I've been sharing printed books over the past few days, but today I wanted to share a beautiful web resource: it's David Lanoue's Haiku of Kobayashi Issa website, which contains (as of today's date) 13,391 of Issa's haiku. Wow!

Obviously, with a body of work that enormous, just figuring out a way to explore it can be a challenge, but Lanoue has the perfect solution: a lovely webpage with a random haiku: Random Issa.

Give it a try and see what you get; you will see a haiku at random each time you refresh/reload the page, and with thousands of haiku in the randomizer, the odds of seeing the same haiku twice are very low indeed. I also really appreciate the romanized Japanese appearing together with the English translation. Here's what I just got when I loaded the page:

I have several of Lanoue's books too, but I enjoy this random haiku approach even more than the books! I have it saved on my phone's homescreen so I can just click and see a random haiku from Issa anywhere anytime.

You can see a list of Lanoue's books here. I can highly recommend his A Taste of Issa book as a great place to start. He explains in the preface to that book that he started studying Japanese in 1986 in order to be able to translate Issa, and he began doing actual translations in 1988, almost 40 years ago. And what a beautiful body of work he has produced!

Issa is my favorite of the classical haiku poets, and I am so glad that David Lanoue has shared his translations online like this so that everyone can get to know Issa and his poetry in English.