Steven Carter on Early Hokku (Starting verse)

Today I'm reading Steven Carter's Haiku Before Haiku: From the Renga Masters to Bashô (bibliographic information at the bottom of the post). Professor Carter is one of the most eminent scholars in North America who works on pre-modern Japanese poetry, particularly the linked verse form renga 連歌. Renga, which one could call the collaborative form of classical waka (tanka, in the modern period), is important in its own right; and for the topic of this blog, is also of interest because it is the ancestor of haiku. Indeed, that's exactly what the title of Carter's book means.

Like everything Professor Carter writes, the book is immensely authoritative: original material is translated with precision, and the scholarly commentary is meticulously researched and clearly presented. The book includes enough detail in its notes to be useful, without being so crowded with them that it is off-putting to non-specialist readers. Haiku Before Haiku would be very useful in the classroom, for instance, or for a general reader who is looking for a reliable source on a form of Japanese poetry that has so far not gotten enough attention by anglophone readers.

I'm writing a review article of the book, but for the moment, here are some preliminary notes. When the article is published, I'll update this post with a link.

Contents summary:

1. Introductory commentary.
2. Translations and notes for hokku by 55 poets, most of them medieval but some of them early modern. The latest poet represented is Bashô.  English version appears on the left page, notes on the right, so it's easy to read in terms of format. Each poet's section begins with a very brief biographical introduction. Notes for each verse list the season, the topic, the original verse in romanized form, and includes brief contextualizing information that are useful in making sense of the translation.
3. Major poets represented (this is a really arbitrary choice): Abutsu-ni, Reizei Tamesuke, Gusai, Nijô Yoshimoto, Sôseki, Shinkei, Sôgi, Shôha, Sôchô, Arikida Moritake, Satomura Jôha, Hosokawa Yûsai, Matsunaga Teitoku, Wife of Mitsusada, Nishiyama Sôin, and Bashô.
4. Bibliography for the book and a list of Columbia U.P.'s Translations from the Asian Classics series, listed chronologically.



Haiku Before Haiku: From the Renga Masters to Bashô. By STEVEN D. CARTER. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 176 pp. $69.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).