Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Journal of the American Oriental Society, published by American Oriental Society on April 1, 2000. The length of the article is 7837 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: BASHO AND THE MASTERY OF POETIC SPACE IN OKU NO HOSOMICHI.(Critical Essay)
Author: Steven D. Carter
Publication: The Journal of the American Oriental Society (Refereed)
Date: April 1, 2000
Publisher: American Oriental Society
Volume: 120Issue: 2Page: 190

Article Type: Critical Essay

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Travel is one of literature's great metaphors for life; to investigate the properties of travel writing in different cultures affords a particular opportunity for intercultural comparison. In Naming Properties, Earl Miner examines closely four travel accounts: in Japanese, Basho's great Narrow Road through the Provinces, and, as control, the nonliterary account of his friend Sora; in English, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's manuscript version, his unbowdlerized Journal. The works were carefully chosen to provide a maximum of literary evidence.
The focus of Miner's comparison is on the practical and philosophical implications of naming. Because comparison can reveal parochialism, currently familiar and unexamined Western conceptions are put in question on such issues as identification (what is a name, what is identity in different cultures?); reference (why name a child or river if they do not exist?); intention (how can we refer without intending to?); and fact and fiction (do names differ in fiction and in fact? What of a factual or historical character in a fiction like the novel? or a legal fiction in daily life?).
In addition to examining the travel accounts, Miner considers the philosophical issues of naming in a range of other texts, from the Bible, Plato, Thucydides, Confucius, and earliest Japanese writing to current Western philosophers such as Kripke, Donnellan, and Nelson.
This book will interest scholars in eighteenth-century English and pre-modern Japanese literature; comparative literature; intercultural study; and naming (onomastics).
Earl Miner is Townsend Martin Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University.
... Read more

Product Description
This book is part of the Our Name in History series, a collection of fascinating facts and statistics, alongside short historical commentary, created to tell the story of previous generations who have shared this name.The information in this book is a compendium of research and data pulled from census records, military records, ships' logs, immigrant and port records, as well as other reputable sources. Topics include:

• Name Meaning and Origin
• Immigration Patterns and Census Detail
• Family Lifestyles
• Military Service History
• Comprehensive Source Guide, for future research

Product Description
A book both for devotees of the great wandering poet Basho as well as those looking for an introduction and insight into one of Japan's great folk heroes. Basho is famous for the Haiku (3-line, 17-syllable) poetry he wrote during his many pilgrimages to different parts of Japan, the most famous collection being entitled "Narrow Road to a Far Province". Today, writing Haiku and interest in Basho and this particular art-form has spread throughout the English-speaking world, and to all age groups. A group of leading Basho specialists offer their own commentaries about the great man and anticipate his inspiration in the years ahead. The book also incorporates an account of a mini "Basho-type" journey (in England) by a group of people who composed "haiku" as Basho did "en route" and includes a record of the experience and personal feelings of those involved. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"Flowers of shepherd's purse at the foot of the hedge."
As Ooka Makoto points out in this very book, Japanese poetry is short and this especially goes for Haiku--so it stands to reason that the baker's dozen of articles in this rather slim volume are short as well. Based on presentations given during a commemorative symposium for Basho at London University in 1994 (the 300th anniversary of the quintessential haiku poet's passing away) along with related events held by the British Haiku Society, the tone throughout is warm and light of touch, which is probably the way Basho would have preferred it. This fact did shift the focus just a tad closer to contemporary haiku practice in Britain and North America (including a detailed retrospective on the life of one of the pioneers in the field, Reginald Blyth) which is fine but a bit out of alignment with my own interest, but several pieces by Japanese presenters on Basho's poetry and his modern relevance evened things out well enough (and the haiku journey northwards through England and Wales turned out to be a pleasant surprise). Overall the tone is learned but never ponderously academic; the presenters seek to appreciate and celebrate Basho and his way of poetry, not critique or deconstruct him. One will probably never need to cite this book in one's dissertation, then, but--or I should say rather, therefore--it is all the more enjoyable for that very reason.

