On Haiku

September 24, 2018
In this collection of essays and talks from the past 25 years, translator and critic Sato (Snow in a Silver Bowl) exhaustively, and sometimes exhaustingly, tells all about haiku. Addressing the historical tradition, poetic form, and craft of haiku, the essays also perform close readings of specific examples, such as the celebrated 17th-century poet Matsuo Basho’s frog haiku, of which Sato once collected 140 different English translations. Roving further afield, Sato uses haiku to illuminate some of the difficulties encountered in Japanese-to-English translation (such as the absence of a Japanese equivalent to English’s plural s.) At the book’s most rewarding, it situates haiku as part of a larger story, explaining how the modern conception of haiku as a tiny, enigmatically philosophical poem represents a strange cropping of the original Japanese form, which served merely as the brief opening to a much longer poem composed as part of elaborate court rituals, and often incorporated humor and in-jokes. But many of the best insights are recycled across the essays, since they weren’t originally written to be read in one collection, and the prose is prone to distracting tangents. Individually, the essays are fascinating, reflecting Sato’s unimpeachable expertise in his subject. Unfortunately, read as a whole, they verge on the unwieldy and redundant.

Starred review from November 1, 2018
Sato, who studied English at Kyoto University before settling in New York in 1968, is best known as a translator. His extraordinary collection of essays is at once a literary history, a scrupulous examination of the vicissitudes of translation, a discussion of haiku in America, and a series of introductions to lesser-known masters. Sato conveys encyclopedic knowledge in a lively, modest, occasionally self-deprecating tone, busting myths along the way. He discusses everything anyone could ever want to know about haiku, giving plenty of attention to Basho, Buson, and Issa, the triumvirate during the Edo period in a standard survey of haikai, as well as modern writers who will be new to most readers. After reading the oddly titled White Quacks and Whale Meat: Basho's Kasen, ?The Sea Darkens, ' one will be unable to read any Edo period haiku the same way again. By translating and contextualizing so many classic haiku, Sato manages to show how assumptions about genre fail to capture just how many means of generating meaning this apparently humble poetic form contains. An expert illumination of a poetic form, to read and reread.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)