loneliness–
chestnuts are talking
on my stove
Comment: the sense of solitude and melancholy that grips the poet in the first ku is partially tempered by the sizzling and crackling sound of chestnuts (kuri 勝ち栗) warmed on the stove plate in the second one. Thanks to a wise and original use of personification, in fact, that sound is associated with the chatter of a few friends who are engaged in conversation, filling the initial silence and offering the reader a typical autumn scene. The alliteration of the sound ‘s’ conveys this reconstruction, while the repetition of the consonant ‘t’ in lines 2-3 underlines the sharpness of the sound produced by the chestnuts and by the fire.
