BUSON – THE HAZE

指南車を胡地に引去ル霞かな

Shinansha wo kochi ni hiki saru kasumi kana

The south pointing chariot 
leaves into
Northern hinterlands: 
the haze!!


Buson studied Chinese poetry and history and wrote many haiku that have allusions to scenes from famous Chinese poems. This haiku is built around an allusion to the Battle of Zhuolu which is recorded as having been fought in Northern China in the 26th century BC.


The battle at Zhuolu happened because a warlord from the east, named Chi You, decided to conquer the lands of Huangd Di, The Yellow Emperor. The mythology surrounding this battle is that as the soldiers of The Yellow Emperor started to finally turn the tide of the battle, Chi You magically produced a sandstorm, and then haze, which stopped the advancing enemy army in its tracks and kept it at bay.


To counter this a divine vision came to the Yellow Emperor with the design of the south pointing chariot, a cart that has a statue of man on it whose finger, because of a complicated set of gears, always points south no matter what direction the cart is pulled. This vehicle enabled the Yellow Emperor to maneuver his troops through the haze to defeat Chi You.


I have a book titled “Haiku Taikan” (A Comprehensive Survey of Haiku) which writes that the kigo of “kasumi” is well used here. “Kasumi” translates as mist, or haze, and as a kigo is defined as the atmospheric condition where enough water droplets are in the air to impede visibility. 


The book argues that the kigo combined with the act of the chariot leaving, this gives the expanded time frame of a chariot being pulled by people disappearing into the haze, as well as the the width of the hinterlands it is disappearing into, and how wide and far reaching this haze must be.


As interesting as this argument is, you have to perform quite a few mental gymnastics to get yourself into a position that lets you read Buson as giving you an bird’s-eye account of something that happened more than 4000 years before he was alive.


The only way to truly get Buson’s eyes into this haiku is to acknowledge that he has pulled the allusion of the south pointing chariot out of the mists of history to make an unstated epic simile (literally) for the haze he now finds himself in.


I’m not sure how much haze it takes to stop an advancing army in its tracks, but I think Buson once found it enough in his daily life to stop him and transmitted it to the world in an unforgettable way. 


Haze accented with an exclamation works back across the break and links to the part of the allusion that didn’t need to be restated because it is the kigo.