Customer Reviews

The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (Penguin Poets)

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I stumbled across this book at a garage sale in southside Chicago. Though then 15 years old, it still had its cellophane wrapping intact. I pity the people who had it for so long and never peeked in, because it is a beautiful collection of poetry. It samples a wide range, from around 1000 a.d. to the 20th century (much of it tanka and haiku). At around 200 pages the book is a bit short for the task, but what is here is superbly rendered, and many of these poems can fill an afternoon with reveries. I have taken this book with me everwhere.

This anthology contains samples of Japanese poetry from all its major periods. It contains a long introduction which focuses on Japanese prosody and the particular and special qualities of Japanese as a language. I felt while reading it that I could never really get the feel of the poetry without knowing Japanese. This does not mean the translations do not make for interesting reading. But there is something very repetetive about them. The poems are short and in small lines. Japanese poetry is syllabic and depends a good deal on assonance and alliteration. It also depends on a kind of tonal language which I suspect simply does not translate. The poems are often about Nature, or rather the human perception of and encounter with nature. Often there is sadness and loss in them and a kind of fading loneliness.There is often a certain kind of gentle and remote Beauty in them. There are different kinds of poems for instance one set written by soldiers guarding the frontier has a strong Stoic quality. Among the major form of Japanese poetry, are the tanka, and for Western readers,the haiku. While the anthology provides short biographies of the writers it does not give any kind of real individual analysis of major figures like Basho, Buson, Issa. The poetry is pervaded by a sense of the fleetingness of the moment, of life, of time. It is without any kind of extensive narrative or speculation or even reflection. It is a poetry of hint and suggestion, of concision, of fragmentary perception. I often had the sense that I simply did not get a poem did not have the kind of flash of intuition which I suspect is required to understand most of these poems. I certainly had by myself no tool for, no means of distinguishing truly between the better poems and the lesser ones.