth month of 1801 and died at dawn after the twentieth of the fifth, the season the verse's 青田 names; the diary records the illness day by day, the stepmother and half-brother in the house, the father's division of his small holdings between his two sons, 所領ははらからと二つ分けにして與へん, and his charge that Issa take a wife and stay [10][1]. Its last entry is dated the twenty-eighth and is the seventh-day memorial, 初七日. Issa writes that some present had feigned not to hear the father's wishes, 聞かぬ振りに空耳したる人あり; that he thought of taking to the road again rather than force the will on them, but that to leave without an answer would go against his father; that he raised the division, しめ野分くる, the fields and woods that would come to him as a branch house; and that 父の遺言守るとありければ、母家の人の指圖にまかせて其日はやみぬ, since they said the father's will would be kept, I left it to the direction of the main house, and so that day ended [1]. Then the verse, and the diary ends. In the 1908 print a small circle follows it and other prose begins [10]; the manuscript, its editor of 1922 writes, carries miscellaneous jottings in its margins, and he prints a selection of them after the diary [1]. A retelling of 1935 glosses the day as the mother and son agreeing to keep the will, an agreement not carried out afterward [3], and Ueda 2004 reads the close the same way: Issa received word that his father's will would be honored [2].

1909. 早稲田文学社, 文芸百科全書, an encyclopedia of literature. The article on Issa tells the death and the burial, fighting with the cold people of his native place, he buried his father alone, quotes the verse, and sends him back on the road: 再び流浪の生涯におつた, he fell again into a wandering life. The verse is already the emblem of that year [4].

1913. Numanami Keion, 大疑の前, a critic's essays. The verse is set beside 小言いふ相手もあらば今日の月, the moon verse after his wife's death, as evidence of the Issa who was not only spiteful and twisted but tender [5].

1916. 田中貢太郎, 豪傑快傑, popular biographies. The father named, 彌五兵衞, and his death placed: 彌五兵衞は、それから八日ばかり床にゐて、九月十九日になつて終に死亡した, he lay some eight days more and died at last on the nineteenth of the ninth month, a date of this book's own that the diary, which puts the death at the end of the twentieth of the fifth month, contradicts; then the verse [15].

1921. Katsumine Shinpū, 新選一茶全集, a new collected edition. The diary printed whole under the running head みとり日記, and its close: 母家の人の指圖に任せて其夜は止みぬ, then 父ありて曙見たし靑田面, then ーをはりー, the 靑 in its old form as every print here has it. The last character is 面, not 原, in this printing only [16].

1922. 束松露香 (ed.), 父の終焉日記 : 一茶遺稿, Iwanami, published after the editor's death in 1918, with a preface by Ogiwara Seisensui 荻原井泉水. The first edition set from Issa's manuscript and the source of the title: 此日記は、原本には標題なかりしを、便宜上假に斯く名けたるなり, the manuscript had no title; I have named it so for convenience. The editor's 解題, signed in the eighth month of 1913, describes the manuscript as thirty-eight leaves with the cover, written on the backs of a printed New Year collection of 1800, and as then held by 久保田慶廡 of Takai village in Shinano, whose forebears were Issa's pupils; doubtful readings he marks with a box rather than correct. The verse stands alone on the last page of the diary: 父ありてあけぼの見たし青田原 [1].

1925 and 1935. Handa Ryōhei, 一茶俳句集 季題別年代考 and its successor 一茶俳句全集 季題別年代附, the collected verse by season word, dated. Under 靑田: 父ありて曙見たし靑田原（享和元）, so printed in both editions. The date is the editor's ruling on the diary's evidence, and it is the one date the record gives [17].

1927. Sōma Gyofū, 一茶随筆選集, a selection of Issa's prose. The diary again to its last line, and the editor's judgment of it: 實に一茶が生涯を通じての最長篇の文章 … 一茶前半生の自叙傳, truly the longest piece of writing in Issa's whole life … the autobiography of his first half [18].

1928. Katsumine Shinpū, 日本俳書大系, the index volume. The verse filed by its first syllables with its source and the poet's age: チチア(日記)父ありてあけぼの見たし靑田原(一茶三三), and on the same line a companion verse from the 選抄, 父ありて母ありて花に出ぬ日哉, with a father and a mother, a day I did not go out to the blossoms, another poem and not a variant. The bracketed 一茶三三 is the index's locator into its own Issa volume [19].

