In the twilight there is a field

Yosa Buson, Travels Through Mountains and Fields, c. 1765
Source: Wikimedia Commons

I've been reading The Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, translated by W. S. Merwin and Takako Lento. The collection was put together just after Buson's death in 1784. Such brief verse can evoke a landscape through metonymy but rarely makes you think immediately of landscape views like the Buson painting above, the Met's Travels Through Mountains and Fields. I did notice a general exception to this rule though and it occurs when fiels are the subject of the poem - you can't really talk about a field without evoking a landscape. There are 868 haiku in the volume so I think it is probably OK under fair use to reproduce just four here, one for each season. For spring it is a toss-up between numbers 58, 140 and 183 but I'll go for the first, which actually has a 'landscape' title, 'Looking across the Field'.

Mist in the grass

the water silent

just before sunset

This summer poem, no. 317, also has a title, 'On the Way Home from Seeing the Nunobiki Waterfall with Tairo and Kito'. Tairo and Kito were his disciples. Nunobiki Waterfall I have mentioned here before in connection with The Tales of Ise (c. 900).

Evening sun slipping behind the hills

a waterwheel is turning

in the field of ripening wheat

The autumn poem, no. 487, is again set at sunset

The mountains darken after the sun goes down

in the twilight there is a field

of silver grass

And finally, no. 742, winter

Vast dry field

out in the desolation

the sun slips into the rock

Clearly these are all variations on a theme: the field and the sunset are constants, but the atmosphere is different in each poem.

 

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