This outstanding study of Japanese haiku crossing cultures comes from Polish scholar Beata Śniecikowska, translated into English and available as a free Open Access publication (PDF or epub) from Peter Lang Publishers: Transcultural Haiku: Polish History of the Genre.

Don't be put off by the focus on Poland: this is a book that will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the reception and translation of Japanese haiku around the world and in the development of haiku traditions in different countries. Consider Poland just a case study! All the Polish poems in the book are translated into English.

Fun fact: did you know that Czesław Miłosz, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, was interested in haiku? He was! In 1992 he published Haiku, a collection of Polish translations from English, featuring both Japanese haiku and also haiku by Canadian and American poets. (And one of Miłosz's best-known English translators, Robert Hass, is also deeply involved in haiku tradition.)

I found this book because I was indeed looking for a book of Polish haiku to read (Polish and Latin are the two languages I know best besides English)... but as soon as I started reading it, I realized it would be of general interest for the wide range of literary and cultural questions it includes.

This is an expensive book to buy, so MANY THANKS to the publishers for making the digital copy available. (I should note also that great care has been taken with the epub so that the page numbers corresponding to the print edition are easily accessible in the digital version.)

I'll write future posts with some notes and observations about the book in detail, but I'm experimenting with this new Ghost website, and I'm making this my first post.

Thank you for reading!