Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

And where do you see this essay fitting in among other considerations
specifically focused on Bashō’s life and work (Robert
Aiken’s A Zen Wave; Haruo Shirane’s Traces of Dreams;
and Makoto Ueda’s Bashō and His Interpreters come to mind
among others)?
JANE: Those books are indispensable, and many were part
of my own introduction to haiku and, I’ll add, to poetry as a
whole: the first book of any kind I ever bought for myself, at
age eight, was a Peter Pauper Press book of translated Japanese
haiku. We should add also the many translations of Bashō’s
poetry now in print. I recommend them all—I think that to
understand anything, especially when there are large leaps of
culture and time and translation involved, the most accurate
understanding comes from looking at multiple sources. There
is no single “best” authority. If you can’t read Bashō, Issa,
Buson, or Yosano Akiko in the original, then reading them
through many eyes is best.
As for how my contribution fits in, The Heart of Haiku was
retitled by Amazon when they took it for the Kindle Singles
program; my title was Seeing Through Words: Matsuo Bashō,
an Introduction. I think that tells you quite a lot about how I
see this piece: I would never myself have made such a grand
claim for it as The Heart of Haiku does. My piece is introductory,
not exhaustive, and its angle of entrance is historical,
through Bashō, not haiku in general, though to read Basho
you have to understand what haiku are, and how they work,
and what they can hold at their best. Bashō himself, though,
is a perennially useful lens, since haiku as we now know it
was so radically changed by Bashō, generally described as its
“founder,” even though the form existed before him. For current,
American writers of haiku, The Heart of Haiku is really a
way to look back to the rootstock, to refresh their relationship
with how haiku was first conceived by its extraordinarily radical
and continually evolving founding figure. Bashō himself
was concerned with so many of the issues that current haiku
writers are concerned with—how to write in this moment’s
language and perception, how to learn from the past without
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
66 Haiku Society of America