A review by lauriesand82
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa by Robert Hass, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, Matsuo Bashō

4.0

I am in no way an expert on poetry, much less haiku specifically, but I truly enjoyed this collection. As Hass explains in the "Note on Haikai, Hokku, and Haiku" at the end of the book, much of the meaning to be found in the poetry as it was originally written is lost in translation for the modern reader, partly because of the limitations of English, but also because the sense of cyclical time versus linear time that was an integral part of the culture of the time is simply not meaningful to us today, even for native Japanese. That said, a sense of the comfort given by the cyclical seasons and the beauty of nature still comes through in the English translation, even if the other layers of meaning are missing. I was most struck by the verses that, amazingly, have stood the test of time, geography, and culture. For example: Children imitating cormorants/are even more wonderful/than cormorants. Or: All the time I pray to Buddha/I keep on/killing mosquitoes. And my personal favorite: Don't worry spiders,/I keep house/casually. All three of these came from Issa, the poet I found to be far and away the most accessible of the three in the collection. Basho was nearly completely opaque to me, although I felt better about this when I read his notes on poetry to his students in which he states, "A verse that has something interesting it is all right, even if its meaning isn't very clear." Well that explains a few things, Basho.