The Young Girl Blew Her Nose in the Evening Glory

I am able to type Japanese in this English essay because of a phonetic alphabet that uses our own letters to represent Japanese sounds. This alphabet is called kana, and this is the haiku:

Yugao no hana de hana kamu musume kana.

R.H. Blyth has published this as

The young girl

Blew her nose

In the evening glory.

As is, this version is full of love, acceptance and humor. The translator has taken care to make the poem beautiful. The third line is the longest to emphasize the irony its words impose. The flower is called an evening glory instead of a moon flower, which flows much more nicely, the hard G and long O linking the young girl and the nose to evening glory... Such a lovely sound! And the meaning of the flower is brought from sky to earth, there to be innocently corrupted.

Now, if we look at the words in their original language, much more meaning can be made from this. From what I can tell (and I am only beginning to teach myself), Japanese is a language with much ambiguity. (The word chichi means both milk and father; the word kami means god or hair or paper.) Let us take each word of this haiku to see what strange combinations of meaning lie beneath the surface.

The first word means literally "an evening face"; it is a moonflower. Yuugata, meaning evening, is combined with kao, which means face. Musume means daughter or young girl. (I think that when combined with the flower's name you might say yugamu, which means to warp or distort-- Or am I trying too hard?)

The word hana has two meanings: 1.) Flower or essence, and 2.) nose or nasal mucous, a pun which is completely lost in the English translation. I imagine an open blossom with drops of nectar morphing by some trick of light and imagination into a snot-nosed kid; or how a young woman blowing her nose might be lovely in the right romantic setting. Kamu means to blow one's nose, but also to chew, bite or gnaw, which could easily have sexual connotations in Japanese.

Maybe you recognize the last word of the haiku? Ending a sentence, kana can mean "I hope that" or "I wonder" or "is it?" But remember that, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, it is also the Japanese syllabary. With this interpretation in mind, the humor runs deeper, into the poet's own processing itself, where the flower is concrete reality, and the words are associations in the mind. Poetry itself reflects this play of inside and outside, what is and what may be, in search of truth or beauty.