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Home › Library › Philology › Buson - In loneliness, there is joy too, An autumn eve

さびしさのうれしくも有秋の暮 sabishisa no ureshiku mo ari aki no kure Buson - In loneliness, there is joy too, An autumn eve

This is a philological study of the haiku さびしさのうれしくも有秋の暮 (sabishisa no ureshiku mo ari aki no kure), given to Buson from his posthumous papers. It examines six Japanese readers' disagreement, from 1904 to 1940, over whether the verse's plainness is sublime or too blunt, and its English renderings from Blyth's of 1949.

Japanese Scroll of Buson - In loneliness, there is joy too, An autumn eve (sabishisa no ureshiku mo ari aki no kure) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Buson - In loneliness, there is joy too, An autumn eve (sabishisa no ureshiku mo ari aki no kure)

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

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Abstract

さびしさのうれしくも有秋の暮, loneliness, and there is gladness in it too; autumn dusk, is Buson's, carried in his posthumous 遺稿 rather than the 句集 printed in his lifetime, by Handa Ryōhei 半田良平's own source tags. Six Japanese readers from 1904 to 1940 disagree about whether its plainness is sublime or too blunt, Its first known English is Blyth's, printed in 1949, and Yuki Sawa and Edith Shiffert in 1978 and Adam Kern in 2018 render it again.

Overview

The text. The scroll carries さびしさのうれしくも有秋の暮, with 有 in kanji where every edition prints あり. Otherwise the witnesses differ only in writing. The source itself, the 蕪村遺稿, writes さひしさの嬉敷もあり秋のくれ in its 1900 edition [1], and the 1907 lectures on it and 潁原's complete edition of 1925 print the same [2][3]: 嬉敷 is 嬉しく with 敷 written for its しく, ひ stands unvoiced as the older writing leaves it, and くれ is in kana. Masaoka Shiki's manuscript anthology copies it さひしさのうれしくもあり秋のくれ [4]. The Buson editions of 1902, 1906, 1921, 1925 and 1935 and the two commentaries of 1904 and 1926 print さびしさのうれしくもあり秋の暮; the 1906 aesthetics and the 1921 annotated edition write 淋しさ; 鳴雪's 1909 manual writes 淋しさの嬉しくもあり; the 1934 anthology of commentaries writes 秋のくれ. 有 and あり, 淋しさ and さびしさ, 嬉しく, 嬉敷 and うれしく, ひ and び, 暮 and くれ are one word each, and the calligrapher's 有 is a kanji the editions leave in kana. No witness varies a word. The meter is five, seven, five: さ・び・し・さ・の, う・れ・し・く・も・あ・り, あ・き・の・く・れ.

The sense. Everyone agrees what the verse says, and the argument is about whether it should have said it. Hasegawa 長谷川 in 1921 gives the plain gloss and stops [5]. So, earlier, do the first lectures on the verse in its own book, in 1907: Takahama Kyoshi 高浜虚子, 秋の夕暮は淋しい、心細い。併し其うちに、嬉しい處もある, autumn dusk is lonely, forlorn; and yet within it there is something glad, and Kawahigashi Hekigotō 河東碧梧桐, who reads the の as が, 淋しさ其ものが又嬉敷くも思はれる, loneliness itself comes to seem glad as well [2]. Kōroku 紅緑 in 1904 says the plainness is the art, a natural music without chisel marks, and warns that a reader who looks for the poem in the words will find a hackneyed one; his Wang Wei is there to show what plain words can hold [6]. 中川 in 1906 raises the stakes to the sublime, a joy that comes only after a blow, and hears Faust in it [7]. Meisetsu 鳴雪 in 1909 files it as lyric and subjective, a verse of feeling [8]. Noguchi 野口, in 1920 and again in 1926, makes it the mark of Buson's temperament, a desolation tasted with warmth and never driven to the bottom [9][10]. The 1934 anthology hears the whole 秋の暮 run as an old man's loneliness pressed too openly, so that the true flavor does not come through [11]. Hino 日野 in 1940 says what the 1934 critic implied: the paradox is stated, not shown, and the better Buson verse shows it [12]. Blyth in 1952 hears the rare moment when the loneliness is welcome, sometimes, rarely, we feel like the bird [13]; three years earlier he had set the verse in a chapter on Zen, as the freedom from seeking happiness [14]. The tradition, then, holds two positions: that the verse is beautiful because it is plain, and that it is a little too plain to be beautiful. Both are readings of the same も.

