Yosa Buson

1716 – 17 January 1784 (~68)

1 live poem · Japanese

Yosa Buson, born in 1716 and dead on 17 January 1784, occupies a singular place in Japanese culture: he was at once one of the supreme masters of haiku, a major painter of the Edo period, an editor and teacher, a student of literary history, and a deliberate maker of artistic personae. Along with Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa, he is regularly named among the three greatest poets of the classical haiku tradition. Su…

“What you want to acquire, you should dare to acquire by any means. What you want to see, even though it is with difficulty, you should see. You should not let it pass, thinking there will be another chance.”

Sadakichi Hartmann

8 November 1867 – 22 November 1944 (~77)

2 live poems · English

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…

“Everyone has experienced that a smell suddenly appreciated sends back one's train of thought to scenes of the past more rapidly and more vividly than any other art medium.”