Help me find winter haiku with translations

December 22, 2009 11:29 PM

俳句フィルター：Help me find great winter haiku in their original Japanese, but with English translations.

I'd like to make a Christmas card for my girlfriend with a more personal sentiment than something pre-made. I used to study Japanese, and I took a calligraphy course, so I thought a taking a blank card and doing a winter haiku on one would be nice.

The problem is, I'm having trouble deciding which one to use since it seems most of the English translations lack the original Japanese and vice versa. My Japanese is good enough to translate on my own, but it's far from effortless, so if there's a good resource of haiku with translations that would be best.

Also, if there are particular poems that people think would be good for this, I'd like to hear them. I particularly like Basho and Buson, but I'm open to that would work well for the purpose.

posted by Cogito to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

I have a book called 1020 Haiku, which has poems by Basho, Buson, and Issa. It has Kanji/kana, romaji, and English translations of the poems. The book is divided by season, then poet, , and keyword about the subject. The keywords also appear in a table of contents. If you can't find anything better, I can did through it and find two or three possibilities if you memail me (might not be until late this afternoon, though, I have to get my mom at the airport).
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:38 AM on December 23, 2009

The JapanesePod101 blog features a haiku every month with English translations.
posted by clearlydemon at 1:04 PM on December 23, 2009

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa from Robert Hass.
posted by bleary at 7:34 PM on December 26, 2009