The words. さびしさの is loneliness, with の making it the subject of the clause that follows, as Hekigotō glossed it in 1907 [2]. うれしくも有 is is glad, too, and the も is the whole poem: also, the gladness inside the loneliness and not instead of it. Hasegawa Reiyoshi's 1921 gloss is the plainest: 秋の暮は淋しいものであるが、その淋しさがまた嬉しい場合もあると云ふ意味の句, autumn dusk is a lonely thing, but the verse means there are times when that loneliness is also a joy [5]. 秋の暮 is autumn dusk or the end of autumn; the phrase carries both, and the tradition has argued it since Bashō's crow. Blyth hears an autumn eve; the 1934 critic hears the season's end, an old man's autumn [13][11]. As words the line says: Loneliness, and there is gladness in it too: autumn dusk.

The verse in English. Blyth's is the verse's first known English rendering, in two wordings: There is joy too in the first volume of Haiku, 1949 [14], and There is a joy too in the autumn volume, 1952 [13], which the 1967 gift-book selection from his four volumes reprints [15]. Yuki Sawa and Edith Marcombe Shiffert, whose translations are dated 1978, give Being alone / may also be pleasant— / autumn dusk [16], and Adam L. Kern in 2018 within loneliness / there is also happiness – / autumn dusk, noting that the verse runs against the grain of most gloom-and-doom autumn verses [17].

The historical record

1900. 蕪村遺稿, edited by Mizuochi Roseki 水落露石, 鹿田松雲堂. The verse's own source, printed from a brushed copy. The verse opens the 秋のくれ run, after もみぢ見や用意かしこき傘二本, and 人は何に化るかもしらじ秋のくれ, 訓讀の經をよすがや秋の暮, 一人來て一人をとふや秋の暮 and the rest follow it; it writes さひしさの嬉〔 〕もあり秋のくれ, where the glyph after 嬉 is cursive and agrees in shape with the 敷 the 1907 lectures print [1].

1900. Masaoka Shiki 正岡子規, 俳家全集, a manuscript anthology in his hand, dated 1900 by the library. In the 秋のくれ run under Buson, between 訓讀の經をよすかや秋のくれ and 人は何に化るかもしらし秋のくれ: さひしさのうれしくもあり秋のくれ, marked (イ) [4].

1902. 山田三子, 蕪村俳句全集, a collected edition. The verse in the 秋の暮 run: 弓取に歌とはれけり秋のくれ, さびしさのうれしくもあり秋の暮, かぎりある命のひまや秋のくれ [18].

1904. Satō Kōroku, 蕪村俳句評釈, a commentary. The verse is printed with 一人來て一人を訪ふや秋のくれ and the two are read together: この種の句の妙は全く天籟にして絕て斧鑿の痕なきにあり、然れども若し誤て其句字より之れを求むれば興會全く沒して、所謂月並調とならずんば則ち一つの平弱の句たるに終らん, the wonder of this kind of verse lies wholly in its natural music, without a trace of the chisel; but seek it wrongly through its letter and its life vanishes, and it ends as a hackneyed verse if not a merely feeble one. Then he turns to a Chinese poet: 我王摩詰の七古を愛す、王の詩一種淡白の致あり, I love Wang Wei's old-style verse; his poetry has a certain plainness, and quotes a poem he says Wang sent to 五弟 from his retreat, 終南有茅屋　前對終南山　終年無客長閉關　終日無心長自閒　不妨飮酒復垂釣　君但能來相往還, in my rendering I have a thatched hut in the Zhongnan hills, facing the mountain; all year no visitors, the gate long shut; all day no cares, long at ease; nothing stops me drinking or dropping a line; if only you could come and go with me, and says of it, と小小の文字、字字生命あり、勿謂讀過淡々として、白湯を喫するが如しと、この水由來宇治第三橋に得たり, small words, and every word alive; do not say that read through it is flat, like drinking plain hot water: this water was drawn at the third bridge of Uji [6].

