New Posted Poem

I'm a huge fan of the great haiku poet Matsuo Bashō, but I really don't like the average modern translations, including the one by Robert Hass, a poet whose original work I really like. The slavish adherence to the 5-7-5 syllabic constraints from the Japanese actually harm my enjoyment of most haiku. I do, however, happen to have what I consider to be the best translation available. It's titled Classic Haiku: An Anthology of Poems by Basho and His Followers and was translated by Asataro Miyamori. I didn't seek out this translation and wasn't made aware of it in any classes or workshops. Rather, by happenstance I picked up the last copy of the book at a small bookstore on the Ocean City, New Jersey boardwalk.

Miyamori's introduction, which takes almost a quarter of the book, goes into detail about his feelings regarding interpretive translations, but suffice to say he doesn't like them. The majority of the poems in this book are two lines long and direct translations (or as near as possible considering the lack of articles and pronouns in the original Japanese). One last selling point of this particular book is that he also includes alternate translations from other sources, the original kanji lettering, and the transliterated Japanese (that is, Japanese sound sense using English letters).

Poem after the break.

Because of my exposure to Miyamori's translation, the first six lines of my poem were written in the same manner and at different times capturing different images. The first tercet is a true haiku of the 5-7-5 species, and the second is an inverted haiku--that is 7-5-7.