One Hundred Poems from the Japanese

Kenneth Rexroth was a highly-regarded poet and influential leader of the San Francisco School of poets in the 1950’s (but he pleaded innocent to the suggestion that he was a Beat Poet!)  In One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, he offers a history of Japanese poetry from the significant period of the 700s to the late 1100s, through translations of the works of major figures.  All of the poems are short, characteristic of Japanese poetry; haikus were a later form that Rexroth did not value as highly, and he offers only a few famous examples in an appendix). 

Many of the poems, read alone, are strikingly lovely and/or thoughtful:

When I left my girl

In her grave on Mount Hikite

And walked down the mountain path,

I felt as though I were dead.

The meaning and significance of the poems is immensely enhanced by Rexroth’s introduction and by notes on many of the poems, discreetly located at the end of the book.  I had been unaware of some important themes and devices that, when explained by Rexroth, opened entirely new perspectives on what had seemed to me to be beautiful but simple moments in nature:

Though the purity

Of the moonlight has silenced

Both nightingale and

Cricket, the cuckoo alone

Sings all the white night

In a note, Rexroth briefly explains the significance of the different birds in Japanese literature; for example, the cuckoo “is also supposed to be a spirit from Hell, and, again, symbolizes the pleasures of the flesh, courtesans and prostitutes, sacred and profane”.  He suggests that this poem could mean “The salvation of Buddha has enraptured both the householder and the monk or nun, but the prostitute worships in her own way, all through the night.”

A very rewarding book.