I just cashed in a book store gift card from Christmas (thanks, Joe and Esther!), picking up a copy of Basho: The Complete Haiku, translated by Jane Reichhold. This is the first time that Basho’s complete haiku have been brought over into English by a non-Japanese translator, but what really won me over was Reichhold’s extensive commentary on the individual poems and her translation of Basho’s famous “Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto”:
old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water
It seems an improvement over my previously favorite version, done by Sam Hamill:
At the ancient pond
a frog plunges into
the sound of water
If this frog had hairs we could split them all! And if you enjoy such hair-splitting, you can find 29 more versions online, along with an illuminating commentary, here.
But the real reason for this post is to draw attention to an observation Reichhold makes in her introduction: “Haiku are so short, succinct, and ambiguous that the reader must supply his own images and make leaps and connections out of acquired experiences to realize the complete poem.” The next time a post-avant poet claims that “refusing closure” is something invented by his tribe, you can point out that it’s really 300-year-old news….
Dang it. Another book to pick up. (I am secretly smiling)
I don’t remember Adam Fieled saying post-avants are smarter and more educated, but the elitism you’re zeroing in on is certainly a feature of High Modernism (Pound/Eliot), the Fugitives (Tate/Ransom), doctrinaire Surrealism (Breton and …?), and that tribe of the avant-garde that traces its lineage to Dadaism and the work of Gertrude Stein. I’m working up a post on all this, but it gives me a
One of the things I really appreciate about haiku is the fascinating mixture of concrete and abstract. I’m bothered by Adam Feiled (?) comment that p-a’s are smarter and more educated and thus right better poetry. Basho shunned this mindset to go on his haiku tour.