Ryokan (1758-1831) was a poet, master calligrapher, zen hermit, and is one of the most beloved poets of Japan. Taking the name of Daigo or “Great Fool”, he was often seen playing games with the village children or begging for food. Instead of becoming the head of a zen temple he preferred the simple and independent life of a hermit.Ryokan’s poetry is simple, direct and colloquial in expresion, influenced by the Chinese poet Han-shan and the Japanese poet Saigo.
The book includes a selection of Ryokan’s poems from both Japanese and Chinese as well as a poetic exchange between Ryokan and Teishin, a Buddhist nun.
What shall remain
as my legacy?
The spring flowers
the cuckoo in summer,
the autumn leaves.
Dennis Maloney is poet and translator. His works of translation include The Landscape for Castile by Antonio Machado, Dusk Lingers: Poems of Issa, and the forthcoming Tangled Hair, Tanka of Yosano Akiko.
Hide Oshiro is a Japanese visual artist living in the U.S. He has illustrated Basho’s travel journal, Back Roads to Far Towns, and Tangled Hair: Poems of Yosano Akiko.
"Just as Ryokan's life is inseparable from his poetry, the translation's clarity of diction is inseparable from the sensitive brushwork on each page. A book to be gazed into again and again."
—Charlotte Mandel, Small Press
“Ryokan's poetry is both muscular and mysteriously empty of self, like the tracks of a bounding deer left in snow. Yet the clarity and lightness of his Zen mind are fulfilled by the warmth of his Zen gaze and heart. Whether in poems describing ball games with village children or in an extended correspondence with a Buddhist nun forty years his junior, Ryokan's writings, beautifully presented in this collection, offer a direct, intimate, and renovating conversation with the deep landcape of human life.”
—Jane Hirshfield