Articles included in this book:

1. "Introduction--Shepherd's Purse: A Weed for Basho" by Stephen Henry Gill
2. "An Offering of Tea" by Michael Birch
3. "Basho and I: The Significance of Basho 300 Years after his Death" by Tsunehiko Hoshino
4. "Representation of Basho in the Arts & Media" by Stephen Henry Gill
5. "Basho has been Found: His Influence on Modern Japanese Poetry" by Hirofumi Wada
6. "Laughter in Japanese Haiku" by Nobuyuki Yuasa
7. "One Hundred Blyths" by David Cobb
8. "Haiku in the Year 2094" by George Swede
9. "A Haiku Meditation" by Brian Tasker
10. "Swiftly Flowing: British Haiku Society River Thames Ginko-no-Renga"
11. "Poetry for the Computer Age: Antidote for Anomie" by Makoto Ooka
12. "Fifty Basho Haiku for the Sky: BHS Primrose Hill Balloon-Launching Ceremony"
13. "In the Autumn Wind, Offa's Dyke: A Haibun Travel Journal" edited by Stephen Henry Gill and Fred Schofield ... Read more

Product Description
THIS 28 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East: Japan, by Charles F. Horne. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766100111. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Print on demand title of an old essay
Please note: this is simply a Print-On-Demand issue of Prof. Chamberlain's essay "Basho, The Chief Poet of Japan, and the Hokku, or Epigram Verses".This publishing house also uses the latter part of the title in a second publication of the same essay, so do not be confused or waste your money on the same text.It is nice to have this essay available separate from the original volume it had appeared, Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East: Vol. 13 Japan, edited by Charles F. Horne, first published in 1917.Chamberlain's translations are loose and only serve as an academic curiosity as all of the poems within have been translated umpteen times since, and by more skilled scholars of the genre.The poems' adjacent texts offer little or no insight to Basho's thoughts or offer criticism of the verse. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection places the writing and thought of the Japanese haiku poet and American essayist in counterpoint, echoing each other across the centuries and bridging East and West. ... Read more

Product Description
Translations of Japanese haiku and other poetry, featuringthe most famous haiku poet Basho but including 14 poets in all. ... Read more

Product Description
250 Very Questionable ‘Haiku’ truly is meant to be absolutely nothing but serious Fun and Games. Any aspirations toward conforming to all and sundry supposedly time-honored Haiku (or, for that matter, Senyru) traditions have been chucked out of every window. Each of the 250 included pieces received a special sort of Grammatical Attention, but only in terms of the ‘English’ side of possible or probable matters.

Product Description

While the rise of the charmingly simple, brilliantly evocative haiku is often associated with the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the form had already flourished for three hundred years before Basho even began to write. These early poems, known ashokku, are identical to haiku in syllable count and structure but function differently as a genre. Whereas each haiku is its own constellation of image and meaning,hokku opens a a series of linked, collaborative stanzas in a sequence calledrenga.

Under the mastery of Basho,hokku first gained its modern independence. His talents evolved the style into the haiku beloved by so many poets today& mdash;Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, and Billy Collins being notable devotees. This anthology reproduces 300 Japanesehokku poems composed between the thirteenth and early eighteenth centuries, from the work of the courtier Nijo Yoshimoto to the genre's first "professional" master, Sogi, and his subsequent disciples. It also features twenty masterpieces by Basho himself. Steven Carter, a renowned scholar of Japanese poetry and prominent translator, includes an introduction covering the history of haiku and the form's aesthetics and classifies these poems according to style and context& mdash;distinguishing earlyrenga fromHaikai renga andrenga from the Edo period, for example. His rich commentary and analysis illuminates each work, and he adds their romanized versions and notes on composition and setting, as well as brief descriptions of the poets and the times in which they wrote.

Product Description
The Basho Variations gathers thirty-four translations of Basho s famous haiku. In doing so it enters an august (albeit scanty) lineage of maverick redactions of this poem that include (as inaugural) thefrog pond plopby Dom Sylvester Huédard and thefog prondl popby bp Nichol. Inspired by Raymond Queneau s Exercises in Style, it also joins the company of his earlierRestricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (After Basho)as well as the Frogments from the Frag Pool: Haiku after Basho by fellow ludicians de langage Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu; Beaulieu s solo ((plop)) and Basho s Frogger (a Zen video game) created by the Prize Budget for Boys. ... Read more

Product Description
     Here is the most complete single-volume collection of writings by one of the great luminaries of Asian literature. Includes a masterful translation of Basho's most celebrated work, Narrow Road to the Interior, along with three less well-known works and over 250 of Basho's finest haiku. The translator has included an overview of Basho's life and an essay on the art of haiku. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

On the Road Again
[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.

classic translation
As a casual and thorough student of Basho and the Japanese poetic forms ofhaiku, haibun and renga I've come to believe that Sam Hamill's translationsare the best ever. Hamill, as a respected poet in the English languagehimself, translates the Japanese of Basho into an American English thatliterally sings.His translation of the opening lines of "Narrow Roadto the Interior," included in this volume, is a classic Basho, andclassic Hamill: "The moon and the sun are eternal travelers. Even theyears wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tiredhorse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself ishome." I have carried Hamill's translation of "Narrow Road"with me for years. To have "The Essential Basho" now on my shelfis an event to celebrate. ... Read more