This humorous haiku was authored by famous Japanese haiku writer, Kobayashi Issa.
Who is Kobayashi Issa?
Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶, June 15, 1763 – January 5, 1828) was a Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest of the Jōdo Shinshū. He is known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa (一茶), a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea (lit. "one [cup of] tea"). He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson and Shiki — "the Great Four."
Reflecting the popularity and interest in Issa as man and poet, Japanese books on Issa outnumber those on Buson and almost equal in number those on Bashō.
RITINGS AND DRAWINGS
Issa wrote over 20,000 haiku, which have won him readers up to the present day. Though his works were popular, he suffered great monetary instability. His poetry makes liberal use of local dialects and conversational phrases, and 'including many verses on plants and the lower creatures. Issa wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 150 on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over 100 on fleas and nearly 90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures'. By contrast, Bashō's verses are comparatively few in number, about 2,000 in all. Issa's haiku were sometimes tender, but stand out most for their irreverence and wry humor, as illustrated in these verses translated by Robert Hass:
No doubt about it,
the mountain cuckoo
is a crybaby.
New Year's Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
Issa, 'with his intense personality and vital language [and] shockingly impassioned verse…is usually considered a most conspicuous heretic to the orthodox Basho tradition'. Nevertheless, 'in that poetry and life were one in him…[&] poetry was a diary of his heart', it is at least arguable that 'Issa could more truly be said to be Basho's heir than most of the haikai poets of the nineteenth century'.
Issa's works include haibun (passages of prose with integrated haiku) such as Oraga Haru (おらが春 "My Spring") and Shichiban Nikki (七番日記 "Number Seven Journal"), and he collaborated on more than 250 renku (collaborative linked verse).
Issa was also known for his drawings, generally accompanying haiku: "the Buddhism of the haiku contrasts with the Zen of the sketch". His approach has been described as "similar to that of Sengai….Issa's sketches are valued for the extremity of their abbreviation, in keeping with the idea of haiku as a simplification of certain types of experience."
One of Issa's haiku, as translated by R.H. Blyth, appears in J. D. Salinger's 1961 novel, Franny and Zooey:O snailClimb Mount Fuji,But slowly, slowly!
(Katatsumuri sorosoro nobore Fuji no yama 蝸牛そろそろ登れ富士の山) The same poem, in Russian translation, served as an epigraph for a novel Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (published 1966–68), also providing the novel's title.
Another, translated by D.T. Suzuki, was written during a period of Issa's life when he was penniless and deep in debt. It reads:ともかくもあなたまかせの年の暮tomokaku mo anata makase no toshi no kureTrusting the Buddha (Amida), good and bad,I bid farewellTo the departing year.
Another, translated by Peter Beilenson with Harry Behn, reads:Everything I touchwith tenderness, alas,pricks like a bramble.
Issa's most popular and commonly known tome, titled The Spring of My Life, is autobiographical, and its structure combines prose and haiku.
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