SOURCE: Introduction to On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashō, translated by Lucien Stryk, Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 9-19.

In the following essay, Stryk discusses Bashō's poetic style and notes the lack of didacticism in his Zen-inspired verses, which celebrate all things and seek to wrest the eternal from the concrete world.

It is night: imagine, if you will, a path leading to a hut lost in a wildly growing arbour, shaded by the basho, a wide-leafed banana tree rare to Japan. A sliding door opens: an eager-eyed man in monk's robe steps out, surveys his shadowy thicket and the purple outline of a distant mountain, bends his head to catch the rush of river just beyond; then, looking up at the sky, pauses a while, and claps his hands. Three hundred years pass—the voice remains fresh and exciting as that moment.

Summer moon— clapping hands, I...