Book record
Mountain Tasting
Santōka Taneda
Translated from Japanese by John Stevens
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.
- Published
- 2009
- Publisher
- White Pine Press
- Language
- Japanese
- Country
- Japan
- ISBN
- 9781935210030