Crow With No Mouth (Old Edition) [Paperback]

Ikkyu (Author), Stephen Berg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1989

poetry, classic Japanese, tr Stephen Berg

Editorial Reviews

Review

American poet Stephen Berg takes on the task of translating one of the most riotous and contentious of the Japanese Zen masters, Ikkyu Sojun. Berg is perhaps best known as the founder and coeditor of American Poetry Review and of the Naked Poetry anthologies. He is also an American Zen poet whose perverse humor and personal directness suit him to this task. Another American Zen poet, Lucien Stryk, provides an informed preface and portrait of Ikkyu, "best known in the Zen world as a sort of rake, always spitting in the face of orthodoxy, madly carrying on as freest of the free." Nicknamed "Crazy Cloud" by his fellow Zennists. Ikkyu managed to write bawdy drinking poems, moving love poems to his blind mistress, and startling Zen statements that awaken us as only a Zen koan can. Berg's brief foreword summarizes the master: "Harsh, delicate, brilliant, reckless, precise, intimate, ignorant, arrogant, aloofIkkyu comes across as a man of simultaneously miserable selfdoubt and infinite self-confidence": "that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets / I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind." Berg explains that his "versions" take the liberty of transforming Ikkyu's favored four-line verse into brief couplets that startle us with their directness-like a Zen master's address to his students. Such an approach reduces the poetry to a Zen minimum. 'Mere are fine memorable lines that make you realize life and understand why Ikkyu was so helpful to his Zen students: "Ikkyu this body isn't yours I say to myself / wherever I am I'm there." It passes so simply and quickly, one has to meditate on the line (dissolve it on the tongue of the mind and body) in order to release its sweetness. More objectionable is Berg's method of running-on thoughts (no punctuation throughout) to approximate the Chinese characters. Such deliberate awkwardness seems more perverse than even Ikkyu would require. For example, "no tiny wooden hut with a grass roof in the hills / but this city these people where I live still are impossible." Lacking even space breaks to guide us. at times it becomes impossible to read and appreciate. Despite this one flaw in method, Berg manages to bring a true Zen master into English, for which W.S. Merwin's praise seems appropriate: "It is good to have Ikkyu brought up close to us." Follow Ikkyu's own perverse advice as a finger pointing to the moon, road signs toward self-nature: "forget what the masters wrote truth's a razor / each instant sitting here you and I being here." -- From Independent Publisher

Crow With No Mouth
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author

Stephen Berg, founding editor of American Poetry Review, is the author of two dozen books of poetry and translations. He is a professor of English at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (May 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556590229
• ISBN-13: 978-1556590221
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,312,011 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something to crow about., February 18, 2001

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crow With No Mouth : Ikkyu : Fifteenth Century Zen Master (Paperback)

"Only one koan matters," Ikkyu writes, "you" (p. 67). "Believe in the man facing you now" (p. 21). While meditating on a boat when he was 27, Ikkyu Sojun--also known as "Crazy Cloud" (1394-1482), was enlightened when he heard a crow call (p. 9). As a Zen Master, he was considered sort of an eccentric rake (p. 13), and he never pretended to be much else. He loved sake. He loved women. "The crow's caw was ok," he writes (p. 58), but "a woman is enlightenment" (p. 64). Ikkyu scandalized his Zen community, and his poetry will offend many readers today as well. "Look me up if you want to," he writes, "in the bar whorehouse fish market" (p. 40).

These poems are "frank, naked, sincere" (p. 15), and full of vivid imagery of "erotic renewal" (p. 13). It's enough to say for purposes of this review, Ikkyu lives "in a shack on the edge of whorehouse row" (p. 40). These are the poems of a poet who is "all there" (p. 15), and fully present on his "long pure beautiful road of pain/ and the beauty of death and no pain" (p. 24), whether he is watching his four-year-old daughter dance--"I can't break free of her" (p. 60), watching the "snow moon tangled among black flowers" (p. 39), or "shuttling between whorehouse and bar" (p. 47). Question "flattery success money," he writes (p. 22). "This city these people where I live still are impossible" (p. 30). "Sing until you have no throat then words come by themselves" (p. 55).

I'm not qualified to comment on Stephen Berg's translation of Ikkyu's poems, but I can tell you this book is certainly something to crow about!

G. Merritt

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zen poetry as a beatnik would want it translated, October 23, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crow With No Mouth (Old Edition) (Paperback)

Ikkyu wrote his verses in a four line form which has been reworked into couplets by Stephen Berg. It is important to remember that these are version by Stephen Berg not careful translations from the original - as reworkings often are the most accessible translations.

Ikkyu was not a typical Zen master - the monkish disciplines of celebacy and sobriety were not in his repetoire. While this makes him an oddity, it reinforces the ideal that one who is enlightened is one who is free. This freedom (often seen as indifference or non-clinging) is voiced in this poem "Ikkyu this body isn't yours I say to myself / wherever I am I'm there". His freedom from the disciplines is shown in poems that are explicitly sexual not merely erotic. A very tame example: "don't hesitate get laid thaat's wisdom / sitting around chanting what crap".

Ikkyu is definately a poet that students or would-be students of Zen should read ... in fact, we all should read it for the sheer fun and beauty of it.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars haiku with an attitude, May 3, 2000

By 

George Schaefer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crow With No Mouth (Old Edition) (Paperback)

This is classic haiku from the 15th century zen master Ikkyu. Ikkyu was a headmaster at Daitokuji before renouncing the hipocritical attitudes of the monks. Ikkyu was far too hearty and robust to endure that fate. He was not afraid to toss a few obscenities into his writing. This is not your Mothers haiku. Ikkyu cussed and swore and ignored the authorities. This collection gives one a generous sampling of his haiku. This is a neglected genius that often is overlooked in favor of Basho and Ryokan. Those two are also brilliant but Ikkyu is the wild man of the group. He is Rimbaud blaspheming, Whitman yowling a barbaric yawp and Bukowksi drunk on the floor in one package. Its a great introductory collection to haiku and japanese poetry in general.