Masaoka Shiki
trans. by Howard Norman with Kazumi Tanaka
Eight Haiku
The red plum
has even more allure
fallen to the snow
At dawn
much adjusting of hairpins
four sisters and a friend
The deaf-mute
still adores
the temple’s great bell
Rain in the bamboo grove
which century
is it?
Nosebleed-dried handkerchief
no Latin name
for this flower
Wind at dusk
a whole mountain
tilts
Go on and try
to discern for me
if the dragonfly is sleeping
Cuckoo tries to instruct
haiku writers
succeeds with only one of us
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) was a Japanese poet of the Meiji period and is often considered one of the four great haiku masters, along with Bashō, Buson, and Issa. He also wrote some of the earliest baseball poetry and was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002.
Howard Norman’s novel My Darling Detective was published in March, 2017. He is the recipient of a Lannan Award in fiction and The Harold Morton Landon Prize in translation from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches in the MFA program at The University of Maryland, and divides his time between Washington DC and Vermont.