About this item
Everything you want to know about haiku written by one of the foremost experts in the field and the "finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English" (Gary Snyder) Who doesn't love haiku It is not only America's most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere -- Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark's made millions off them, first-grade students across the country still learn to write them. But what really is a haiku Where does the form originate Who were the original Japanese poets who wrote them And how has their work been translated into English over the years The haiku form comes down to us today as a clich: a three-line poem of 5-7-5 syllables.
About the Author
Hiroaki Sato is a prize-winning writer and translator with over 40 works of classical and modern Japanese poetry, prose, and fiction published in English. His reviews and articles have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times Book Review, AsiaWeek, Mainichi Daily News, St. Andrews Review, Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, The Journal of American and Canadian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, The Japan Times, The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, The Journal of Japanese Studies, Modern Haiku, Japan Focus, and others.