1906. 中川四明, 俳諧美学, an aesthetics of haikai. The verse as an instance of 嵩高, the sublime: 要するに、嵩高は總て一たび打擊を受け、壓抑せられて而して後に生ずる〓揚怡悅の感覺なり, in sum, the sublime is always the feeling of elation and delight that arises only after a blow has been received and a pressing-down endured, beside it a line of Goethe's Faust in German, its own text too damaged to quote; given here as reconstructed, In jenem seligen Augenblick, ich fühle mich so klein, so gross [7].

1906. Iwamoto Shiseki 岩本梓石, 蕪村俳句全集 標註, an annotated edition. The same run, with notes on the neighbors and none on this verse [19].

1907. 蕪村遺稿講義, 秋之部, the lectures of Naitō Meisetsu 内藤鳴雪, Kyoshi, Hekigotō and others on the 遺稿, 俳書堂, pages 163–164. The verse as the 遺稿 writes it, さひしさの嬉敷もあり秋のくれ, in the 遺稿's order, with the two readings quoted above [2].

1909. Naitō Meisetsu, 俳句作法, a manual. 淋しさの嬉しくもあり秋の暮, twice: among the 抒情の句, the lyric verses, and among those 主觀に屬するもの, belonging to the subjective [8].

1920. Noguchi Yonejirō, 日本の美術, the essay 奉與謝蕪村書, a letter to Buson, page 225. 與謝蕪村君、君の寂寥味は芭蕉のそれとは異つて居る, Yosa Buson, your loneliness is not Bashō's; with this verse first among four, 其處に寂寞をどん底にまで極めずに人情味の餘裕を保つて居る, you keep there the ease of human feeling, never taking desolation to its very bottom, and 君の京都式情調は禪僧的寂寞から巧に逃れて居る, your Kyoto temper deftly escapes the Zen monk's desolation [9].

1921. Hasegawa Reiyoshi, 蕪村俳句全集 校註解釈, an annotated edition. The gloss quoted above [5].

1925. 蕪村三千句, and Handa Ryōhei, 蕪村俳句全集 季題別. The 三千句 prints the 秋の暮 run whole: 我がてに我をまねくや秋の暮, 門を出れば我も行く人秋の暮, 弓取に歌とはれけり秋のくれ, 淋し身に杖わすれたり秋の暮, 秋のくれ辻の地藏に油さす, さびしさのうれしくもあり秋の暮, 人は何に化るかもしらじ秋の暮, 訓讀の經をよすがや秋のくれ, 一人來て一人を訪ふや秋の暮, かぎりある命のひまや秋の暮, 門を出て故人にあひぬ秋の暮, 燈ともせといひつゝ出るや秋の暮, 鳥さしの西へ過けり秋の暮. Handa prints the same run with his source tags, 右八句、句集 before this verse and 右八句、遺稿 after the eighth from it [20]. 潁原退蔵's 蕪村全集 of the same year prints it さひしさの嬉敷もあり秋のくれ and tags it 遺稿 alone, where the two verses before it are tagged 句集 [3].

1926. Noguchi Yonejirō, 蕪村俳句選評, a poet's selection with comments. The 1920 judgment again: the verse among those that show that Buson never drives desolation to its bottom but tastes it with a human warmth that leaves room, and that his Kyoto sensibility cannot be reconciled with the Zen monk's desolation [10].

1934. 俳句評釈選集, an anthology of commentaries, the 蕪村名句評釈. The 秋の暮 run read as one set, 去年より又た淋しいぞ秋の暮, 父母のことのみ思ふ秋のくれ, さびし身に杖わすれたり, and the judgment that it presses its old man's loneliness on us in quick succession, a little too openly, so that the true flavor of age does not come through [11].

1935. Handa Ryōhei, 蕪村俳句全集 季題別年代附. The 1925 arrangement and tags reprinted [21].

1940. Hino Sōjō, 展望車, a modern poet's essays. The verse's paradox こころもちの逆說的な一面が率直に詠はれてある, sung straight out, set against さびしさに花咲きぬめり山櫻, where the loneliness is not said but shown [12].

