Navigating 18th Century Haiku: Translating the Poetry of Yosa Buson

摘要

One of the difficulties in translating the poetry of Yosa Buson, an 18th century Japanese poet and painter is negotiating the cultural differences between time and place, and still writing a translation that moves the audience within the limits of a haiku without doing any violence to the original text. My presentation is on the difficulties in translating a literary master from the Edo Era, Yosa Buson, especially when the poems contain embedded cultural references that the average American reader would not be familiar with as it is important to convey all of the information in a meaningful way and yet at the same time preserve the poetic experience.