1935. Yoshida Genjirō, 梅の咲くころ, essays. 父ありて曙見たし靑田原といふ句が最後に加へてある。洵に一茶の眞情を語るものである, the verse is added at the very end; it truly speaks Issa's real feeling [6].

1936. 菊池寛 (supervising editor), 日本英雄伝, lives for young readers. The will's terms as popular biography tells them, half the land and the house and a wife for Issa, refused by the stepmother and the half-brother 仙六, and the verse as what he wrote before swallowing tears of grief and indignation and going up to Edo again, 悲憤の淚を呑んで再び江戶に上つた. The terms are this book's, not the diary's own account [7].

The dictionaries today. kotobank gives the poet's dates 1763–1828 in デジタル大辞泉 and 日本人名大辞典, and the ブリタニカ国際大百科事典 entry on the same kotobank page writes them 宝暦13(1763).5.5 to 文政10(1827).11.19; Britannica gives the diary's year, 享和1 (1801) 年，父の没後継母子と遺産を争い, in 1801, after his father's death, he disputed the inheritance with his stepmother and her son [20].

The attribution. There is no thread to untangle. The verse is Issa's because it closes Issa's own diary, and every witness that prints it prints it there or names him. Handa Ryōhei's two editions of the collected verse arranged by season word and dated, 1925 and 1935, file it under 青田 with the year in brackets, 享和元, the first year of Kyōwa, 1801, the year the father died [17]. The 1936 biography gives Issa's age as thirty-nine that year, which agrees [7]. That is the year the diary records, not the year it was finished: Ueda reports that it is thought to have been completed between August 1807 and December 1808, well after Issa began feuding with his stepmother and half brother, and calls it a work of literature strewn with fictional elements [2]; Shirane's anthology says he probably wrote it between 1801 and 1806 or 1807 and heads it 1807 [21]. So the verse stands in a text written up six or seven years after the day it names. The manuscript is Issa's and untitled; its earliest known printing is the 1908 全集 under the heading 父終焉の記 [10], the 1921 全集 prints it whole under the running head みとり日記, the nursing diary, with ーをはりー, the end, set after the verse [16], and the title the world knows is its 1922 editor's [1]. The English books that carry the verse, Mackenzie in 1957, Blyth in 1963 and Hass in 1994, all place it in the diary and none doubts it [11][8][9]. Nobody has ever given this verse to anyone else.

What is not a source. The companion verse the 1928 index sets on the same line, 父ありて母ありて花に出ぬ日哉, is another poem from another book and says a different thing about the same house [19]. The will's terms are the diary's own, the holdings split between the two sons and a wife for Issa [10][1]; what the 1936 lives for young readers adds is a refusal at the memorial, the stepmother and 仙六 feigned not to hear, where the diary has some unnamed person feigning deafness and then the family agreeing [7]. The father's death date in the 1916 biography, the nineteenth of the ninth month, disagrees with the diary and the dated editions and is that book's error [15]. None of these is a source for the verse; the verse's source is the diary.

The verse in English

1957. Lewis Mackenzie, The Autumn Wind, a selection of Issa, John Murray, London; reissued by Kodansha International in 1984 and 1999. If he were here, my father, / We'd watch once again the day break / Over green meadows, no. 46, with the romaji Chichi arite akebono mitashi aotabara in the notes, placed after the passage naming 父の終焉日記; the copy read is the 1999 reissue, whose imprint gives the 1957 first edition [11].

1963. R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, volume 1, Hokuseido Press, Tokyo. Two renderings in one book. The first, in his account of Issa's life: Were my father here, / At dawn we would gaze / Over the green fields, with the note This was written after his father's death; his feelings are expressed in Chichi no Shuen Nikki, and the reservation about sentimentality quoted above. The second, later, comparing Issa with another poet: With my dead father / I would look at the dawn / Over the green fields, with the judgment Both poets were deeply filial, and their love of nature was an extension of this piety. Poetry, like charity, begins at home. He prints the Japanese in kana both times, あけぼのみたし at the first and あけぼの見たし at the second. His romaji is chichi arite akebono mitashi aotabara at the first and aotahara at the second, a slip of his or his printer's [8].

1968. Richard Lewis, Of This World: A Poet's Life in Poetry, Dial Press. Blyth's first rendering reprinted word for word, Were my father here, / At dawn we would gaze / Over the green fields [12].

