Basho's Oku-no-hosomichi
December 7, 2003 7:32 PM Subscribe
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.
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
posted by digaman at 9:30 PM on December 7, 2003 [1 favorite]
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
posted by digaman at 9:30 PM on December 7, 2003 [1 favorite]
Thanks for the link. Its been ages since I read Bankei Zen which focuses on Basho.
posted by infowar at 1:07 PM on December 8, 2003
posted by infowar at 1:07 PM on December 8, 2003
Interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
posted by homunculus at 1:49 PM on December 8, 2003 [1 favorite]
posted by homunculus at 1:49 PM on December 8, 2003 [1 favorite]
« Older Jennicam shuts down for good | Dean Campaign and Revival of Community Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
On a journey, ill:
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.
-- Basho
from a collection of death haiku.
posted by pandaharma at 8:48 PM on December 7, 2003