Mountain Tasting by Santōka Taneda and translated by John Stevens

This is poetry from Japan.

Mountain Tasting by Santōka Taneda translated by John Stevens is published by White Pine Press. This is a Book originally written in Japanese. This was published in 2009.0 and has the ISBN of 9.78193521003E12.

Mountain Tasting, by Santōka Taneda and translated by John Stevens, brings English readers into the wandering, bare, and deeply human world of one of Japan’s great free-verse haiku poets. Santōka’s poems are associated with walking, begging, drinking, Zen-inflected solitude, and direct encounters with weather and road. The title is perfect because it makes landscape bodily. One does not merely see the mountain; one tastes it, takes it into the mouth, into hunger, into life. Stevens’s translation gives the work a plainspoken immediacy. I would read Mountain Tasting as a book of movement and austerity, but also of pleasure. The poems remind us that a small line can contain road dust, sake, loneliness, rain, and a whole mountain.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.