Years of searching for meaning revealed in a minute
I am reading Natalie Goldberg's book Three Simple Lines and she wrote about her visit to Japan tracing Basho's footsteps.
Together with her travel companions she meets Harada and his son, who maintains a shrine. While they are in the shrine, the son asks what the Americans are doing in Japan and Goldberg explains their purpose and recites one of Basho's haiku, his death haiku:
Sick on the journey
my dreams wander
over withered fields
She also has a book by Buson, another one of the renowned haiku writers where he, in his death bed states:
“The heights of 'My dream hovers over withered fields'—Basho's last haiku— is impossible for me to reach. Therefore, the old poet Basho's greatness is supremely moving to me now”
Goldberg adds that her enthusiasm for this haiku is because she “has been intensely studying it after reading Buson's comment”. And yet she “doesn't quite get its greatness”.
She continues, writing
Immediately, a lively discussion flies back and forth across the altar room among Harada, Taiseki, and Mitsue.
After more than a minute, Mitsue turns to me and says “It's not withered fields. Poor translation.”
“No? What is it?”
They confer again for a long time.
It seems this is important to the three of them. Mitsue then explains, “Something much wilder. After everything has died and it's all removed — the stubble, everything — the fields are totally empty, truly vast.”
I take a step back. Tears spring to my eyes. On his death bed, Basho embraced the whole impermanent field of the universe.
I am noting this down to notice how easy it comes to native speakers, meaning that is not transferred well into another language. Meaning that means a great deal to someone, how it can be withheld with the wrong words.
I imagine one might not need to travel to Japan and find monks to get the correct translation of a Japanese poem any more with advancements such as LLMs. But one still needs to reach to that point in their life where this mistranslation once revealed would bring tears of joy.
For anyone else, that nuance in translation is meaningless.
