Makoto Ueda – författare

Far Beyond the Field is a first-of-its-kind anthology of haiku by Japanese women, collecting translations of four hundred haiku written by twenty poets from the seventeenth century to the present. By arranging the poems chronologically, Makoto Ueda has created an overview of the way in which this enigmatic seventeen-syllable form has been used and experimented with during different eras. At the same time, the reader is admitted to the often marginalized world of female experience in Japan, revealing voices every bit as rich and colorful, and perhaps even more lyrical and erotic, than those found in male haiku.Listen, for instance, to Chiyojo, who worked in what has been long thought of as the dark age of haiku during the eighteenth century, but who composed exquisitely fine poems tracing the smallest workings of nature. Or Katsuro Nobuko, who wrote powerfully erotic poems when she was widowed after only two years of marriage. And here, too, is a voice from today, Mayuzumi Madoka, whose meditations on romantic love represent a fresh new approach to haiku.

The West has become familiar with Japanese haiku predominantly through the works of classical masters such as Bashõ, Buson, and Issa. If the leading haiku poets in modern Japan are unknown in the West, it is simply because translations of their works have not been available.

This anthology presents, in English translation, twenty haikus each from the work of twenty modern poets. The writers have been selected to exemplify the various trends that have dominated Japanese haiku in the last hundred years, but the individual haiku have been selected for literary merit; more than anything else this is intended to be a book of poetry.

In the introduction Professor Ueda traces the development of the verse form to the present. Brief biographies of the twenty poets are also provided.

Haiku, by its very nature, asks each reader to be a poet. Thus, for each haiku the poetic translation is accompanied by the original Japanese and a word-by-word translation into English, and the reader is invited to compose his own poem, to enter into that private relationship with the poem that haiku demands.