Book-of-the-Week

Book of the Week: A Future Waterfall

 

 

Our Book of the Week is A Future Waterfall: 100 Haiku from the Japanese by Ban’ya Natsuishi, published by Red Moon Press in a second, expanded version in 2004, with an Introduction by Jim Kacian and a selection of the poet’s prose writings. Certainly one of the most discussed, analyzed, praised and controversial books of haiku in English, A Future Waterfall, in Japanese with English translations, is a touchstone of the gendai, or “modern” haiku movement.

 

From the future
a wind arrives
that blows the waterfall apart

 

Put a period deeply
into the desert
at the center of the New World

 

That’s my brain, there!
That gap
in the cottony clouds

 

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.

Do you have a chapbook published 2010 or earlier you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details.

Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by THF Digital Librarian Garry Eaton, and are used with permission

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. So wonderful to come here today and see Ban’ya Natsuishi’s work being featured. His haiku push us into new intellectual territory. His work in the international haiku community is amazing.

  2. Dear editor,
    Going through all haiku poems, is a delectable pleasure and the introductory
    notes by Jim Kacian – very true . A fair approach,giving wider scope for the reader’s critical oeuvre

    “The poems aside from minor adjustments to two of the translations we decided to leave just as they were permitting the reader to approach the poems directly without annotation or other materiél that might bias the reading This might be seen as controversial but it stems from the conviction that the poems in this book must be encountered in Japanese or English but not as a hybrid of the two It is at least a recognition of the impossibility of true translation
    and an argument instead for parallel texts each at work in its own sphere with the possibility that the gap between the two might be leapt rather than waded This is the challenge I now offer you: to be that spark” .
    J

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