A Poem by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

This year I’ve taken a challenge to try to memorize at least one (short) poem each month. I’ll do my challengers one better: whenever the poem is in a language I can read other than English, I’ll (do my best to) translate it.

I’ve started with this well-known poem by Masaoka Shiki, probably Japan’s best-loved and most influential exponent of the haikai or haiku form since the country rejoined worldwide political and economic systems in the 1850s and 1860s. Like many luminaries of his period, Shiki died very young of tuberculosis, a disease that he had for much of his writing period and living with which he saw as a key point of his personal identity; this perhaps renders his innovative handling of Japanese poetry’s traditional focus on sense-media especially poignant.