I travel back 300 years before my lifetime. I move in time but not in space staying rooted to this spot on earth. Who lives on this soil? What grows here? If I could, I would see the whole story unfold from the beginning. We are specks, our history a blip in billions of years.
….this is the last verse in Basho’s ‘Oku no Hosomichi’ ‘The Narrow Road to the Far North’. Because there are several word plays at work here, the Japanese maintain that there is no way for the poem to be rendered into another language.
The challenge here was to “revise” Basho’s haiku even though in its original Japanese there are many wordplays. After reading Chevrefeuille’s post (link above) and much head scratching, I came up with this simple version:
Futami, a word used in the Japanese version, is the name of the port where the Wedded Rocks, shown in the photo, are located. Beach chestnuts is an alternative meaning of the words in the first line and possibly could be an image representing the Wedded Rocks.