Now I'll read some three line poems to reward you
for trying to listen to that.
A few years ago, I was working on translations
of poet I love very much a great haiku poet named Kobayashi
Issa.
His family name was Kobayashi.
Issa was the name that he took as Japanese poets traditionally
did.
And Issa means tea.
He wrote around he's roughly a contemporary
of Robert Burns a little older than Blake and Wordsworth.
And he wrote at a time when the last great haiku poet
in the 18th century had been a very great poet who is also
a great painter named Buson.
And in the wake of Buson's work the tradition
of Japanese poetry had gotten very visual and very precious.
Haiku has a tendency to get precious
because the Japanese language admits of punning a lot.
And Issa revived it.
First poem-- first day of spring is New Year's day in Japan
and it's everybody's birthday and it's
a day celebrated by everybody getting presents and putting
on new clothes.
And almost every haiku poet wrote one every year.
So if you read through the work, or maybe
watch them taking their pulse year
after year on New Year's day.
This one goes, New Year's morning.
Everything is in blossom.
I feel about average.
There's a seasonal word in every haiku
and an important aspect of them or reference to a season.
They're incredibly explicit.
If the reference is to a plum leaf or a pear blossom,
they know that it's after the plums of blossomed
and that means it must be very late April, early May.
And the days are just getting longer,
and the white of the pear blossom
is associated with that.
And they would not make the mistake
of writing a poem about a time earlier when it's just crisp
and your desire first wakes up, and you're
talking about pink plum blossoms about the later time.
I mean the haiku are accurate to within five days.
They have that feeling and belong to that sense of being.
Big frogs belong to late summer heat.
A huge frog and I staring at each other.
Neither of us moves.
This is a summer poem.
It's an urban poem.
This moth saw brightness in a woman's chamber
burned to a crisp.
Neurotic males everywhere.
This is one of my favorite poems in the world, this next one.
It's another New Year's day poem.
Asked how old he was, the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five fingers.
[HUMMING] I love that poem.
He's got the new clothes because it's that day.
And so it's his birthday.
And so he's turned the year and Issa sees the kid going.
And he notices that that's all the fingers
there are on that hand, and goes, ah, with a smiling face.
Asked how old he was, the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five fingers.
It's an incredible poem.
This is a peach--
this is one of those pear blossom poems.
Pear blossoms are white.
The poem depends on your having observed
what the relaxation of people's faces when they come out
of a concert.
Blossoms at night and people moved by music.
This is a summer poem.
Nap half the day.
No one punished me.
This is a poem written on his 50th birthday.
From now on it's all clear profit every sky.
He used to belong to a sect of Buddhism that
took with radical seriousness the injunction
to honor all living things.
One emblem of that is in his work
is that he wrote about 11,000 poems about insects
during his life.
I don't know how well this poem applies in Arizona, however.
It goes, don't worry spiders, I keep house casually.
His most famous-- you probably know it.
His most-- it's everywhere.
His most famous poem of that kind is
don't hit that fly, look, it's rubbing its hands,
it's rubbing its feet.
So he's praying for mercy.
That-- the period was as it was in American literature
a period of expansion, militarism, jingoism,
and patriotism.
And all Japanese poets were encouraged
to write patriotic poems.
And this is so far as I know, the only patriotic poem
that Issa ever wrote.
The sea slugs they just don't seem Japanese.
[LAUGHTER]
And the other side of him that is not
that I have is not represented in this little group
very much is there's what goes with that attention
to small beings is the thinness of the mind's
skin and a sensitivity to pain that's like--
Oh, I don't know.
It's like Baudelaire, Strindberg, Du
Fu, the great sufferers and--
this poem is called hell.
Bright autumn moon, pond snails crying in the saucepan.
The word is very hard to translate,
and I took it around and asked someone else
and they said hissing.
So I tried bright autumn moon, pond snails
hissing in the saucepan.
And a Korean guy, an engineer, professor
of computer engineering who a great lover of Issa
said that the right English word would be mewling.
Mewling.
So bright autumn moon pond snails mewling in the saucepan.
And I walked around for a while saying hissing in the saucepan,
crying in the saucepan, mewling.
And I got so freaked out that I just thought
all translations are imperfect.
I'm not going to think about this anymore.