The dictionaries today. The Nipponica entry on kotobank gives the poet's dates 1716–1783 and does not mention the verse [22].

The attribution. Buson's, at every witness, and in every edition of Buson. Its source is not the 蕪村句集 of 1784 but the posthumous 遺稿, published in 1801 [23]. The 遺稿 itself, in its 1900 edition, opens its 秋のくれ run with this verse [1]; 潁原's complete edition of 1925 tags it 遺稿 [3]; and Handa Ryōhei's dated edition of 1925 arranges the 秋の暮 verses in two groups, closes the first eight with 右八句、句集, opens the second with this verse, and closes those eight with 右八句、遺稿 [20]. The 蕪村三千句 of the same year prints the same run in the same order without the tags [20]. No witness dates the composition. Blyth, from 1949, is the first English translator known to carry it [14][13], and Sawa and Shiffert and Kern follow [16][17].

What is not a source. Wang Wei's poem to his friend, which Kōroku quotes at length, is the commentator's parallel for a kind of plainness, not a source Buson names [6]. Goethe's Faust, in 中川, is likewise the critic's instrument [7]. The other 秋の暮 verses of the run, 門を出れば我も行く人, 淋し身に杖わすれたり, かぎりある命のひまや, 一人來て一人を訪ふや, are the verse's neighbors in Buson's editors' ordering and the set the 1934 critic reads as one; they are its company, not its kin [20][11]. Hino's 山櫻 verse is the contrast he sets against it [12]. None of these is a source for the verse.

The verse in English

1949. R. H. Blyth, Haiku, volume 1, Eastern Culture, Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, in the chapter ZEN, page 229. After a passage of Spengler's on a freedom of outlook that ranks nothing above anything else: We must have freedom from the idea, and freedom from the fact of seeking for happiness, seeking for beauty or significance. So Buson says, and the verse in kana, さびしさのうれしくもあり秋の暮, then An autumn eve; / There is joy too, / In loneliness. The season word comes first here too [14].

1952. R. H. Blyth, Haiku, volume 3, Summer–Autumn, Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, under AUTUMN, THE SEASON, page 345. An autumn eve; / There is a joy too, / In loneliness, with the sentence on the bird quoted above. Blyth puts the season word first, where the Japanese puts it last [13].

1967. Dorothy Price, ed., Silent Flowers: A Collection of Japanese Haiku, Hallmark Editions, selected from Blyth's four volumes, unpaginated, in the autumn section. The 1952 wording, An autumn eve; / There is a joy too, / In loneliness., under Buson's name [15].

1978, read in the edition of 2007. Yuki Sawa and Edith Marcombe Shiffert, Haiku Master Buson, White Pine Press, page 120. Being alone / may also be pleasant— / autumn dusk, with the romaji under it, between the Jizō verse and the sutra verse of the same run [16].

2018. Adam L. Kern, The Penguin Book of Haiku, Penguin Classics, page 148, and the commentary, page 329. within loneliness / there is also happiness – / autumn dusk, and in the commentary: This verse runs against the grain of most gloom-and-doom autumn verses [17].

Today. The house English, In loneliness / there is joy too / An autumn eve, is Blyth's three lines of 1949 word for word, in the Japanese order rather than his, with his punctuation dropped, under the poet's name alone. The reordering is an improvement on his English, since it puts 秋の暮 last where the verse does; it is still his words. A rendering of this line has to keep the も, the too, because the verse is nothing without it, and it should keep the season word last, which the page already does.

A reading

I take Kōroku's side and Hino's warning together. The verse says a plain thing, and the plainness is the point: there is no image, no scene, only a feeling named and then qualified by one syllable, も, and then the hour. Read for its letter it is nothing, as 紅緑 says, and read as a statement it is a little too open, as the 1934 critic and 日野 say; read as a moment, the instant at dusk when the loneliness one has been dreading turns out to be welcome, it is exact.

Sources not seen

ホトトギス, 1905, National Diet Library pid 7972219. The library's full-text search finds さひしさの嬉敷 in this issue, which is on its restricted service and not delivered through the public viewer; it would show whether the 1907 lectures first ran in the magazine, and in what words.

