Basho: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Basho

by Matsuo Bashō

This is the essential English edition of the complete poems of the eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Bashō.
 
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō offers in English a full picture of the haiku of Bashō, 980 poems in all. Andrew Fitzsimons’ translation is the first to adhere strictly to form: all of the poems are translated following the syllabic count of the originals. This book also translates a number of Bashō’s headnotes to poems ignored by previous English-language translators.
 
In Fitzsimons’ beautiful rendering, Bashō is much more than a philosopher of the natural world and the leading exponent of a refined Japanese sensibility. He is also a poet of queer love and eroticism; of the city as well as the country, the indoors and the outdoors, travel and staying put; of lonesomeness as well as the desire to be alone.
His poetry explores the full range of social experience in Edo Japan as he moved among friends and followers high and low, the elite and the demi-monde, the less fortunate: poor farmers, abandoned children, disregarded elders. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō reveals how this work speaks to our concerns today as much as it captures a Japan emerging from the Middle Ages. For dedicated scholars and those coming upon Bashō for the first time, Fitzsimons’ elegant translation—with an insightful introduction and helpful notes—allows readers to enjoy these works in all their glory.
 

Genres: Poetry, Japan, Philosophy, Japanese Literature, Classics, Religion, Collections

678 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 25, 2022

About the author

Known Japanese poet Matsuo Basho composed haiku, infused with the spirit of Zen.

The renowned Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) during his lifetime of the period of Edo worked in the collaborative haikai no renga form; people today recognize this most famous brief and clear master.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_...

Reviews

[JPD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fell in love with Matsuo Basho in one of my Lit courses and did a few essays revolving around a famous Haibun of his.

I ordered this and read it over the course of the month.

The translator has a great introduction and references Pound a few times; the translation is paired with an original translation of 980 of Basho's haikus. The translator even has references/context for almost every haiku.

What I do not like is the lack of kireji and the choice to capitalize to signify the break/pause instead, which is confusing.

While the 5/7/5 is important, Basho frequently veered away from structure so why did the translator force themselves to adhere to this?

There is a lot to admire in 13+ syllables. Walking before Sebald. A love of nature before Thoreau. The moment before Proust.

I will seek out the Haibun in the future. I hear Issa is melancholic so that I will try sooner or later.

[Quentin Ferrari · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems are great, but anyone who likes Bashō knows that. An edition like this should be judged on the quality of its translation and its editorial apparatus. The editorial appratus was really good. The notes to these poems are extremely helpful/necessary, and the editor knows when to shut up. The introduction was great. But the translations themselves had frustrating and frequent missteps. Holding to the 5-7-5 is always bad imo, sincea haiku's immediacy is most often lost, and resequencing (mucking with the surprise) becomes necessary. Lots of empty syllables like "a-walking" here. And most of these read really unnaturally for me. Who would ever say "rainy season rains" in a haiku? All in all, it reminds me of a Hemingway quote I'm not remembering 100% right, referring to Dostoevsky in A Moveable Feast: "If he's definitely a bad writer, how come his books are so good?" These poems are still, I must stress, jewels. Despite the translator. My advice: get a book edited by Steven D. Carter. (I think Carter does Basho's haibun.) He's an incredible translator and scholar.

[EP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this book for what feels like a century.
3.75/5
I got way too in over my head going for the full collection and question why I did so.
I could have picked 100 of the 900+ in here and had a solid compilation of the best.
But alas, as life, you get the good the mid and the ok with the beautiful.
I didn’t say bad or ugly cause many were not bad.

I enjoy his simplicity, sometimes just describing a scene, empty and lonesome yet with 17 syllables made me feel like I was sitting alongside him. He felt like a little travel buddy through many arduous journeys, both with his own and my own many journeys this summer. Sadly didn’t feel as such the whole way through.

A side-note is that the notes under the poems sometimes ruined it for me 😅. I’d be like wow what a beautiful poem about xyz and then the note would just give some fact that was very loosely tied to the haiku. Not really a big deal nor did it happen much, just a little pet peeve that got in the way sometimes as this was a bog to get through.

Here’s a nice little haiku from the book I’ll leave on, my favorite:

““I spent my days and nights on my journey till the year came to a close”

Certainly. Certainly.

[Dominic Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ⭐️

Admittedly, four stars is quite contrary to the 2.9 I gave the earlier Basho book I had read, Im not going to change my other review however because I think the formatting of the previous book could still have some room for improvement. Anyway, since reading ‘The Narrow Road to the deep North’ I have become much more educated on first of all, who Basho is/was, and secondly, the complexity & sociality that comes from the poems themselves and the work that has gone into translating them. This is an absolutely wonderful book to have on the back burner to just pick up now and then and enjoy a journey across Japan through playful, ambiguous verses, as well as getting some cultural education in there too. Great imagery, and Andrew Fitzsimmons did a very humble & great job at making these poems sound (Id like to hope) equally as beautiful in English as they would have in Edo era Japanese.

