E-mail conversation this afternoon with Jordan Davis about reading all of O'Hara, Koch, and Ashbery's favorite writers. The merits of David Schubert. Teaching poetry to children. The founding of the International Ron Padgett Society.

***

I'm bringing home Japanese Linked Poetry and Japanese Poetic Diaries, edited by Earl Miner, to read this evening. I haven't looked at these books in at least five years.

For Basho's:

Abura kasurite
yoine suru aki

Miner puts: "In his lamp the oil grows low / and autumn brings him early sleep"

Lenore Mayhew, in Monkey's Raincoat" (Charles Tuttle, 1985) has "Autumn: scrape the oil / go to bed with the dark."

Too bad the scholar and the poet are not combined in one person. Miner's scholarly apparatus is indispensable, but my paternal aunt, who knows even less Japanese than I do, has a more graceful touch--and is often more accurate to boot. There is no "his" or "and" in Basho's original. There's not even a lamp, this is implied.