1994. Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa, Ecco Press. Twice: among the selected verses, I / With my father / would watch dawn / over green fields, page 189; and inside his translation of the diary itself, after the family's decision, Thereupon I decided to follow the instructions of the family and pursued the matter no further that day. I / With my father / would look out at dawn / over green fields, page 216. Hass keeps the grammar of ありて and the wish, and drops the death, which the diary around it supplies [9].

2003. Cid Corman, One Man's Moon, Gnomon Press. Were my father here / at dawn we'd be out looking / at the green rice fields, page 88 [13].

2007. G. Brian Karas, Today and Today, Scholastic Press. A picture book of Issa for children, the translator unnamed: With my father / I would watch dawn / over green fields, which is Hass's 1994 line without its first word [14].

Today. The diary has been in English since Robert Huey's Journal of My Father's Last Days, in Monumenta Nipponica in 1984, which Shirane's anthology of 2002 excerpts from the father's collapse to his death, translated from the 1959 annotated edition in 日本古典文学大系 58 [21]. A rendering of this line has to keep the counterfactual and the wish, ありて and たし, and to keep the fields green and the hour dawn; it need not say the father is dead, because the diary says it, but a scroll has no diary beside it. Blyth's second version, with my dead father, is the truer of his two for a reader who will never see the diary.

A reading

I read this verse as the plainest thing here and the heaviest. It is not an image and hardly a poem; it is a sentence a man writes at the bottom of a page when there is nothing more to write, and the poem is that he wrote it in seventeen syllables anyway, with a season word, because that was the form his grief knew. The diary's last prose sentence is about property, and the verse that follows is about a dawn he will not see with the one person he wanted to see it with. That turn, from the will to the fields, is the whole of it, and no rendering can carry it without the diary.

Sources not seen

A reader with access to any of these is invited to write to Takase Studios at Tim@Takase.com.

References

  1. 束松露香 校訂『父の終焉日記 : 一茶遺稿』, 岩波書店, 1922, 解題 pp. 1–9 and the diary's close pp. 40–41. National Diet Library pid 968476, scans 10–15 and 30. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/968476/1/30
  2. Makoto Ueda, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, Brill, Leiden, 2004, pp. 42–45.
  3. 藤村作 他 訳『物語日本文学』第21巻, 一茶一代物語, 1935, printed page 60. National Diet Library pid 1226739, scan 39. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1226739/1/39
  4. 早稲田文学社 編『文芸百科全書』, 1909. National Diet Library pid 871775, scan 936. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/871775/1/936
  5. 沼波瓊音『大疑の前』, 1913. National Diet Library pid 947491, scan 141. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/947491/1/141
  6. 吉田絃二郎『梅の咲くころ』, 1935. National Diet Library pid 1232420, scan 26. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1232420/1/26
  7. 菊池寛 監修『日本英雄伝』, 1936. National Diet Library pid 1222289, scan 183. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1222289/1/183
  8. R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, vol. 1, Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, 1963, pp. 409–410 and 424.
  9. Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa, Ecco Press, 1994, pp. 189, 216.
  10. 俳諧寺可秋 編『一茶一代全集』, 1908, the diary at scans 102–109, its close at printed pages 198–199. National Diet Library pid 874846, scan 109. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/874846/1/109
  11. Lewis Mackenzie, The Autumn Wind, John Murray, London, 1957; Kodansha International reissue, 1999, no. 46, p. 33.
  12. Richard Lewis, Of This World: A Poet's Life in Poetry, Dial Press, 1968.
  13. Cid Corman, One Man's Moon, Gnomon Press, 2003, p. 88.
  14. G. Brian Karas, Today and Today, Scholastic Press, 2007.
  15. 田中貢太郎『豪傑快傑』, 1916. National Diet Library pid 955894, scan 85. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/955894/1/85
  16. 勝峰晋風 編『新選一茶全集』, 1921, printed pages 98–99. National Diet Library pid 970100, scan 71. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/970100/1/71
  17. 半田良平 編『一茶俳句集 季題別年代考』, 1925, printed page 28; 『一茶俳句全集 季題別年代附』, 1935. National Diet Library pid 917542, scan 22; pid 1034501, scan 21. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/917542/1/22
  18. 相馬御風 編『一茶随筆選集』, 1927. National Diet Library pid 1186719, komas 26–27.
  19. 勝峰晋風 編『日本俳書大系』, the index volume, 1928. National Diet Library pid 1179400, scan 280. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1179400/1/280
  20. 「小林一茶」, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/小林一茶
  21. Haruo Shirane (ed.), Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900, Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 933–939, the diary in Robert Huey's translation.

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

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