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RE: To Kill an Ant :: Haiku of Japan #65
Three cheers for your papa-ethics! Pulling apart the Kanji for "ant" (ouch, not a good way to put it! especially not since the compound character even looks a bit like an ant somehow), but I stumbled across an obsolete pronounciation of ari-no-ko and wondered if to the well versed Haiku ear this askance reference would have added a layer (with the silent repeat "no ko" in "my children"); would this implied correspondence emphasise the imagery of life=life in ants as in kids? Or am I seeing things a Japanese reader could not possibly hear?
I don't know of that reading—it's not in my dictionary. Few Japanese would be silently thinking that. The truth is, few Japanese understand haiku at all. They have the same problem we do, they don't understand the allusions or any of the subtle wordplay. Reading old haiku for today's Japanese is like reading Shakespeare is for English speakers: we understand the words (sometimes), but the broader meaning is often beyond us without a teacher to explain it.
Thank you so much for your thoughts on this, it helps me think on further about meaning and knowing v feeling our way through it.