Beloved translator Peter Beilenson’s goal was twofold: to craft a book of haiku accessible to anyone, and to render his best guess at what the poets would have written in English. His translations preserve the sublime spirit of each verse, conjuring vivid visual and emotional impressions in spare words.Haiku icon Basho is represented amply here, as are imagery-virtuoso Buson and wry, warm, painfully human Issa. The verses of Shiki, Joso, Kyorai, Kikaku, Chora, Gyodai, Kakei, Izen, and others also appear, all illuminated by lovely woodblock prints. Ranging from exquisite (In the sea surf edge/Mingling with the bright small shells…/Bush-clover petals –Basho) to bittersweet (Dead my fine hopes/And dry my dreaming, but still…/Iris, blue each spring –Shushiki) to silly (Dim the grey cow comes/Mooing, mooing, and mooing/Out of the morning mist –Issa), this collection will stir your senses and your heart.

    Arguably the central genre of Japanese literature, the 31-syllable lyric made up the great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was the inspiration for such poetry as haiku and renga. Tanka has begun to attract considerable attention in North America in recent years. Modern Japanese Tanka is the first comprehensive collection available in English.Tanka retains the aesthetic sensibilities that circumscribe Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during this tumultuous century, tanka has undergone equally radical shifts. Responding to artistic and social movements of the West, tanka has incorporated influences ranging from Marxism to Avant-Garde.Modern Japanese Tanka includes four hundred poems by twenty of Japan's most renowned poets who have made major contributions to the hisotry of tanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his graceful, eloquent translations, Makoto Ueda captures the distinct voices of these individual poets, providing biographical sketches of each as well as transliterating Japanese text below each poem. His introduction gives an excellent overview of the development of tanka in the last one hundred years.Tracing the contemporary tanka tradition from Yosana Tekkan in the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth-century poetry of such writers as Taware Machi, Modern Japanese Tankselegantly conveys an authentic sense of Japanese lyric to a Western audience.

    These journeys were part of his religious training as a Buddhist monk as well as literary inspiration for his memorable and often painfully moving poems. The works he wrote during this time comprise a record of his quest for spiritual enlightenment.Although Santoka was master of conventional-style haiku, which he wrote in his youth, the vast majority of his works, and those for which he is most admired, are in free-verse form. He also left a number of diaries in which he frequently recorded the circumstances that had led to the composition of a particular poem or group of poems. In "For All My Walking, " master translator Burton Watson makes Santoka's life story and literary journeys available to English-speaking readers and students of haiku and Zen Buddhism. He allows us to meet Santoka directly, not by withholding his own opinions but by leaving room for us to form our own. Watson's translations bring across not only the poetry but also the emotional force at the core of the poems.This volume includes 245 of Santoka's poems and of excerpts from his prose diary, along with a chronology of his life and a compelling introduction that provides historical and biographical context to Taneda Santoka's work.

    The only comprehensive study that examines all areas of Basho's work, including haibun, renku and critical commentaries.

    Miyazawa Kenji: Selections collects a wide range of his poetry and provides an excellent introduction to his life and work. Miyazawa was a teacher of agriculture by profession and largely unknown as a poet until after his death. Since then his work has increasingly attracted a devoted following, especially among ecologists, Buddhists, and the literary avant-garde. This volume includes poems translated by Gary Snyder, who was the first to translate a substantial body of Miyazawa’s work into English. Hiroaki Sato’s own superb translations, many never before published, demonstrate his deep familiarity with Miyazawa’s poetry. His remarkable introduction considers the poet’s significance and suggests ways for contemporary readers to approach his work. It further places developments in Japanese poetry into a global context during the first decades of the twentieth century. In addition the book features a Foreword by the poet Geoffrey O’Brien and essays by Tanikawa Shuntaro, Yoshimasu Gozo, and Michael O’Brien.

    The haiku is one of the most popular and widely recognized poetic forms in the world. In just three lines a great haiku presents a crystalline moment of image, emotion, and awareness. This illustrated collection includes haiku by the great masters from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.

