Comments on: Basho's Oku-no-hosomichi

Basho's Oku-no-hosomichi

chymes — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:32:54 -0800

Basho: Many old places brought down to us through poetry, but landslides and floods have altered paths and covered markers with earth, and trees arisen generations gone, and hard to locate anything now, but that moment seeing the thousand-year-old monument brought back sense of time past. One blessing of such pilgrimage, one joy of having come through, aches of the journey forgotten, shaken, into eyes. - Cid Corman's tr. of Basho's Oku no Hosomichi. 4 translations online.

By: pandaharma

pandaharma — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 20:48:56 -0800

Wonderful to think of Basho on this cold dark day... On a journey, ill: my dream goes wandering over withered fields. -- Basho from a collection of death haiku.

By: digaman

digaman — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 21:30:51 -0800

Allen Ginsberg had tremendous respect for haiku as a super-concise means of expressing the connection between the vast cosmic and the minute particular. He translated Basho's most famous poem as: The old pond A frog jumps in Kerplunk! In Ginsberg's classes (I was his teaching assistant at Naropa), he would gloss that haiku like this: The old pond = "Heaven," vastness, the cosmos A frog jumps in = Earth, mortal animal particularity Kerplunk! = Heaven and Earth unified in an act of human perception

By: hama7

hama7 — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 08:48:55 -0800

Nice find, chymes. Thanks.

By: plep

plep — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:04:26 -0800

[this is good]

By: infowar

infowar — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:07:20 -0800

Thanks for the link. Its been ages since I read Bankei Zen which focuses on Basho.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:49:14 -0800

Interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.