but I gave up my hope when I had written the following in English:
“My Love’s lengthened hair
Swings o’er me from Heaven’s gate:
Lo, Evening’s shadow!”
It was in London, to say more particularly, Hyde Park, that I wrote the above hokku in English, where I walked slowly, my mind being filled with the thought of the long hair of Rossetti’s woman as I perhaps had visited Tate’s Gallery that afternoon; pray, believe me when I say the dusk that descended from the sky swung like that lengthened hair. I exclaimed then: “What use to try the impossibility in translation, when I have a moment to feel a hokku feeling and write about it in English?” Although I had only a few such moments in the past, my decision not to translate hokku into English is unchanged. Let me wait patiently for a moment to come when I become a hokku poet in my beloved English.
