Post your favorites.
Rules: Must have originally been written in Japanese. In other words, real haiku or, as much as it can be translated into English.
Here’s Buson, translated by Robert Hass.
I go
You stay
Two autumns
Another Buson, also translated by Hass:
The piercing chill I feel:
my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel…
Here’s something interesting. It’s two translations of the same haiku by Issa:
The old dog bends his head listening…
I guess the singing
of the earthworms gets to him.
–trans. Robert Bly
The old dog–
listening for the songs
of earthworms?
–trans. Robert Hass
And here’s Issa’s death poem, translated by Robert Hass:
A bath when you’re born
a bath when you die,
how stupid.
Basho:
Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto
An old pond
A frog jumps in -
Splash!
Here is my favorite one from Issa (also translated by Robert Hass; his Essential Haiku is indeed essential although I think it may be out of print now):
Don’t worry, spiders
I keep house
casually
I have a crackpot theory that David Caruso, as Horatio Caine, speaks only in conscious poetic rhythms on his teevee show. It’s not all haiku, but an alternation with other forms. He rarely speaks more than ten syllables.
A dead chrysanthemum
and yet - isn’t there still something
remaining in it?
/¯\00
| 0()0
| 00
|
Robert Hass was interviewed once on Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” show on public radio in the States. He could quote a lot of haiku (and longer poems) from memory, and one that he quoted is this, one of Basho’s most famous:
Even in Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoos cry
I long for Kyoto
Hass went on to give his interpretation of what that haiku was saying: “To defend ourselves against reality, we rehabilitate desire instantly to put ourselves back into our real condition, which is permanent longing.” I thought that was so true and so eloquent, almost as eloquent as the haiku itself.
In many cases, haiku from the old masters didn’t have anything to say beyond what you saw on the surface; they were carefully framed snapshots made with words, usually with a seasonal reference and a touch of Buddist symbolism, a way of capturing a moment with minimalist precision but with no deeper meaning intended. But sometimes–as in the poem above–they ran deep indeed.
Can a falling leaf
return to the tree?
A butterfly.
Silence.
The butterfly sleeps
On the temple bell.
This next isn’t haiku but it’s wonderful.
A zen nun became enlightened while carrying water
from the well–the bottom of her pail suddenly fell out.
She wrote:
This way and that I tried to patch the old pail
Till one night, returning from the well,
The bottom fell out.
No water in the pail!
No moon in the water!
Laurie Anderson quotes one. I don’t know where she got it. I’ve re-translated it:
Sudden fit of coughing
overcomes the puppeteer-
Spring thaw.
I don’t think anyone who uses exclamation points can have obtained Nibbana.
And while we’re breaking rules. Here’s Ezra Pound’s ‘In A Station Of The Metro’:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bow
Satori is Nibbana with exclamation points!
More rule breaking–but still Japanese and Buddhist
and poetry-related, which perhaps will appease the
authorities.
A thief broke into Ryokan’s hut on a moonlit night.
The poet/monk
was sitting on the bare floor, meditating.
The thief looked everywhere but there was nothing
to steal.
‘I can’t let you come all this way and leave with
nothing’ Ryokan said. ‘Here, take my clothes.’
The thief, bewildered, left with Ryokan’s clothes,
leaving the door open behind him.
Ryokan, sitting naked on the floor, looked out
the open door at the night sky and exclaimed:
‘I wish I could have given him the full moon!’
Medieval Japanese are mad for the moon.
Three more haikus from Basho:
another year is gone
a traveller’s shade on my head,
straw sandals at my feet
even a horse
arrests my eyes–on this
snowy morrow
The rough sea
stretching out towards Sado
the Milky Way
They certainly were looney enough. 
djm
I doubt that my memory’s good enough to call this an exact rendering, but I took a course that was taught by the poet Robert Mezey, who wrote something like:
Hey, you frogs! You know
a poet, name of Basho?
No? Well, he knows you.