| Furuike ya | |
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This is the most famous Haiku from the most famous Japanese poet. It reads: "Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto" FURUIKE = Old (ancient ) pond / YA = short exclamation showing emotion / KAWAZU = a frog / TOBIKOMU = compound verb: fly + go into; to dive, to jump / MIZU = water / NO = genitive suffix: of / OTO = sound. Old pond! A frog jumps in: water's sound. When he composed this Haiku, Basho was living in his hut (The Banana Hut, from which he choose is pen-name) very close to the compounds of a buddhist temple, with a garden and an old pond (small artificial lake). The sound of a frog jumping in it broke the stillness of the day and echoed into the poet bringing with it the oldness of that pond and a deep emotion. |
When he was a youth he was an attendant of the young noble Yoshitada, the eldest son of his Lord: they were very close to each other. They studied togheter haikai under Senjin. When Yoshitada died, Basho, 23 years old, suffered deeply from the loss; he left the service of his master and, later, went to Edo (the actual Tokyo). He spent much of his life traveling and teaching poetry (haikai renga) to many disciples. Famous are his travel diaries, a kind of intermixed prose and poetry that did constitute a new literary genre. Basho's poems and diaries are at the same time the record of his travels and of his spiritual life. Deeply filled with natural piety, he perceives the essential beauty of a blade of grass, of the cry of a wild goose, the expression of a traveler, and of the eternal progress of seasons. He dives into Nature and becames one with Her. What makes Basho the great poet he is, and one of the gratest in the world, is the fact that (as R.H.Blyth states) "he lived the poetry he wrote and wrote the poetry he lived". |
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Vittorio-Maria Brandoni This page, last updated: July 7 th 1998 |
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