Böcker av Eric Hoffman

As celebrated as Akutagawa Ry¿nosuke is as a short story writer, his haiku-the first of which was composed in 1906, the same year Akutagawa began to read contemporary Japanese literature-is relatively unknown outside of Japan, and rarely translated. Akutagawa's teikei (fixed-form) haiku, like his fiction, mostly eschews modernism in its embrace of classical forms, and derives as much from literary tradition as from lived experience. If not for their precision, learning, and psychological depth, Akutagawa's haiku share more in common with the haikai of the 17th and 18th century than with 20th century haiku. Frequently they portray a modern consciousness in relationship with an idealized nature that exists more in the Japanese psyche than the landscape that surrounds him. Included in this volume are over 500 of Akutagawa's haiku in a new translation

Hoffman's narrative explores in considerable depth Oppen's thinking about his own work, his reasonings and judgments on himself and his contemporaries in life, politics and poetry. Throughout, Hoffman supplies a rich contextual background to the Oppens' story, one in which public and private life continually intersect.