I’ve recently really gotten into reading haiku as part of my Japanese learning. Mostly I’m reading old stuff, Bashō, Buson, etc, and I really like it. I haven’t found an edition of the poetry I’m crazy about though. I have a very slim volume of Bashō where the English translation is right there on the same page, which I find a bit distracting—but at the same time, having an English translation and commentary somewhere is important, because the grammar can be archaic and the meaning obscure when approaching it for the first time.
My current strategy for sourcing haiku is that I have an AI chatbot sift through pdfs of haiku and then present individual poems to me along with a glossary of key words. This works better than you might think, but the chatbot can definitely be unreliable, so I have to double check everything it tells me.
At any rate, I really love the poetry, I just wish I had a physical book with lots of classic haiku in Japanese with commentary in English, but I’m having trouble finding anything like that online.
If anyone has a recommendations I’d love to hear them. Thank you!
which is a collection of the 100 haiku that every Japanese schoolchild has to learn, with age-appropriate explanations in Japanese. I read part of it and found it quite interesting. We also ran a bookclub on it here in the forums where people researched the authors and so on. That club is also incomplete but might still be interesting.
To OP : I mainly focus on waka here, but I have also translated some haiku and if you want haiku anthologies with commentary, my recommendations right now are :
Robin D. Gill (look out the “Cherry Blossom Epiphany” for example)
R. H. Blyth (I only have one volume right now but it’s very good)
There is also this book focusing only on Basho, Buson and Issa. I don’t have it right now but I put it on my list a few months ago, it seems really good.
If you want to learn more about classical Japanese, I couldn’t recommend you enough the books of Haruo Shirane, the Grammar and the Reader. To learn more about the cultural aspects, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons.
On the first post of my thread I have a list with a lot of books and ressources. I just edited the first post to include the R. H. Blyth series, they have been re-published a few years ago.
@NicoleIsEnough maybe I’m wrong but, isn’t it a book for the waka of the Hyakunin Isshu ? There are haiku included with them in the book ?
Hmmm, I must confess I am not very knowledgeable with the different styles of poems, and I always assumed these were haiku, but appearently not: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu - Wikipedia
Thanks for setting this straight!
Wow! This is amazing. I know almost nothing about waka, but looking through your thread I’m completely captivated. Honestly, I feel like I’m getting a peek at a whole world I didn’t realize existed. I’m excited to read more!
Thanks a lot, I’m really glad to read this And by the way if you want to share poems on this thread feel free to do so, it’s open to everyone !
Outside of Japan, waka is quite obscure indeed especially compared to haiku ; and yet it is the classical, most prestigious form of Japanese poetry.
The melancholic aesthetic of these waka anthologies, this idea of mono no aware that you can read in the Kokin wakashû for example, is such a unique and elegant one. Once you are in this rabbit hole, if you like it you will never get out, you will just dig deeper (and spend more money… for books)
One of my goals with this language now is to read Japanese books about the Heian period, such a fascinating time. Did you know for example that the aristocratic women were wearing a kind of kimono with twelve layers, the jûni hitoe, with precise color associations according to the seasons ? The composition of waka and the passing of the seasons were so important for Heian aristocrats that, during autumn for example, some insects specifically related to autumnal topics of composition were literally captured to be released in their gardens, along with the plants and flowers related to autumn (my source is the book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons). It is to me a fascinating world, both from a visual and literary point of view.
Classical Japanese Poetry 
