8 March 2005: I consider Robert Hass an enemy of poetry because he had good opportunities to publicize burstnorm poetry while he was U.S. Poet Laureate, but ignored it. I also don't think highly of his poetry, although I can't say I've read enough of it to responsibly criticize it. Nevertheless, I have to say--much as it bothers me--that I find it hard to imagine that his book, The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa, can be bettered. It contains translations of about a hundred haiku by each of the three haiku greats, almost all of them by Hass. Just about all of them seem of the highest order--and better-translated than I've seen the same ones translated elsewhere (into words alone, at any rate).
Hass (who was born the same year as I, and shares a first name with me) has, it seems to me, the same feel for haiku that I do (no doubt a significant reason for my approval of his translations). Here's how his introduction begins:
This is a collection of versions of a hundred poems or so each by three masters in the haiku tradition, Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. It is a truism of Japanese literqary criticism that the three men represent three types of the poet--Basho the ascetic and seeker, Buson the artist, Issa the humanist--and their differences are clear at a glance when you read them. Here is a fall poem that has Basho's poignant calm and spiritual restlessness:
Deep autumn--
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?
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And this winter poem was Buson's painterly mix of precision and strangeness:
Tethered horse;
snow
in both stirrups.
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And here is a summer poem of Issa's, with its pathos and humor:
Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.
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Hass even singles out a haiku by Basho that I, too, have singled out at this blog (and which I hope my readers will remember). I hope in future entries to discuss some of the poems in this collection.
Oh, I did find one haiku (actually, I looked for it) that I don't think Hass got as effectively as I myself have. He has:
The old pond--
a frog jumps in,
sound of water
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I have:
old pond--
abruptly, the sound
of a frog's splash-in
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I feel my version sets up a quietude Hass's doesn't, and I prefer the sound of the frog to precede the observer's identification of what made it. On second thought, maybe Hass's version sets up a quietude better than mine--since it had to be quiet for anyone to hear the sound of the water. In his version, we see the frog, then hear it because of the quiet. In mine, we hear a sound which suggests it must be quiet, then recognize it as that of a frog. I don't know Japanese, so don't know how Basho had it--but I don't care, to tell the truth. Hmmm, I still prefer my version. It has not only the frog after the sound, but ends with the frog's entrance of the pond, which I think the most important element of the scene. I still don't entirely love my somewhat slangly "splash-in, as I indicated when I first wrote about this translation of mine somewhere. I even changed my last line a few months ago to "of a frog, entering it." The heck with that: I want the splash!
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