The Essential Basho [Hardcover]

Matsuo Basho (Author), Sam Hamill (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 1999

     Here is the most complete single-volume collection of writings by one of the great luminaries of Asian literature. Includes a masterful translation of Basho's most celebrated work, Narrow Road to the Interior, along with three less well-known works and over 250 of Basho's finest haiku. The translator has included an overview of Basho's life and an essay on the art of haiku.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

One of Japan's most famous poets, B asho (1644-94) spent much of his life writing as he traveled around Japan. Here Hamill, a poet and translator of Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Latin, presents sensitive and beautiful translations from B asho's most famous work, Narrow Road to the Interior, along with Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones, The Knapsack Notebook, Sarashina Travelogue, and a large selection of haiku. The Japanese original is included in Romanization. In the excerpts, B asho combines prose descriptions of his route with poems by himself and by friends. Many of the poems are grounded in a sense of place ("The winds that blow/ through South Valley Temple/ are sweetened by snow"), some reflect on life ("It's good now and then/ to go out snow-viewing/ until I tumble"), but most depict nature, his favorite theme ("The bee emerging/ from deep within the peony/ departs reluctantly"). Hamill introduces the works with explanations of poetic references and conventions and appended notes that explicate specifics. Some poems will still be obscure, but this is recommended as a good overview to this major poet.?Kitty Dean Chen, Nassau Community Coll., Garden City, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

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The Knapsack Notebook
Mourning The Death Of Ranran
Narrow Road To The Interior
On A Portrait Of Hotei, God Of Good Fortune
Sarashina Travelogue
Travelogue Of Weather-beaten Bones
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Shambhala; 1st. ed edition (March 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570622825
• ISBN-13: 978-1570622823
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,559,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars classic translation, August 3, 2000

By 

Don VanValkenburgh (Lummi Island, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Essential Basho (Hardcover)

As a casual and thorough student of Basho and the Japanese poetic forms of haiku, haibun and renga I've come to believe that Sam Hamill's translations are the best ever. Hamill, as a respected poet in the English language himself, translates the Japanese of Basho into an American English that literally sings.His translation of the opening lines of "Narrow Road to the Interior," included in this volume, is a classic Basho, and classic Hamill: "The moon and the sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." I have carried Hamill's translation of "Narrow Road" with me for years. To have "The Essential Basho" now on my shelf is an event to celebrate.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On the Road Again, July 27, 2001

By 

Judy Lightfoot (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Essential Basho (Hardcover)

[Note: This review appeared July 22, 1999, in the Seattle Weekly and is available online at http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/9929/books-lightfoot.shtml]

The Essential Basho, translated by Sam Hamill. Shambhala, $25 No wonder dreams of journeys are so often associated with death. We travel to leave our lives behind - the familiar workaday parts, anyway - hoping to arrive in a Paradise where our eyes, ears, tongues, maybe even our hearts, will be startled awake. What we really want is a new self, but what we often get is more stuff -samples of a regional cuisine, eyefuls of great art, tidbits about Kafka's life in Prague, opinions, trinkets. Traveling becomes grazing on a global scale.

A different pathway opens up in Sam Hamill's newest collection of translations, The Essential Basho. Here for the first time in a single volume is the essence of Basho's work: four travel narratives, including the best-known "Narrow Road to the Interior," and 250 haiku returning us home to a dailiness transformed by awareness and attention. Whether the poet is on the road or behind his own brushwood gate he seeks, instead of new acquisitions or excitements, an honest encounter between world and mind. These two entities were never separate to begin with. So although Basho's travelogues seem to record his treks on foot through 17th-century Japan, they're actually journeys into his own true nature, the heartland within, where self and circumstances are one.

"Very early on the twenty-seventh morning of the third moon, under a predawn haze, transparent moon barely visible, mount Fuji just a shadow, I set out under the cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka. When would I see them again? A few old friends had gathered in the night and followed along far enough to see me off from the boat I felt three thousand miles rushing through my heart, the whole world only a dream. I saw it through farewell tears.

"Spring passes / and the birds cry out - tears / in the eyes of fishes.

"With these first words from my brush, I started. Those who remain behind watch the shadow of a traveler's back disappear."

Carrying just a few necessities along with friends' farewell presents, which he can't bear to part with, Basho lets each event on the way speak the language of its particular life. At a farm he asks directions, but they're so complicated the farmer just lends Basho his horse ("'He knows the road. When he stops, get off, and he'll come back alone.'") The horse takes Basho to a village and then turns around, a gift from the poet tied to his saddle. Farther on, Basho observes peasants wearing black formal hats for ancient rites, speaks with prostitutes on a pilgrimage, sadly leaves to his fate a child abandoned by his parents, retreats from a three-day storm into a shack: Eaten alive by / lice and fleas - now the horse / beside my pillow pees.

At a mountain temple "I crawled among boulders to make my bows at shrines. The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open." Elsewhere, hearing distant villagers clap wooden noisemakers to scare deer from their fields, he feels "the utter aloneness of autumn." A stranger asks for a poem ("'Something beautiful, please'") and Basho writes a verse about the cuckoo's cry that arrives, just then, from across a field.

Basho's words flow spontaneously out of each moment lived. Instead of giving us tours or mementos of the world, he helps us open to its presences and discover who we are. Through his haiku we sense the wholeness and sufficiency of an early frost, an eggplant seed, a hangover, "Mr. Seagull," a nest of mice, a bean-floured rice ball, tears in the eyes of fishes, and ourselves, awake and alive again. Hamill frames "The Essential Basho" with essays on Basho's life and work that are scholarly enough to educate a student of haiku or Japanese culture and lively enough to engage any reader. Their depth and ease testify to the virtuosity Hamill has achieved as Editor of Copper Canyon Press, Director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, author of over thirty books, and translator of poetry in several languages. Travelers like me have carried around the world his pocket-size Basho ("Narrow Road to the Interior," now out of print) until it's tattered. We'll treasure the fine new volume silkily sleeved in Hokusai's portrait of the poet on the road again.