This is a Buddhist poet with whom we were not familiar. We were delighted to make his acquaintance in this elegant, substantive book of introduction, poems, and commentary.
The translators previously worked on a big book of Hanshan’s poems, and on The Essential Dogen, which we enthusiastically reviewed more than a decade ago. Their lengthy introduction explains where Saigyo grew up, how he became a monk — with a previous career as a soldier — and the time in which he lived, twelfth-century Japan. The translators also introduce the central themes in Saigyo’s poetry: not-knowing, longing, and wandering.
The poems are then grouped under more specific headings including renunciation, blossom awakenings, a dreamlike world, love, and loneliness. Each poem appears on the page with the original Japanese, plus a transliterated version. Here’s a sample poem from the section on loneliness:
“Even someone without much heart
knows loneliness.
A long bill snipe flies up
from the marsh—
autumn dusk.”
Throughout the verses, one encounters a blending, common in Saigyo’s work, of Shintoism — “the native Japanese animistic faith,” the translators call it — and various forms and expressions of Buddhist devotion. Most of all, Saigyo remains the poet of Pure Land Buddhism, a branch of Mahayana.