“Musashino Plain,
an inch tall and an inch loud,
the deer and its call”

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 5 out of 5]

snow against the snow.

[Lawrence Pettener · Rating 4 out of 5]

Active in the 13th century, poet Matsuo Basho has been a cornerstone of literature globally since the late 19th century when the word haiku was used to cover traditional “haikai” and “hokku” (more about which further down). Largely due to 19th-century Realism, Western onlookers and practitioners have made much of direct personal experience in haiku; DT Suzuki, Alan Watts and the Beat poets in turn exaggerated the influence of Zen on haiku, lauding their depth of truth and presence. Haiku has since become the world’s most prevalent poetic form, with Basho the standard bearer.

This collection’s timeline reveals in the first two entries that the poet, born in 1644, was of samurai descent, and that his father died when Basho was only twelve years old. Basho was named for the inedible banana tree whose fabric was used to make paper and quench thirst, gifted to him by a disciple.

Following his first publication at the age of 28, Basho started gathering students. Despite being an outsider, a countryman in the city, he bridged many gaps with the social life of a wandering poet of the times, holding and attending gatherings and composing collaboratively. Basho’s influences were eclectic, if exclusively Japanese. They included the waka poetic form of Saigyo from five hundred years earlier, the renga poetic form of Sogo, the latterly popular painting of Sesshu, and the Tea ceremony of Sen no Rikyu.

Basho taught many poetic principles of his own devising, such as ‘Karumi’ which was the main teaching of his late period. Its plain themes and light-heartedness have emerged strongly in the western haiku sensibility.

What we know as haiku started out as hokku, the customary traveller-poets’ praise for the host. This was the first in a set sequence of poems (renga). The hokku, or opening verse, required a word denoting the season and the “cutting word”, after which the subject might change suddenly to consciously juxtapose with its predecessor. In the example further below, the capitalised “A dog”—“A” is the cutting word—which is also the case grammatically; a new sentence. Haiku is a non-punctuated form.

While Basho’s work was intensely focused, equally crucial to him was honoring the so-called ‘vertical axis’: the deceased ancestors plus key cultural historical references. This requirement was met by naming objects as metaphors for his venue hosts in each sequence opener, or hokku. Under Basho and his contemporaries, a poem’s depth depended on references to Chinese or Japanese poetry. Their allusiveness was a conscious effort to elevate what had come to be seen as a form made lowly by this lack of vertical axis.

Modern, western haiku still avoids metaphor and allegory, keeping it shallow in Fitzsimons’ view. In his foreword, Fitzsimons states that this volume highlights a more inclusive range of experience in Basho’s work than do existing publications: not simply the nature philosopher, Zen mystic or agent of Japanese sensibility, Basho was an active contender with weather and erotic male love as well as honest moods and polarities such as loneliness and longed-for solitude.

Uniquely, this collection provides the poet’s notes to introduce many of the poems. Unusually, Fitzsimons’s translations also remain faithful to Basho’s syllable count.

While previous publications have lauded Basho for his restraint—as in brevity and Zen austerity—they have left aside the subtlety and range of his language, his ear for popular speech ranging from refined registers to demotic ones. In poem 85 for example, Basho uses bari, colloquial Japanese for urine:

The scudding of clouds
A dog running and pissing
a passing shower

Basho’s Japanese is even more distant chronologically than is Shakespeare’s English. For translation, Fitzsimons draws on the authoritative 1982 collected edition by Kon Eizo.

The translations here are no doubt helped by Fitzsimons being the author of three poetry collections as well as an academic. However, very few people effectively manage to combine the skills of a translator with a poet’s sensibility. Fitzsimons’s versions or translations can read less lyrically than they might in both Western poetry and haikai poetry diction. Compare Fitzsimons’s:

The sea has darkened
A mallard calling
a whiteness I barely hear

with UK haiku poet Alan Summers’ translation:

a darker sea
becomes white and faint
the wild duck’s voice

This may be due in part to Fitzsimons’s loyalty to the syllable count of the original, which inevitably curtails either the shape or scope of the version.

At other points Fitzsimons has endeavored to be faithful in English to Basho’s original puns and sound values. Poem 540 runs along on its ‘R’-sounds:

The turbulent sea
Unfurling over Sado
the River of Stars

As poet Bernard O’Donoghue says, quoted on the back cover, this volume “makes the poet’s work in the context of his life understandable as it never has been before in English.” Fitzsimons’s inclusion of Basho’s head notes helps enormously to that end, plus his own introduction and poem notes together with timeline, glossary and indexes.

