Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times

Informationen zum Autor David Young has written eleven previous books of poetry, including, most recently, Black Lab and Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems. He is a well-known translator of the Chinese poets as well as the poems of Petrarch and Eugenio Montale. A past winner of the Guggeheim and NEA Fellowships as well as a Pushcart Prize, Young is the Longman Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Oberlin College and the editor of the Field Poetry Series at Oberlin College Press. Klappentext Vivid new translations of Basho's popular haiku, in a selected format ideal for newcomers as well as fans long familiar with the Japanese master. Basho, the famously bohemian traveler through seventeenth-century Japan, is a poet attuned to the natural world as well as humble human doings; "Piles of quilts/ snow on distant mountains/ I watch both," he writes. His work captures both the profound loneliness of one observing mind and the broad-ranging joy he finds in our connections to the larger community. David Young, acclaimed translator and Knopf poet, writes in his introduction to this selection, "This poet's consciousness affiliates itself with crickets, islands, monkeys, snowfalls, moonscapes, flowers, trees, and ceremonies...Waking and sleeping, alone and in company, he moves through the world, delighting in its details." Young's translations are bright, alert, musically perfect, and rich in tenderness toward their maker. Introduction The seasons wheel past, majestic, troubling, and reassuring. Their procession signals constant change and a transient existence, but their repetition provides a sense of stability. Basho's world is a world of hardship and poverty, but even life's privations and disasters can disclose delights that enlarge his awareness, his enjoyment of being-in-the-world. By allowing his participation in the beauty and variety of its particulars, large or small, the earth on which Basho lives permits him to transcend his own ego: Crawl out from under the shed toad-croak It is summer on the farm, in this case, and the simple delight of encountering a different creature is, for this poet, sufficient occasion for a poem. The toad is also allowed his voice; his is the music of the poem, in effect, echoing the poet's greeting. They share a moment of identification and identity. Sometimes the visual effect is more imposing: A line of egrets making a bridge between two snowy peaks Much of the pleasure here derives from the play of scale, contrasting the size of the mountains with the delicate dimensions of the birds, along with the white-on-white color scheme. This poet's consciousness affiliates itself with crickets, islands, monkeys, snowfalls, moonscapes, flowers, trees, and ceremonies. He shares his writing with other poets and is known as an inspiring teacher. When he isn't socializing with writers, he can socialize with the world around and beyond the self. From a communal activity, renga, where a group of writers collaborate on a series of linked verses, he takes the seventeen-syllable unit used to introduce (and be interspersed among) such verses and makes it into his own instrument of meditation and discovery. His haiku are still linked to social activity, but they also become independent, more broad ranging, singular, substantive. Travel was Basho's modus vivendi. Born into a samurai family (his official dates are 16441694), he left that aristocratic world behind in favor of a kind of bohemian existence, gregarious but restless. Success as a poet and a teacher did not lead him to settle in one place. Instead, he hit the road, always curious to see what was over the next horizon. He made it his mission to know the Japan of his time deeply and well. But love of travel was a typical pas...

Klappentext

Vivid new translations of Basho's popular haiku, in a selected format ideal for newcomers as well as fans long familiar with the Japanese master.

Basho, the famously bohemian traveler through seventeenth-century Japan, is a poet attuned to the natural world as well as humble human doings; "Piles of quilts/ snow on distant mountains/ I watch both," he writes. His work captures both the profound loneliness of one observing mind and the broad-ranging joy he finds in our connections to the larger community. David Young, acclaimed translator and Knopf poet, writes in his introduction to this selection, "This poet's consciousness affiliates itself with crickets, islands, monkeys, snowfalls, moonscapes, flowers, trees, and ceremonies...Waking and sleeping, alone and in company, he moves through the world, delighting in its details." Young's translations are bright, alert, musically perfect, and rich in tenderness toward their maker.

Leseprobe

Introduction
 
The seasons wheel past, majestic, troubling, and reassuring. Their procession signals constant change and a transient existence, but their repetition provides a sense of stability. Basho’s world is a world of hardship and poverty, but even life’s privations and disasters can disclose delights that enlarge his awareness, his enjoyment of being-in-the-world.
 
By allowing his participation in the beauty and variety of its particulars, large or small, the earth on which Basho lives permits him to transcend his own ego:
 
Crawl out
from under the shed
toad-croak
 
It is summer on the farm, in this case, and the simple delight of encountering a different creature is, for this poet, sufficient occasion for a poem. The toad is also allowed his voice; his is the music of the poem, in effect, echoing the poet’s greeting. They share a moment of identification and identity.
 
Sometimes the visual effect is more imposing:
 
A line of egrets
making a bridge
between two snowy peaks
 
Much of the pleasure here derives from the play of scale, contrasting the size of the mountains with the delicate dimensions of the birds, along with the white-on-white color scheme.
 
This poet’s consciousness affiliates itself with crickets, islands, monkeys, snowfalls, moonscapes, flowers, trees, and ceremonies. He shares his writing with other poets and is known as an inspiring teacher. When he isn’t socializing with writers, he can socialize with the world around and beyond the self. From a communal activity, renga, where a group of writers collaborate on a series of linked verses, he takes the seventeen-syllable unit used to introduce (and be interspersed among) such verses and makes it into his own instrument of meditation and discovery. His haiku are still linked to social activity, but they also become independent, more broad ranging, singular, substantive.
 
Travel was Basho’s modus vivendi. Born into a samurai family (his official dates are 1644–1694), he left that aristocratic world behind in favor of a kind of bohemian existence, gregarious but restless. Success as a poet and a teacher did not lead him to settle in one place. Instead, he hit the road, always curious to see what was over the next horizon. He made it his mission to know the Japan of his time deeply and well. But love of travel was a typical pastime even when the poet was at home. He could associate with a butterfly one moment, a galaxy the next. Waking and sleeping, alone and in company, he moved through the world delighting in its details.
 
Basho’s work has such range of expression and tone that generalizing about it is tricky and even unprofitable. Robert Hass speaks of Basho’s “profound loneliness and sense of suffering,” and I think, Yes, but there’s his joy and his deep sense of community. All four emotions are present in his work, which eludes our descriptions, again and again.
 
Many of his haiku are deeply embedded in his culture: its tr…