Short, Sweet Collection
4 stars
This is a short, sweet collection of haikus collected and translated into English. The contents here range from famous and classical poems to more recent ones, and they tend to be good.
The translation style isn't exactly consistent, for good reason. Some poems were translated more freely than others, and the choice of how a poem got translated was decided by the end result. That's to say, if a more freely translated poem was more "faithful" to the original Japanese, it was often kept. There's a huge disparity between English and Japanese w/r/t to syllables and structure, so this seems to have been the right choice.
Only the first part of the book is exclusively nature poems. This is a bit of a shame, as those were the best of the collection. The more "human" poems seemed to lose something, but it's not for want of trying.
Still, this is …
This is a short, sweet collection of haikus collected and translated into English. The contents here range from famous and classical poems to more recent ones, and they tend to be good.
The translation style isn't exactly consistent, for good reason. Some poems were translated more freely than others, and the choice of how a poem got translated was decided by the end result. That's to say, if a more freely translated poem was more "faithful" to the original Japanese, it was often kept. There's a huge disparity between English and Japanese w/r/t to syllables and structure, so this seems to have been the right choice.
Only the first part of the book is exclusively nature poems. This is a bit of a shame, as those were the best of the collection. The more "human" poems seemed to lose something, but it's not for want of trying.
Still, this is a good collection. It can easily be read in an hour or so; I just wish there was more here.