Please read this short text.
The text signature and seal say 柳川 Yanagawa ?
The painting seal says 碧潮 Hekishio ? Could it be 太田碧潮 ?
The painting signature:碧
What is on the outside?
Writing above the picture seal says 碧画 (Heki-ga) > Drawn by Heki.
The seal itself says 碧潮 (Hekishio)
The writing on the outside of the scroll says 不如帰 (Hototogisu - cuckoo bird)
Scroll calligraphy says
つんぼうに碁は
勝れたりほととぎす
柳川花人囗
Not sure of the red ones. I can't offer a translation of the poem either, other than to note the reappearance of the word "hototogisu" this time in hiragana.
the cuckoostains the skipjack tunaI suppose 時鳥鰹を染めにけりけらし hototogisu katsuo o some ni keri kerashi Ahi Tuna Hototogisu katsuo What do we make of this strange haiku where a cuckoo stains a fish? Was …
matsuobashohaiku.home.blog
Certainly the right guy does not seem to show any...
It's also a haiku magazine:
The last kanji of the left end column is 賛, i.e., the poem was written (and/or composed) by 柳川花人.
The google translation is totally wrong.
my attempt: Go is favorable to deaf people
Cuckoo bird
The left bald-headed man is deaf, and is concentrating on playing Go even in a situation where his opponent is calling something. A cuckoo bird/Cuckoo birds might be singing there. It shows the season anyway.
Yes, the painter is 太田碧潮, but the reading of his given name would be Hekichō. You can see his seal is the same as the one on your scroll. (You already found the following auction page, and got his full name from there, maybe?)
the cuckoostains the skipjack tunaI suppose 時鳥鰹を染めにけりけらし hototogisu katsuo o some ni keri kerashi Ahi Tuna Hototogisu katsuo What do we make of this strange haiku where a cuckoo stains a fish? Was …
matsuobashohaiku.home.blog
In the end it says:
"Katsuo can also be read to mean "man who wins." Hototogisu katsuo, means "the cuckoo wins." Thus, the patient Ieyasu killed the "fish"."
Could 勝れたり不如帰 somehow be interpreted as "the cuckoo" wins - or the patient player wins? The deaf man not paying attention to his opponents shouting around.
Patience is a well known advice at playing go.
The writer of the blog just wrote his own thoughts by his imagination with no evidence. It's already clarified that those three well-known haiku were made lately, not originally made by the three samurai. That episode appeared firstly in a book 甲子夜話, which was written approximately from 1820 to 1840. However, Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644 and dead in 1694. Thus, it's impossible that he knew it.
Indeed かつお can be 勝男, meaning "man who wins", but Hototogisu katsuo cannot mean "the cuckoo wins".
Machine translators are very bad at translating Japanese poems and classical Japanese. For example, Google Translate misinterpreted たり as a modern Japanese structure ～たり…たり in the haiku. The translation "or" is from this misunderstanding. たり is actually a classical auxiliary verb there.
Machine translators are very bad at translating Japanese poems and classical Japanese. For example, Google Translate misinterpreted たり as a modern Japanese structure ～たり…たり in the haiku. The translation "or" is from this misunderstanding. たり is actually a classical auxiliary verb there.
Thanks very much. So what would the literal (word by word) translation with たり be:
To the deaf man / concerning go / win? / ...? / hototogisu / ?
Still the true meaning might be hidden by wordplay.
Here it is shown how the bird is associated with time:
"And one more interesting thing is Hototogisu's Kanji is 時鳥. 時 means time. 鳥 means bird".