If you are the author of a country’s two most beloved poems, you have officially made it. And if that country happens to be Japan—where poetry is a fundamental part of the nation’s fabric—you’ve made it twice over. You’re like Shakespeare and The Stones. This is the case for Matsuo Bashō, whose influence within Japan (and beyond) is so great, it is impossible to map. Bashō (1644-1694) is more contemporary than many people imagine. He was born the same year Descartes penned Cogito ergo sum, and several years after the death of Shakespeare. Thus, Bashō, at least chronologically, is a modern writer, but for many readers, the great master of hokku feels timeless or at least beyond time. My students associate him with St. Thomas Aquinas and even St. Augustine. But as Andrew Fitzsimons demonstrates in Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō (translated by Fitzsimons; 433 pages; University of California Press), Bashō was neither a mystic nor philosopher. He was a poet. He could be funny, rebellious, even a little spicy, and to his credit, we get to know this Bashō through Fitzsimons’s generous renderings. 

            As Fitzsimons explains in his erudite and utterly compelling introduction, most of Bashō’s poems are not what we now think of as haiku but rather hokku. Hokku (which literally means “opening verse”)is the gateway poem in a much longer collaborative chain poem known as rengaor renku. This means that very few of Bashō’s poems were ever supposed to be read on their own. They were almost always the lead-in to a longer collaborative project. Bashō was a master poet, and as such, he was often invited to write the opening poem in a planned renga, a great honor. This means his poems needed to be inviting, playful and open-ended. Fitzsimons’ Bashō is all of these and more.

The process of translation is a series of utterly painful decisions, and as I perused all 980 of Bashō poems, I found myself intrigued by a number of choices Fitzsimons makes. First, Bashō was a joyful poet. He was fond of assonance, alliteration, internal rhymes, and wordplay. Fitzsimons relishes showing us Bashō’s skills in this arena. For example, consider the great aural landscape of this hokku:

Araumi ya / Sado ni yokotau /Amanogawa

Even if you don’t read Japanese, you can appreciate the subtle rhymes in this line. Bashō’s ear for assonance is often overlooked, but Fitzsimons hears his music and helps us do so as well. Here is his version

The turbulent sea

            Unfurling over Sado

                           the river of stars.

That repetition of the ur sounds, their sonic slant rhymes, is gorgeous. Another example:

            The Buddha’s birthday

                        and coincidentally

                                    first dawn for this fawn.

In Japanese, the last line is kanako kana. Again, you may notice that kanako and kana create an internal rhyme. Fitzsimons mimics that rhyme with dawn and fawn. Bashō’s version is more elegant, but in both versions, we feel the effect of the rhyme at the end of the line.

In what may be my favorite translating choice, Fitzsimons minimizes what is known as “the cutting word” and what I think of as the cutting-word effect. In Japanese, hokku is one line, one sentence (as illustrated above). It is not broken up into three poetic lines as English translations of it typically are. However, within the one line, there is an effect similar to a line break in lyric poetry, where the poet creates a pause or a shift. A juxtaposition. That shift is indicated by what’s called a cutting word—like ya, ka, or kana—that alerts the reader we are changing gears or shifting planes. Early translators made the beguiling decision to mark these shifts with line breaks, and Fitzsimons honors that tradition. His translations appear in three stepped lines but, thankfully, with no punctuation. That lack of punctuation can leave things open-ended, especially when there is a marked tonal shift that creates a mysterious metaphor that seems dropped in from the ether.  For readers of English, that shift can feel abrupt or random, and so some translators fill in those gaps with prepositions or clarifications. But Fitzsimons resists that temptation. He lets the mystery hang:

            Tired of journeying

                        How many days is it now?

                                    The autumnal wind.

Or

            This Kiyotaki

                        water drawn up clean and clear

                                    these jelly noodles

In both instances, Fitzsimons could have added a “like” at the beginning of the last line or “endless like” or “beautiful like” to help explain or bridge the metaphors. But he doesn’t. For me, this is a great choice because the experience of feeling our way through the poems expands due to our ability to enter their open spaces.

Where Fitzsimons may lose a few haiku and hokku devotees is in his commitment to the seventeen-syllable formulation—what we all know as the classic five-seven-five format. It is true that traditional haiku and hokku are characterized by seventeen on. But on is really better translated as “sound” than “syllable.” A detailed explanation requires more pages than I have here, but suffice it to say that for many poets and scholars trying to substitute syllables for on is clunky, if not garish. Imagine a perfectly packed train car with everything you need inside, then latching on three more empty cars that just rattle behind it. In fact, there is a strong belief that a twelve-syllable poem best captures the compression and elegance of haiku.

I will say that I understand Fitzsimons’ thinking—he wants to deliver Bashō to English speaking readers in the envelope they are expecting him in. However, Bashō himself often wrote in hachō or “broken meter,” so I probably would have made the call on a poem-by-poem basis. But I am skeptical of symmetry, and I don’t read Japanese, so it is impossible for me to go to the mat on this one.

Overall, the book is splendid. It collects all of Bashō’s poems and each one includes the original Japanese version and a short explanation. The historical, cultural, and literary references in the explanations, which directly follow the poems, are alone worth the price of admission.

So, what about those two famous poems? How did Fitzsimons do with the notorious “frog haiku” and the often quoted and wildly beloved “when in Kyoto?”

I’m inserting my own cutting word. I’m letting you decide.

            An olden pond now

                        A songfrog springs off into

                                    The sound of water

And

            In Kyoto too

                        a yearning for Kyoto

                                    Cuckoo cuckooing

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored twelve books, including Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.