Writings and Drawings
Issa wrote over 20,000 haiku, which have won him readers up to the present day. Though his works were popular, he suffered great monetary instability. Despite a multitude of personal trials, his poetry reflects a childlike simplicity, making liberal use of local dialects and conversational phrases, and 'including many verses on plants and the lower creatures. Issa wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 150 on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over 100 on fleas and nearly 90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures'. By contrast, Bashō's verses are comparatively few in number, about two thousand in all).
Issa, 'with his intense personality and vital language shockingly impassioned verse...is usually considered a most conspicuous heretic to the orthodox Basho tradition'. Nevertheless, 'in that poetry and life were one in him... poetry was a diary of his heart', it is at least arguable that 'Issa could more truly be said to be Basho's heir than most of the haikai poets of the nineteenth century'.
Issa's works also include haibun (passages of prose with integrated haiku) such as Oraga Haru (おらが春 "My Spring") and Shichiban Nikki (七番日記 "Number Seven Journal"), and he collaborated on more than 250 renku (collaborative linked verse).
Issa was also known for his drawings, generally accompanying haiku: 'the Buddhism of the haiku contrasts with the Zen of the sketch'. His approach has been described as 'similar to that of Sengai....Issa's sketches are valued for the extremity of their abbreviation, in keeping with the idea of haiku as a simplification of certain types of experience'
One of Issa's haiku, as translated by R.H. Blyth, appears in J. D. Salinger's 1961 novel, Franny and Zooey:
- O snail
- Climb Mount Fuji,
- But slowly, slowly!
The same poem, in Russian translation, served as an epigraph for Snail on the Slope (published 1966–68), by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, also providing the novel's title.
Another, translated by D.T. Suzuki, was written during a period of Issa's life when he was penniless and deep in debt. It reads:
- Trusting the Buddha (Amida), good and bad,
- I bid farewell
- To the departing year.
Another, translated by Peter Beilenson with Harry Behn, reads:
- Everything I touch
- with tenderness, alas,
- pricks like a bramble.
Read more about this topic: Kobayashi Issa
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