Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary
by Makoto Ueda

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Book Reviews of Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary

Book Review: Revelatory
Summary: 5 Stars

For each of the two hundred and fifty five haiku discussed, Ueda includes the Japanese original (in Roman script), a word for word literal translation (which is invaluable for gaining insight into how the haiku is understood in its native language) and his own poetic translation.

Ueda also writes notes on many of the haiku, explaining their context and/or meaning in a way that would be impossible to discern simply by reading the haiku.

This much alone would (IMO) have been enough to merit five stars but I found the diverse and often contradictory commentaries by various Japanese critics most revelatory, tending to confirm my belief that Westerners who write definitively on Japanese haiku tend to present their personal vision of what Japanese haiku has been and is (and, for that matter, of what non-Japanese haiku should be) as if it were universally accepted, when clearly it is not.

Thanks to the commentaries I can say that this is, for me, the best book on haiku that I have ever read.

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