The Essential Basho

Rating:
Summary: classic translation
Review: As a casual and thorough student of Basho and the Japanese poetic forms of haiku, haibun and renga I've come to believe that Sam Hamill's translations are the best ever. Hamill, as a respected poet in the English language himself, translates the Japanese of Basho into an American English that literally sings.His translation of the opening lines of "Narrow Road to the Interior," included in this volume, is a classic Basho, and classic Hamill: "The moon and the sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." I have carried Hamill's translation of "Narrow Road" with me for years. To have "The Essential Basho" now on my shelf is an event to celebrate.

Rating:
Summary: On the Road Again
Review: [Note: This review appeared July 22, 1999, in the Seattle Weekly and is available online at http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/9929/books-lightfoot.shtml]

The Essential Basho, translated by Sam Hamill. Shambhala, $25 No wonder dreams of journeys are so often associated with death. We travel to leave our lives behind - the familiar workaday parts, anyway - hoping to arrive in a Paradise where our eyes, ears, tongues, maybe even our hearts, will be startled awake. What we really want is a new self, but what we often get is more stuff -samples of a regional cuisine, eyefuls of great art, tidbits about Kafka's life in Prague, opinions, trinkets. Traveling becomes grazing on a global scale.

A different pathway opens up in Sam Hamill's newest collection of translations, The Essential Basho. Here for the first time in a single volume is the essence of Basho's work: four travel narratives, including the best-known "Narrow Road to the Interior," and 250 haiku returning us home to a dailiness transformed by awareness and attention. Whether the poet is on the road or behind his own brushwood gate he seeks, instead of new acquisitions or excitements, an honest encounter between world and mind. These two entities were never separate to begin with. So although Basho's travelogues seem to record his treks on foot through 17th-century Japan, they're actually journeys into his own true nature, the heartland within, where self and circumstances are one.

"Very early on the twenty-seventh morning of the third moon, under a predawn haze, transparent moon barely visible, mount Fuji just a shadow, I set out under the cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka. When would I see them again? A few old friends had gathered in the night and followed along far enough to see me off from the boat' I felt three thousand miles rushing through my heart, the whole world only a dream. I saw it through farewell tears.

"Spring passes / and the birds cry out - tears / in the eyes of fishes.

"With these first words from my brush, I started. Those who remain behind watch the shadow of a traveler's back disappear."

Carrying just a few necessities along with friends' farewell presents, which he can't bear to part with, Basho lets each event on the way speak the language of its particular life. At a farm he asks directions, but they're so complicated the farmer just lends Basho his horse ("'He knows the road. When he stops, get off, and he'll come back alone.'") The horse takes Basho to a village and then turns around, a gift from the poet tied to his saddle. Farther on, Basho observes peasants wearing black formal hats for ancient rites, speaks with prostitutes on a pilgrimage, sadly leaves to his fate a child abandoned by his parents, retreats from a three-day storm into a shack: Eaten alive by / lice and fleas - now the horse / beside my pillow pees.

At a mountain temple "I crawled among boulders to make my bows at shrines. The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open." Elsewhere, hearing distant villagers clap wooden noisemakers to scare deer from their fields, he feels "the utter aloneness of autumn." A stranger asks for a poem ("'Something beautiful, please'") and Basho writes a verse about the cuckoo's cry that arrives, just then, from across a field.

Basho's words flow spontaneously out of each moment lived. Instead of giving us tours or mementos of the world, he helps us open to its presences and discover who we are. Through his haiku we sense the wholeness and sufficiency of an early frost, an eggplant seed, a hangover, "Mr. Seagull," a nest of mice, a bean-floured rice ball, tears in the eyes of fishes, and ourselves, awake and alive again. Hamill frames "The Essential Basho" with essays on Basho's life and work that are scholarly enough to educate a student of haiku or Japanese culture and lively enough to engage any reader. Their depth and ease testify to the virtuosity Hamill has achieved as Editor of Copper Canyon Press, Director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, author of over thirty books, and translator of poetry in several languages. Travelers like me have carried around the world his pocket-size Basho ("Narrow Road to the Interior," now out of print) until it's tattered. We'll treasure the fine new volume silkily sleeved in Hokusai's portrait of the poet on the road again.