100 Poems from the Japanese
10 best books like 100 Poems from the Japanese (Kenneth Rexroth): Cat Town, Basho: The Complete Haiku, alphabet, The Selected Poems, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry, River of Stars: Selected Poems, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, One Hundred Leaves: A new annotated translation of the Hyakunin Isshu, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu
| Author | Sakutarō Hagiwara |
| ISBN | 1590178041 |
Modernist poet Sakutarō Hagiwara’s first published book, Howling at the Moon, shattered conventional verse forms and transformed the poetic landscape of Japan. Two of its poems were removed on order of the Ministry of the Interior for “disturbing social customs.” Along with the entirety...
| Author | Matsuo Bashō |
| ISBN | 4770030630 |
Basho stands today as Japans most renowned writer, and one of the most revered. Wherever Japanese literature, poetry or Zen are studied, his oeuvre carries weight. Every new student of haiku quickly learns that Basho was the greatest of the Old Japanese Masters.
Yet despite his stature, Bashos...
Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally...
| Author | Li Bai |
| ISBN | 0856462918 |
I return to Li Po often. He is as important to me as anyone in my literary pantheon. I haven't done the comparative research to determine which translation is best, but I've yet to be disappointed when I've cracked a Li Po collection.
really, the following is all you need to know:
Alone...
| Author | Arthur Waley |
| ISBN | 0802134777 |
One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs (Shijing) is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs left from antiquity. Where the other Confucian classics treat “outward things: deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works,”...
| Author | Akiko Yosano |
| ISBN | 1570621462 |
Yosano Akiko (1878-942) is one of the most famous Japanese writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of more than seventy-five books, including twenty volumes of original poetry and the definitive translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of the Genji. Although probably best known for...
| Author | Ono no Komachi |
| ISBN | 0679729585 |
Japanese poetry is said to be originated in human heart and mind and grows in to the myriad leaves of words. The collection of poems The Ink Dark Moon is from the Heian era of Japanese literature, the era is considered as Golden Age in the history of Japanese literature. The language in that era was very inflected...
| Author | Kobayashi Issa |
| ISBN | 1570621446 |
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the...
The Hyakunin Isshu is a poetry anthology beloved by generations of Japanese since it was compiled in the 13th century. Many Japanese know the poems by heart as a result of playing the popular card game version of the anthology. Collecting one poem each from one hundred poets living from the 7th century...
| Author | Du Fu |
| ISBN | 0811211002 |
Tu Fu radically altered poetry as he found it in the High T’ang period. In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton,...
| Author | Robert Hass |
| ISBN | 0613339983 |
American readers have been fascinated since their exposure to Japanese culture late in the nineteenth century, with the brief Japanese poem called the hokku or haiku. The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion....
| Author | Sam Hamill |
| ISBN | 1570620199 |
Here are more than two hundred of the best haiku of Japanese literature translated by one of America’s premier poet-translators. The haiku is one of the most popular and widely recognized poetic forms in the world. In just three lines a great haiku presents a crystalline moment of image, emotion,...
| Author | Wang Wei |
| ISBN | 0811216187 |
Wang Wei (701-761 C.E.) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China's 3,000-year poetic tradition. Of the three, Wang was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. He developed...
| Author | Hanshan |
| ISBN | 1556591403 |
A Zen-Taoist poetry classic, in a handsome Chinese-English format
This definitive translation of Han Shan’s poetry appears in a bilingual Chinese-English format. Included are extensive notes, a preface by renowned translator Red Pine, a findings list, and photographs of the cave and...
| Author | Burton Watson |
| ISBN | 0231034504 |
This collection is one of the earliest and most important works of Chinese Buddhist poetry and is especially influential in the later literature of the Zen Sect of Buddhism, which looked back to these poems as a classic of Zen literature. The poems cover a wide range of subjects: the conventional lament...
| Author | Zbigniew Herbert |
| ISBN | 0060783907 |
This outstanding new translation brings a uniformity of voice to Zbigniew Herbert's entire poetic output, from his first book of poems, String of Light, in 1956, to his final volume, previously unpublished in English, Epilogue Of the Storm. Collected Poems: 1956-1998, as Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's...
| Author | Yoel Hoffmann |
| ISBN | 0804831793 |
"A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pity, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems." —Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
Although the consciousness of...
| Author | Ryōkan |
| ISBN | 0834805707 |
The hermit-monk Ryokan, long beloved in Japan both for his poetry and for his character, belongs in the tradition of the great Zen eccentrics of China and Japan. His reclusive life and celebration of nature and the natural life also bring to mind his younger American contemporary, Thoreau. Ryokan's...
| Author | Faubion Bowers |
| ISBN | 0486292746 |
Haiku should be just
small stones dropping down a well
with a small splash
- James Kirkup (8)
Haiku or the complexity of subtlety
As a big fan of etymology, I was captivated by this book's introduction. It is a clear and detailed recount of the history of haiku. The present enthralling...
List of Illustrations
Foreword, by Donald Keene
Introduction & Notes
Further Reading
Note on the Translation and Text
--The Tales of Ise
A Note on the Commentary
Commentary
Appendix 1: Glossary of Literary and Social Conventions
Appendix...
Crow With No Mouth: Ikkyu, Fifteenth Century Zen Master
| Author | Ikkyu |
| ISBN | 1556591527 |
When Zen master Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481) was appointed headmaster of the great temple at Kyoto, he lasted nine days before denouncing the rampant hypocrisy he saw among the monks there. He in turn invited them to look for him in the sake parlors of the Pleasure Quarters. A Zen monk-poet-calligrapher-musician,...
| Author | Red Pine |
| ISBN | 0861711432 |
This unique collection presents the verse, much of it translated for the first time, of fourteen eminent Chinese Buddhist poet monks. Featuring the original Chinese as well as english translations and historical introductions by Burton Watson, J.P. Seaton, Paul Hansen, James Sanford, and the editors,...
