Dejan Pavilnović is a Croatian haiku poet who reached out to me with his latest collection Life Lines. It’s a fascinating trilingual collection of haiku written in Croatian, English, and Japanese. As I understand it, Pavilnović is responsible for the Croatian and English versions, and they were then translated into Japanese by Ikuyo Yoshimura. I actually met Yoshimura once; she lives in Gifu and translated some of my haiku. I had a very enjoyable pizza lunch with her, Alan Spence, and his wife. Good times. I can’t comment on the Croatian versions, but the English and Japanese poems are excellent, powerful, witty, thought-provoking: everything good haiku should be. I particularly liked “full moon… / walking the shutters / on her naked back” and “trapped / in honey jars / autumn colours”. I’d heartily recommend this book to fans of haiku outside it’s original Japanese context. For anyone learning English, Croatian, or Japanese, this would be a cool way to study too.
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August Reads (part two)
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Dejan Pavilnović is a Croatian haiku poet who reached out to me with his latest collection Life Lines. It’s a fascinating trilingual collection of haiku written in Croatian, English, and Japanese. As I understand it, Pavilnović is responsible for the Croatian and English versions, and they were then translated into Japanese by Ikuyo Yoshimura. I actually met Yoshimura once; she lives in Gifu and translated some of my haiku. I had a very enjoyable pizza lunch with her, Alan Spence, and his wife. Good times. I can’t comment on the Croatian versions, but the English and Japanese poems are excellent, powerful, witty, thought-provoking: everything good haiku should be. I particularly liked “full moon… / walking the shutters / on her naked back” and “trapped / in honey jars / autumn colours”. I’d heartily recommend this book to fans of haiku outside it’s original Japanese context. For anyone learning English, Croatian, or Japanese, this would be a cool way to study too.