April is National Poetry Month in the United States. I subscribe to a couple of
emails that send a poem-a-day during National Poetry Month. One of the emails
has an established poet pick a poem by someone else to comment on.

Here is the poem and he comment for April 2:

Michael Dickman's Poetry Month Pick, April 2, 2010

"Having Reddened the Plum Blossoms"
by Yosa Buson (1716-1783)
translated by Robert Hass


Charles Simic says that the short poem "is a match flaring up in the dark
universe".

One poem that comes to my mind as a match, or even a book of matches, flaring up
in the dark universe is a three-line poem by Yosa Buson:

Having reddened the plum blossoms
the sunset attacks
oaks and pines.

I think this is a small and meditative poem about summer that is also somehow a
large and raucous poem about bloody desire. It is, to be sure, a poem that asks
us to take in and make sense of a great deal in a very short amount of time. The
poem moves slowly. But our minds have to race. We need to make sense of, among
other things, plum blossoms turning a color they don't usually take on—by what
we're not sure until the second line. We find out it is due to a sunset, but a
sunset that attacks, that has martial qualities, and which turns to redden the
oaks and pines next. In its way it is a very fast and violent poem, leaving the
reader to wonder if there will be any end to the "reddening." The poem keeps
opening out after its final period along with the sunset. Almost cinematic in
its jump cuts, the images move in wide circles inside of the world. They start
in the miniscule; a blossom, then move out to the grand sweeping sunset and then
back to something that lives in-between the two: trees. Buson does this in three
lines. Eleven words.

About the effect of images there is the famous comment made by a student of Tu
Fu's: "It's like being alive twice", he said. Part of what I think the student
means is that thinking in images renders us alive and present to the actual
world. And reading poems like this one will leave us gasping for breath, amazed,
and lit up like a match.

About Michael Dickman:

Michael Dickman is the author of The End of the West (Copper Canyon Press,
2009). He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in The
New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, and Narrative
Magazine, among others.

* * *

This is not a frequently-translated poem of Buson's. Doing a quick search of
various books of translation, I found it in only two places: Hass's Essential
Haiku, and Blyth.

Here is Blyth's translation:

Koobai ya irihi no osou matsu kashiwa

Red plum-blossoms:
The setting sun assails
Pines and oak trees.

Here is Blyth's comment:

The level rays of the sun strike on the oaks and pines above the plum-tree, and
flood them with a strength and depth of colour that surpasses that of the
obscurely red blossoms. There is here no attempt on the part of the poet to
unite himself with nature, to live his own life into nature. Buson makes himself
a 'tabula rasa' upon which to portray the scene which somehow or other disturbs
him. It is true that we can find subjective elements here, as everywhere, the
contrast of the masculine pines and oaks with the feminine plum-tree, the use of
the word "assail" which which really expresses the poet's own feeling of being
overwhelmed by the rich colour of the rays of the setting sun.

* * *

It appears that Hass mistakenly believes that the plum blossoms are white, and
are being reddened by the setting sun, along with the pine and oak.

How good/interesting is this haiku? I wonder if there is more going on here
than even Blyth found. With Buson's love of samurai culture, are there overtones
of meaning in the use of such a striking word as "osou" (attack) that I am
missing?

--Larry