mama chicken
struts with great confidence
for one wrangling chicks.
Chick Wrangling [Senryū]
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Tag Archives: Senryū
Just the Tips [Senryū]
high mountains:
sunrise hits snowcaps only;
in darkness & don't know it.
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Sleeping Dog [Haiku]
waves crash on rocks;
distant lightening flickers.
dog sleeps - unstirring.
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Scurry [Haiku]
shore birds scurry,
evading rolling surf,
like playful kids.
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Battle Royale [Senryū]
insects unseen:
chaotic bird movement, a
bird battle royale?
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Orange [Senryū]
lying on a hill,
eyes open to orange clouds:
how long was I out?
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Foresight [Senryū]
from the hilltop,
Spring downpour creeps nearer;
me, sans raingear.
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In Its Time [Senryū]
impatient child
gives pollen fluff a blow;
it does not yield.
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BOOKS: “Soseki Natsume’s Collected Haiku” trans. by Erik Lofgren
Soseki Natsume’s Collected Haiku: 1,000 Verses from Japan’s Most Popular Writer by Natsume SōsekiMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher Site — Tuttle
Natsume Soseki is widely considered one of 2oth century Japan’s greatest writers. While he is best known for his novels, such as Kokoro and I Am a Cat, Soseki wrote broadly, including the one-thousand haiku collected in this volume.
The collection, as is common among haiku volumes, is organized seasonally. Season words being a common feature of classical haiku. That said, these poems are not all classical haiku (though most are.) With respect to form, they are all haiku, but – with respect to content – some are senryū (a style that is the same as haiku in form, but uses more humor and humanistic elements and is less strictly natural and imagist) and others are more idiosyncratic experiments.
One excellent feature of this collection is that it includes both the Japanese characters and Romanized phoneticizations for each poem. This is great for readers who know some level of Japanese, but having the pronunciations allows readers to take in the sound quality of the original — even if they don’t read Japanese.
The translations are optimized for readability by English readers. By this I mean that the translator, Erik Lofgren, doesn’t pare the lines down to maximize sparseness of sound. There are different strategies for translation, and I think Lofgren’s approach is best for a general readership because the translations don’t draw attention to themselves by reading in a fashion that is clunky or tone deaf in English. That said, I suspect some readers would prefer translations more stripped of articles, conjunctions, and other function words.
If you enjoy haiku and modern Japanese literature, I’d highly recommend this book.
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Riderless [Senryū]
riderless horses
race across the pasture:
finish line unknown
Tiger Riding for Beginners 