The great haiku poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) was first represented to the West just over a century ago. This was in W.G. Aston's "A History of Japanese Literature" (1899), a pioneering study. Unfortunately the author, a British scholar from the north of Ireland, got the poet's name wrong, and was somewhat baffled by his work. Since then, however, there have been numerous studies and selections to explain it better and more fully. So what makes it necessary to have another one?
This is the second part of a new two-volume edition of the poet's work by David Landis Barnhill. The first book, "Basho's Haiku," was reviewed here previously (by Donald Richie, Sept. 26, 2004). It contains a thoroughly annotated selection of the haiku, as we now call them, though Aston used the older term haikai for the verses. Like many early explicators, Aston also made no mention of the poet's prose, which indeed was not translated properly until Nobuyuki Yuasa's important selection, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches" (1966), came out in Penguin.
That the prose journals set the poems in specific contexts was critically important for our understanding of them, and arguably Yuasa's volume has been the most influential representation in English of the poet's life and work so far. Barnhill mentions in his helpful introduction the names of several American writers who felt the influence directly, just as I have observed it on British and Irish writers. There is plenty of continuing interest in Basho, particularly among writers on the natural environment, for whom the idea of things "following their nature" is of key importance.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.