In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.
Matsuo Bashō, Journal of a Travel-Worn Satchel
(tr. Nobuyuki Yuasa)
Matsuo Bashō wrote these sentences in 1687. He was forty-three. By then, his restless “wind-swept spirit” had substantially remade the shape of Japanese literature, by taking a verse form of almost unfathomable brevity and transforming it into a near-weightless, durable instrument for exploring a single moment’s precise perception and resinous depths.
A few of the most well known glimpses:
old pond:
frog leaps in
the sound of water
furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto
silence:
the cicada’s cry
soaks into stone
shizukasaya iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe
spring leaving—
birds cry,
fishes’ eyes fill with tears
yukuharu ya tori naki uo no me wa namida
horsefly
among the blossoms—
don’t eat it, friend sparrow
hanani asobu abu na kurai so tomosuzume
in the fishmarket
even the gums of the salted sea-bream
look cold
shiodai no haguki mo samushi uo no tana
summer grasses:
what’s left
of warriors’ dreams
natsugusa ya tsuwa mono domo ga yume no ato
In his poems and in his teaching of other poets, Bashō set forth a simple, deeply useful reminder: that if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you. “To learn about the pine tree,” he told his students, “go to the pine tree; to learn from the bamboo, study bamboo.” He found in every life and object an equal potential for insight and expansion. A good subject for haiku, he suggested, is a crow picking mud-snails from between a rice paddy’s plants. Seen truly, he taught, there is nothing that does not become a flower, a moon. “But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.”
A wanderer all his life both in body and spirit, Bashō concerned himself less with destination than with the quality of the traveller’s attention. A poem, he said, only exists while it’s on the writing desk; by the time its ink has dried, it should be recognized as just a scrap of paper. In poetry as in life, he saw each moment as gate-latch. Permeability mattered more in this process than product or will: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.”
*
The haiku form Bashō wrote in is now long familiar to Western readers: an image-based poem of seventeen sound units, written in lines of five, seven, and again five units each. (The Japanese on corresponds only approximately to our English “syllable,” though that word is generally used to translate it; in a similar issue, Japanese poetic “lines” are heard, rather than written with visually separate line breaks on the page, yet most English haiku translations are set, as
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