Purchase Issue 2
Masaoka Shiki
trans. by Howard Norman & Kazumi Tanaka
Three Haiku
The red plum
has even more allure
fallen to the snow
At dawn
much adjusting of hairpins
four sisters and a friend
The deaf-mute
still adores
the temple’s great bell
The rest of Howard Norman's and Kazumi Tanaka's translations of Masaoka Shiki's "Eight Haiku" can be read in the print edition of The Arkansas International 2.
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) was a Japanese poet of the Meiji period and is often considered one of the four great haiku masters, along with Bashō, Buson, and Issa. He also wrote some of the earliest baseball poetry and was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002.
Howard Norman's novel MY DARLING DETECTIVE was published in March, 2017. He is the recipient of a Lannan Award in fiction, and The Harold Morton Landon Prize in translation from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches in the MFA program at The University of Maryland, and divides his time between Washington DC and Vermont.