    Staring with the Classical Period (645-1604 A.D.), characterized by the wanka and tanka styles,followed by haiku poets of the Tokugawa period (to 1867), the subsequent modern tanka and haiku poets,and including the contemporary school of free verse—Women Poets of Japan records twelve hundred years of poetic accomplishment. Included are biographical notes on the individual poets, an essay on Japanese women and literature, and a table of historical periods.

    He not only helped give new vitality and direction to the old conventions of court poetry, but created works that, because of their depth of feeling, continue to attract readers to the present day.

    Winner of every major Japanese literary prize, his work translated around the globe, Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) is a great and unique figure in the literature of the twentient century. "Irrevocably enmeshed in Japanese culture, he is by virtue of his religion [Endo was Roman Catholic] irrevocably alienated from it" (Geoffrey O'Brian, Village Voice). It is this aspect that has made Endo so particularly intriguing to his readership at home and abroad. Now gathered in a New Directions Bibelot edition are five of Endo's supreme short stories exemplifying his style and his interests, presenting, as it were, Endo in a nutshell. "Unzen," the opening story, touches on the subject of Silence Endo's most famous novel -- that is the torture and martyrdom of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan. Next comes "A Fifty-year-old Man" in which Mr. Chiba takes up ballroom dancing and faces the imminent death of his brother and his dog Whitey. In "Japanese in Warsaw" a business man has a strange encounter; in "The Box," an old photo album and a few postcards have a tale to reveal. Finally included is "The Case of Isobe," the opening chapter of Endo's novel Deep River in which Isobe, a member of a tour group, hopes to find in India the reincarnation of the wife he took so much for granted.

    Deceptively simple, Ryokan's poems transcend artifice, presenting spontaneous expressions of pure Zen spirit. Like his contemporary Thoreau, Ryokan celebrates nature and the natural life, but his poems touch the whole range of human experience: joy and sadness, pleasure and pain, enlightenment and illusion, love and loneliness. This collection of translations reflects the full spectrum of Ryokan's spiritual and poetic vision, including Japanese haiku, longer folk songs, and Chinese-style verse. Fifteen ink paintings by Koshi no Sengai (1895-1958) complement these translations and beautifully depict the spirit of this famous poet.

    The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku has served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and also as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of the 1950s. This definitive collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest haiku masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century. Robert Hass has written a lively and informed introduction, provided brief examples by each poet of their work in the haibun, or poetic prose form, and included informal notes to the poems. This is a useful and inspiring addition to the Essential Poets series.

    The poems range in tone from the spiritual longing of an isolated monk to the erotic ecstasy of a court princess—but share the extraordinary simplicity and luminosity of language that marks Kenneth Rexroth's verse style. An introduction by the poet and translator Sam Hamill, the editor of this collection, and short biographies of the poets are included. The Shambhala Library is a series of exquisitely designed and produced cloth editions of the world's spiritual and literary classics, both ancient and modern. Perfect for collecting or as gifts, each volume features a sewn binding, decorative endsheets, and a ribbon marker—a delightful-to-hold 4 ¼ x 6 ¾ trim size.

    Haiku are clearly shown to be a means of discovering and recording the miracles of the world, from the humorous to the tragic. This is one of the major themes underlying Writing and Enjoying Haiku-that haiku can provide a way to a better life.After looking at why the reading and writing of haiku is important from a spiritual point of view, the book shows, as has never been done before, the techniques of writing-the when and the where, punctuation and capitalization, choice of words, figures of speech, sharing haiku, and much, much more.Having come this far, having learned to read and write haiku with a discerning mind, the reader will never again look upon the world in quite the same way.

    Henderson was, from 1927 to 1929, the Assistant to the Curator of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Musuem of Art. In 1930 he went to Japan, where he lived the following three years. On his return to this country he joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he taught Japanese and initiated a course in the history of Japanese art. He retired in 1955. His published works include The Bamboo Broom, Surviving Works of Sharaku (with Louis V. Ledoux), and A Handbook of Japanese Grammar. He has also translated H. Minamoto's Illustrated History of Japanese Art, etc. Mr. Henderson lives in New York City.

    This collection of translations of the classical Zen poets of China, Japan, and Korea includes the work of Zen practitioners and monks as well as scholars, artists, travelers, and recluses, ranging from Wang Wei, Hanshan, and Yang Wanli, to Shinkei, Basho, and Ryokan.