Table of Contents

9 Introduction

I. BASHO
21 Matsuo Basho
27 Poems
65 ‘The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling’ (tr. Burton Watson)
69 The Saga Diary (prose tr. Etsuko Terasaki)

II. BUSON
85 Yosa Buson
91 Poems
129 Long Poems
137 from New Flower Picking (tr. Yuki Sawa & Edith M. Shiffert)

III. ISSA
145 Kobayashi Issa
149 Poems
185 from Journal of My Father’s Last Days (tr. Robert N. Huey)
205 from A Year of My Life (prose tr. Nobuyuki Yausa)

IV. BASHO ON POETRY
219 Learn from the Pine
225 from Kyorai’s Conversations with Basho (tr.Jonathan Keene)

237 Notes
292 A Note on Haikai, Hokku, and Haiku
301 A Note on Translation
311 Further Reading
316 Acknowledgements
317 Copyright Acknowledgments
320 Biographical note

About the Author

Robert Hass was born in 1941 in San Francisco. He served as US Poet Laureate in 1995-97. His many awards include a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Time and Materials (2007), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sun Under Wood (1996). His first collection Field Guide was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1973. His latest book of poetry is The Apple Trees at Olema: New & Selected Poems (Ecco, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2011). Hass also worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen books of Milosz's poetry, including Treatise on Poetry and, most recently, A Second Space. His translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) and Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns (2007). He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.