On Haiku
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Everything you want to know about haiku written by one of the foremost experts in the field and the “finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English” (Gary Snyder)
Who doesn’t love haiku? It is not only America’s most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere—Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark’s made millions off them, first-grade students across the country still learn to write them. But what really is a haiku? Where does the form originate? Who were the original Japanese poets who wrote them? And how has their work been translated into English over the years? The haiku form comes down to us today as a cliché: a three-line poem of 5-7-5 syllables. And yet its story is actually much more colorful and multifaceted. And of course to write a good one can be as difficult as writing a Homeric epic—or it can materialize in an instant of epic inspiration.
In On Haiku, Hiroaki Sato explores the many styles and genres of haiku on both sides of the Pacific, from the classical haiku of Basho, Issa, and Zen monks, to modern haiku about swimsuits and atomic bombs, to the haiku of famous American writers such as J. D. Salinger and Allen Ginsburg. As if conversing over beers in your favorite pub, Sato explains everything you wanted to know about the haiku in this endearing and pleasurable book, destined to be a classic in the field.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of essays and talks from the past 25 years, translator and critic Sato (Snow in a Silver Bowl) exhaustively, and sometimes exhaustingly, tells all about haiku. Addressing the historical tradition, poetic form, and craft of haiku, the essays also perform close readings of specific examples, such as the celebrated 17th-century poet Matsuo Basho's frog haiku, of which Sato once collected 140 different English translations. Roving further afield, Sato uses haiku to illuminate some of the difficulties encountered in Japanese-to-English translation (such as the absence of a Japanese equivalent to English's plural s.) At the book's most rewarding, it situates haiku as part of a larger story, explaining how the modern conception of haiku as a tiny, enigmatically philosophical poem represents a strange cropping of the original Japanese form, which served merely as the brief opening to a much longer poem composed as part of elaborate court rituals, and often incorporated humor and in-jokes. But many of the best insights are recycled across the essays, since they weren't originally written to be read in one collection, and the prose is prone to distracting tangents. Individually, the essays are fascinating, reflecting Sato's unimpeachable expertise in his subject. Unfortunately, read as a whole, they verge on the unwieldy and redundant.