This collection will be definitive for most readers, working poets included. For haiku aficionados and academics it will be a useful adjunct to existing complete volumes such as those by Jane Reichhold and Makedo Ueda.

Lawrence Pettener is a poet and editor living in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. This review first appeared in Asian Review of Books (online) in November 2022.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a wonderful birthday present from Jan, chosen from one of my numerous Amazon Wishlists.
A new translation published in late 2024, it is also a brilliant piece of scholarship. With nearly 1,000 haiku, not all the translations are successful as poetry. The difficulty of translating haiku, let alone Basho's puns and subtlety, and from the 17th C to the 21st, can only be described as overwhelming. The puns and double meanings and cultural references in the poems are beyond most 21st C English readers.
Andrew Fitzsimons, who teaches in Japan, has done a worthy job of helping us through all that difficult literary terrain.
Each poem is presented in English, lines separated in traditional poetic manner. Then just below is the poem in Japanese using the English alphabet, with lines separated by a slash (/). And then below that are notes on the puns, double meanings, and cultural, geograpical, religious, political and literary references within each poem.
There are three Indexes - the poem in English, the poem in Japanese using the English alphabet, and the poem in Japanese using the Japanese alphabet.
And an *extensive* Bibliography.
This is a university press publication, and the quality of the book is very high (sewn in signatures, a place keeping ribbon). And I would like to thank the U of California Press (Go Bears! - and, the ORIGINAL "U of C") for making this very affordable for the general reader. At $27 (before discount) and nearly 500 pp, it is less expensive, and much better made, than most mainstream publisher offerings.
I am reading a page a night - usually three poems. The poems are presented in chronological order.
I love the poems, I love reading them to myself in Japanese (learning a bit of Japaneses here!), I love the quality of the physical book (even the boards are special), and I love the scholarship. Fitzsimons shares with us valuable information regarding the finer points of the poems.
I do get a kick that there are some "reviews" of this book that complain that his sexual haiku are included in here (Bashu was bisexual). This is a scholarly work, and that in the 21st C we should even consider publishing a bowlderized version is both sad and hilarious. This is, to my understanding, the *complete* haiku of Basho. And to be complete, it needs to be *complete*, not bending over to some prurient standard.
5 out of 5. A joy to read nightly.

[April Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very lovely collection of all of Basho's poems, each with explanatory tidbits including date written, context, word use, etc. This additional information is interesting and educational in a congenial, non-pedantic way, and added a lot to my enjoyment of the work. The back matter includes an extensive bibliography, indexes of the poems in Japanese and by first line in English, and a glossary.
This would be a perfect coffee table book, something to pick up and read through and consider in quiet moments. It feels to me better read slowly to allow the poetry to sink in, rather than reading great chunks all at once, but that of course is up to the reader. Whatever your preference, this volume is gorgeous, and deserves a spot in any home library!

[Joseph Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Summer grasses
For warriors of the past
Glory's aftermath



Leaves of the ivy
bring the tinge of long ago
The autumn colors


Ah, tranquility!
Penetrating the very rock
A cicada's voice.



The blossoms a refuge
from beginning to their end
twenty days or so



An olden pond now
A songfrog springs off into
the sound of water



The poet singing
The air echoes with his joy
Birds smile in their nests

[Khaleel Writer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basho is, indeed, one of the greatest haiku poets ever. His work is elegant and eloquently written with 980 haikus in this collection. I've practiced the art of writing haikus, but reading one of the masters of the craft was truly an honor and humbling experience. Thank you to Andrew Fitzsimons for your annotations and translations, though some notes were a bit hefty.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extensively researched with interesting & useful annotations. Includes Bashō’s headnotes to set up the poems when available.
To me the translations are not as poetic as other English versions that I have read including Sam Hamill’s more lyrical The Essential Bashō among others.

[Addison Hart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very helpful and gratifying to have all the poems in a single volume with a good bibliography and excellent notes. Unfortunately the translations themselves are quite bad, tin-eared, and twee.

[Degan Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems but I didn’t reali3 how much of the haiku relies on verbal puns and grammatical context, so much is lost in translation although the footnotes are excellent

[Stephanie Kesler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite translations. And the introduction and annotations provide excellent background,

[Travis Klunick]

These translations are dramatically less pleasurable than Lucien Stryk's or Robert Hass'. The context provided is useful but the poetry is largely lost.

[Jack Malik · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enlightening collection that change my mindset of the 5-7-5 rule when writing a haiku.

[joy (elend’s version - semi-hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 stars for Basho. 3 stars for this translation.