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Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho - Softcover

Basho, Matsuo

 
9780307962003: Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307962008 ISBN 13: 9780307962003
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Vivid new translations of Basho's popular haiku, in a selected format ideal for newcomers as well as fans long familiar with the Japanese master.

Basho, the famously bohemian traveler through seventeenth-century Japan, is a poet attuned to the natural world as well as humble human doings; "Piles of quilts/ snow on distant mountains/ I watch both," he writes. His work captures both the profound loneliness of one observing mind and the broad-ranging joy he finds in our connections to the larger community. David Young, acclaimed translator and Knopf poet, writes in his introduction to this selection, "This poet's consciousness affiliates itself with crickets, islands, monkeys, snowfalls, moonscapes, flowers, trees, and ceremonies...Waking and sleeping, alone and in company, he moves through the world, delighting in its details." Young's translations are bright, alert, musically perfect, and rich in tenderness toward their maker.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Young has written eleven previous books of poetry, including, most recently, Black Lab and Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems. He is a well-known translator of the Chinese poets as well as the poems of Petrarch and Eugenio Montale. A past winner of the Guggeheim and NEA Fellowships as well as a Pushcart Prize, Young is the Longman Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Oberlin College and the editor of the Field Poetry Series at Oberlin College Press.

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Introduction
 
The seasons wheel past, majestic, troubling, and reassuring. Their procession signals constant change and a transient existence, but their repetition provides a sense of stability. Basho’s world is a world of hardship and poverty, but even life’s privations and disasters can disclose delights that enlarge his awareness, his enjoyment of being-in-the-world.
 
By allowing his participation in the beauty and variety of its particulars, large or small, the earth on which Basho lives permits him to transcend his own ego:
 
Crawl out
from under the shed
toad-croak
 
It is summer on the farm, in this case, and the simple delight of encountering a different creature is, for this poet, sufficient occasion for a poem. The toad is also allowed his voice; his is the music of the poem, in effect, echoing the poet’s greeting. They share a moment of identification and identity.
 
Sometimes the visual effect is more imposing:
 
A line of egrets
making a bridge
between two snowy peaks
 
Much of the pleasure here derives from the play of scale, contrasting the size of the mountains with the delicate dimensions of the birds, along with the white-on-white color scheme.
 
This poet’s consciousness affiliates itself with crickets, islands, monkeys, snowfalls, moonscapes, flowers, trees, and ceremonies. He shares his writing with other poets and is known as an inspiring teacher. When he isn’t socializing with writers, he can socialize with the world around and beyond the self. From a communal activity, renga, where a group of writers collaborate on a series of linked verses, he takes the seventeen-syllable unit used to introduce (and be interspersed among) such verses and makes it into his own instrument of meditation and discovery. His haiku are still linked to social activity, but they also become independent, more broad ranging, singular, substantive.
 
Travel was Basho’s modus vivendi. Born into a samurai family (his official dates are 1644–1694), he left that aristocratic world behind in favor of a kind of bohemian existence, gregarious but restless. Success as a poet and a teacher did not lead him to settle in one place. Instead, he hit the road, always curious to see what was over the next horizon. He made it his mission to know the Japan of his time deeply and well. But love of travel was a typical pastime even when the poet was at home. He could associate with a butterfly one moment, a galaxy the next. Waking and sleeping, alone and in company, he moved through the world delighting in its details.
 
Basho’s work has such range of expression and tone that generalizing about it is tricky and even unprofitable. Robert Hass speaks of Basho’s “profound loneliness and sense of suffering,” and I think, Yes, but there’s his joy and his deep sense of community. All four emotions are present in his work, which eludes our descriptions, again and again.
 
Many of his haiku are deeply embedded in his culture: its traditions, legends, holidays, and folklore. Many others stem from specific occasions, often as gifts of commemoration and thanks. Those poems, entwined with the life and times of their writer, don’t translate so well and would require scholarly commentary to accompany them. But since the poet left us just over a thousand haiku, we readers who belong to another time, place, and language can concentrate on the ones that best demonstrate his universality, even as we acknowledge in passing that our portrait of the poet is partial and just a bit idealized. While we consider his work timeless, Basho was also very much a man of his own time and place. The 188 haiku I have selected to translate here don’t fully reflect that, though they certainly attest to his variety of interest, mood, and tone.
 
*
 
Typically, Basho’s haiku lodge us firmly in a season and a time of day, by means of an activity or an observation, before turning sharply to an interior or subjective accompanying emotion or thought:
 
Cool of the evening
watching the melons grow
you should be here
 
This is like a compressed version of a Chinese lyric poem from, say, the T’ang Dynasty, a combination of outer observation and inner response.
 
In this poem we do not know exactly who the “you” is, but we recognize the sudden sense of longing, coupled with the urge to communicate it. And if we are alert to the haiku’s commitment to seasonal awareness, we appreciate that summer is turning into autumn, as cool evenings come and melons reach ripeness. That someone would actually try to watch melons grow argues that we can slow down our pace and allow a meditative peace to invade our consciousness.
 
The Japanese original, incidentally, has a different order: the first line last, the thought of the absent friend or lover in the middle: Watching the melons grow / you should be here / cool of the evening. The reordering shows how circular the form tends to be: you can enter at any point, loop through, and exit where you arrived.
 
It was not unusual, in fact, to place the emotional surge in the middle, between two more “objective” moments:
 
Black forest
nothing you say matters
it snows all morning
 
Here the “you” is more likely the articulating self, the speaker. And how we feel about the midpoem realization will depend on how we manage our response to the black forest and the apparently endless snowfall that frame it. I would suggest that while the poem sounds quite pessimistic at first, it is similar, finally, to the Buddhist recognition that spreads out through the melon-watching haiku, a slowing down and opening out that helps alleviate human worry and distraction. The anxious self disappears into the calm larger world around it.
 
More frequently, however, any emotional or interior response is implicit, and it’s not so much a matter of our guessing the emotion as it is our creating it. No two readers will have exactly the same reaction, and that is part of what we prize:
 
Drawing water
sound of monks’ clogs
crossing ice
 
Depending on your mood, this can be melancholy, exhilarating, painful, giddy, or some mixture of those responses. It’s a chilly morning in a monastery, and you must decide how you feel about that. The point is that readers are free to shape their own response. We are part owners of such poems. Haiku can instruct us on how to react, but we are in charge, finally, of our own well-being and appreciation. As Lucien Stryk once put it, “The reader is aware of a microcosm related to transcendent unity. A moment, crystallized, distilled, snatched from time’s flow, and that is enough.”
 
Sweeping statements about haiku, however, are always tricky. No sooner have you stressed their impersonality than you come upon one that is emphatically subjective. If you remark on their reverence, you will promptly encounter one that is deliberately silly, thumbing its nose at spiritual pretense. Far better to be open to their astonishing variety than to try to fit them into categories. They love to startle, first the writer and then the reader. As though a hummingbird were to land suddenly on your resting arm. It is the way the world so often surprises us, reaffirming its rightness from a direction we didn’t expect. Haiku are grounded in the seasons of the year, always, but beyond that (and...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307962008
ISBN 13 
9780307962003
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
128
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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