Independent Publisher
American poet Stephen Berg takes on the task of translating one of the most riotous and contentious of the Japanese Zen masters, Ikkyu Sojun. Berg is perhaps best known as the founder and coeditor of American Poetry Review and of the Naked Poetry anthologies. He is also an American Zen poet whose perverse humor and personal directness suit him to this task. Another American Zen poet, Lucien Stryk, provides an informed preface and portrait of Ikkyu, "best known in the Zen world as a sort of rake, always spitting in the face of orthodoxy, madly carrying on as freest of the free." Nicknamed "Crazy Cloud" by his fellow Zennists. Ikkyu managed to write bawdy drinking poems, moving love poems to his blind mistress, and startling Zen statements that awaken us as only a Zen koan can. Berg's brief foreword summarizes the master: "Harsh, delicate, brilliant, reckless, precise, intimate, ignorant, arrogant, aloofIkkyu comes across as a man of simultaneously miserable selfdoubt and infinite self-confidence": "that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets / I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind." Berg explains that his "versions" take the liberty of transforming Ikkyu's favored four-line verse into brief couplets that startle us with their directness-like a Zen master's address to his students. Such an approach reduces the poetry to a Zen minimum. 'Mere are fine memorable lines that make you realize life and understand why Ikkyu was so helpful to his Zen students: "Ikkyu this body isn't yours I say to myself / wherever I am I'm there." It passes so simply and quickly, one has to meditate on the line (dissolve it on the tongue of the mind and body) in order to release its sweetness. More objectionable is Berg's method of running-on thoughts (no punctuation throughout) to approximate the Chinese characters. Such deliberate awkwardness seems more perverse than even Ikkyu would require. For example, "no tiny wooden hut with a grass roof in the hills / but this city these people where I live still are impossible." Lacking even space breaks to guide us. at times it becomes impossible to read and appreciate. Despite this one flaw in method, Berg manages to bring a true Zen master into English, for which W.S. Merwin's praise seems appropriate: "It is good to have Ikkyu brought up close to us." Follow Ikkyu's own perverse advice as a finger pointing to the moon, road signs toward self-nature: "forget what the masters wrote truth's a razor / each instant sitting here you and I being here."
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Book Description
poetry, classic Japanese, tr Stephen Berg
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
