Cho no shita

蝶の舌/ゼンマイに似る/暑さかな
(芥川龍之介 1892-1927)

cho no shita / zenmai ni niru / atsusa kana
(Akutagawa Ryunosuke 1892-1927)

butterfly's tongue
looks like a spring,
the heat!


How close do you have to get to a butterfly to be able to see its tongue? As I've mentioned before I'm rather ignorant of the natural world, but if you want to see a butterfly's tongue this is what they look like. Kind of like a spring I suppose, all coiled up like that. I'm trying to think of the right word to describe this poem. Psychedelic? Hallucinogenic? Phantasmagoric, perhaps? The heat seems to play its part in the transformation of the natural into something mechanical. We might also consider that the butterfly is a symbol of metamorphosis, except there's something unnatural in any further transformation from its final state.

I think the contrast in this haiku between different writing systems really works. Setting the kanji butterfly, '蝶', against the katakana spring, 'ゼンマイ', there's a real sense of a clash between ancient and modern. I don't always find this kind of thing convincing, but in this case '蝶' just looks pretty, and 'ゼンマイ' utilitarian, and I can't explain it any better than that. I really enjoyed this haiku, but it's the last one in the book I'm going to look at, and the next entry will move on to tanka.

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