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

informative

4.5

This is the best book I've read about, or containing, Japanese poetry. Ueda's translations are great; they're elegant but not oversimplified. Haiku are so simple that it's difficult to translate them without either losing their interest, or else over-stuffing them with words to recapture their lost essence. Ueda strikes a great balance. Each poem is followed by Ueda's brief exegesis and then selected commentary from many different critics over the past several hundred years. It's a fantastic template. You start to get to know the personalities of the different commentators and it's fun to see how they react to different poems. Ueda's explanations are also critical for some of the earlier poems that rely on Japanese wordplay or jokes, which would go completely over your head otherwise. It's rare that I feel so nourished by an essentially academic book. This book truly enhanced my appreciation for, and love of, Japanese poetry and the works of Basho. I wish every poet had a work as great as this dedicated to them.