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Between the Floating Mist: Poems of Ryokan

AUTHOR

Ryokan


TRANSLATORS

Dennis Maloney and Hide Oshiro

Between the Floating Mist: Poems of Ryokan

What shall remain
as my legacy?
The spring flowers
the cuckoo in summer,
the autumn leaves.

Reviews

“Just as Ryokan’s life is inseparable from his poetry, the translation’s clarity of diction is inseparable from the sensitive brushwork on each page. A book to be gazed into again and again.”


—Charlotte Mandel, Small Press

Hide Oshiro is a Japanese visual artist living in the U.S. He has illustrated Basho's travel journal, Back Roads to Far Towns, and Tangled Hair: Poems of Yosano Akiko.

Ryokan (1758–1831) was a poet, master calligrapher, Zen hermit, and is one of the most beloved poets of Japan. Instead of becoming the head of a Zen temple, he preferred the simple and independent life of a hermit. Ryokan’s poetry is simple, direct, and colloquial in expression.

Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including The Map Is Not the Territory: Poems & Translations and Just Enough, and Listening to Tao Yuan Ming. A bilingual German/English volume, Empty Cup was published in Germany in 2017. Recent collections include The Things I Notice Now and The Faces of Guan Yin. His poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

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