蕪村遺稿講義, 俳書堂, 1905. National Diet Library Search lists imprints of 1905 with no digital copy; the lectures cited are the 1907 秋之部.

蕪村遺稿, 享和元 (1801), the first print, recorded at the 国書データベース with no image [23]; the edition cited is the 1900 one.

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

References

  1. 水落露石 編『蕪村遺稿』, 鹿田松雲堂, 1900. National Diet Library pid 875700, scan 27. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875700/1/27
  2. 内藤鳴雪 等『蕪村遺稿講義』秋之部, 俳書堂, 1907, printed pages 163–164. National Diet Library pid 875703, scans 85–86. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875703/1/85
  3. 潁原退蔵 編『蕪村全集』, 1925, printed page 140. National Diet Library pid 1018320, scan 98. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1018320/1/98
  4. 正岡子規 編『俳家全集』, manuscript, dated 1900 by the National Diet Library. National Diet Library pid 2546172, scan 119. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2546172/1/119
  5. 長谷川零余子 編『蕪村俳句全集 校註解釈』, 1921. National Diet Library pid 968346, scan 59. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/968346/1/59
  6. 佐藤紅緑『蕪村俳句評釈』, 1904, printed pages 188–189. National Diet Library pid 875716, scan 99. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875716/1/99
  7. 中川四明『俳諧美学 平言俗語』, 1906. National Diet Library pid 875470, scan 98. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875470/1/98
  8. 内藤鳴雪『俳句作法』, 1909. National Diet Library pid 875595, komas 74, 124. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875595/1/74
  9. 野口米次郎『日本の美術』, 1920, printed page 225. National Diet Library pid 981161, scan 129. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/981161/1/129
  10. 野口米次郎『蕪村俳句選評』, 1926. National Diet Library pid 1019055, scan 28. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1019055/1/28
  11. 『俳句評釈選集』, 蕪村名句評釈, 1934. National Diet Library pid 1148254, scan 105. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1148254/1/105
  12. 日野草城『展望車』, 1940. National Diet Library pid 1114982, komas 116–117. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1114982/1/116
  13. R. H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 3, Summer–Autumn, Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, 1952, p. 345.
  14. R. H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 1, Eastern Culture, Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, 1949, p. 229.
  15. Dorothy Price, ed., Silent Flowers: A Collection of Japanese Haiku, Hallmark Editions, 1967, selected from R. H. Blyth, Haiku, vols. 1–4; unpaginated, autumn section. https://archive.org/details/silentflowerscol00pric
  16. Yuki Sawa and Edith Marcombe Shiffert, Haiku Master Buson, White Pine Press, Buffalo, 2007 (translations copyright 1978, 2007), p. 120. Internet Archive haikumasterbuson0000yosa (lending). https://archive.org/details/haikumasterbuson0000yosa
  17. Adam L. Kern, ed. and tr., The Penguin Book of Haiku, Penguin Classics, London, 2018, p. 148; commentary p. 329.
  18. 山田三子 編『蕪村俳句全集』, 1902. National Diet Library pid 875715, scan 72. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875715/1/72
  19. 岩本梓石 編『蕪村俳句全集 標註』, 1906. National Diet Library pid 875714, scan 72. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875714/1/72
  20. 『蕪村三千句』, 1925, printed page 88. National Diet Library pid 924926, scan 47; 半田良平 編『蕪村俳句全集 季題別』, 1925, printed page 48, National Diet Library pid 964212, scan 31. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/924926/1/47
  21. 半田良平 編『蕪村俳句全集 季題別年代附』, 1935. National Diet Library pid 1090303, scan 29. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1090303/1/29
  22. 「与謝蕪村」, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/与謝蕪村-22116
  23. 「蕪村遺稿」, 国書データベース (National Institute of Japanese Literature), work 482791, 享和元 (1801). https://kokusho.nijl.ac.jp/work/482791

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.

Checked · grok-4.6 (xAI), 2026-09-05, citations · gpt-6-astra (OpenAI), 2026-09-05, citations · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-09-14, citations — every claim tested at its address; one page citation corrected — Blyth's adjacent page-number token differs from the account's cited pages