Basho stands today as Japan’s most renowned writer, and one of the most revered. Wherever Japanese literature, poetry or Zen are studied, his oeuvre carries weight. Every new student of haiku quickly learns that Basho was the greatest of the Old Japanese Masters. Yet despite his stature, Basho’s complete haiku have not been collected into a single volume. Until now. To render the writer’s full body of work into English, Jane Reichhold, an American haiku poet and translator, dedicated over ten...
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) is widely acknowledged as the greatest of all the Japanese haiku poets. In the original Japanese, the two defining features of the haiku form are its 5-7-5 sound unit format (the syllable being the corresponding unit in English) and its rhythm. This selection of three hundred of Basho's finest haiku represents the first successful strict translation into English haiku of what was actually written, some 350 years ago, by a genius of the form. The renditions are beautiful;...
