Moving Poems

A simple Flash animation experiment by Joseph Shopen. The translation is from Japanese Haiku, by Peter Beilenson. Sora was a disciple and traveling companion of Matsuo Bashô.

I like poems and poem-like things that can be enjoyed without any knowledge of the language. Hanafubuki says,

It’s me reading a Japanese tongue twister. the word “hato” means pigeon in Japanese.

Video illustration by erikdegroot88 of a haiku by Ryôkan Daigu

A video by Portuguese artist Bruno Gaspar illustrating a tanka by Ono no Komachi. Here’s an English version:

It’s too cold to sleep
in this lodging on the way
to Iwanoue.
Oh monk, if it’s all the same to you,
could I borrow your robes?

And here’s a short film by Bryan Lacey. The interplay between the classical Japanese poem and modern folk/country song certainly creates an interesting mood, and one worlds away from the original court milieu.

Multiple English versions of the tanka in this video — Ono no Komachi’s most famous poem — are collected here.

Haibun travelogue by Matsuo Bashô, adapted from the translation of Sam Hamill

From the film Basho, directed by Babak Gray (full credits here)

IMDb describes the full-length film as just 8 minutes long, so this YouTube selection must comprise most of it. It also seems to be an authorized upload — Damien Daniel was the cinematographer for Basho.

I found this a very welcome relief from the general run of Orientalist tripe that turns up when one searches the English-language Internet for videos of East Asian poetry. It might not provide the sort of lesson in compassion that most modern admirers of Japanese Buddhism would wish for, however.

Nozarashi Kikô, also translated as Record of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, was published in 1684, the first of four haibun travelogues Bashô wrote (the most famous being Oku no Hosomichi — The Narrow Road to the Far North). As the Wikipedia puts it,

Traveling in medieval Japan was immensely dangerous, and at first Bashô expected to simply die in the middle of nowhere or be killed by bandits. As the trip progressed, his mood improved and he became comfortable on the road. He met many friends and grew to enjoy the changing scenery and the seasons. His poems took on a less introspective and more striking tone as he observed the world around him. [...] The trip took him from Edo to Mount Fuji, Ueno, and Kyoto.