and background from which they were born, to use a simile, like a dew born out of the deepest heart of dawn.
It is not my purpose here to criticise and examine Mr. Porter's translation to satisfy my fastidious heart of minuteness-loving; let it suffice to say that the hokku is not a poetry to be rightly appreciated by people in the West who lie by the comfortable fire in Winter, or under an electric fan in Summer, because it was originally written beside a paper shoji door or upon the strow mats. We have a saying: “Better to leave the renge flowers in their own wild plain;” it suggest quite many things, but what it impresses me most is that you should admire things, flowers or pictures or what not, in their own proper place. To translate hokku or any other Japanese poem into English rarely does justice to the original; it is a thankless task at the best. I myself was a hokku student since I was fifteen or sixteen years old; during many years of my Western life, now amid the California forest, then by the skyscrapers of New York, again in the London "bus, I often, tried to translate the hokkus of our old masters
