"Japanese Death Poems" is a collection of just what the title suggests: death poems (jisei) written by Japanese throughout the centuries. Hoffman's discussion of the genre along with basic cultural background (some aspects of which are more solid than others) occupies the first third of the book; the second is composed of translations of jisei originally written in Classical Chinese; and the third and largest section contains haiku-style jisei along with romanizations of their original Japanese. It was this last aspect that convinced me to purchase the book, as Japanese poetry anthologies fail to include anything save the translation more often than not. The romanizations do help quite a bit, as they both allowed me to understand how the author arrived at her choices in translating and to formulate my own alternate translations when I disagreed with her choices. Another strength of Japanese Death Poems is to be found in the author's inclusion of biographical notes and death dates for the poems' authors, as well as explanations concerning the formalized symbolic imagery in the poems. The book's weaknesses are Hoffman's choice not to include the original characters for any of the poems; to not indicate vowel duration outside of the transliterations; her breakdown of the poems into "stanzas"; and her choice to organize the poems alphabetically by author instead of chronologically, thus destroying any opportunity to observe developments in language, expression, and symbolism within the form. Still, I recommend this book both for the uniqueness of its content and for the fact that it is more informative to the Japanese-speaker than other similar collections.

Absolutely fascinating. I would recommend it to anyone. I've probably read it 3-4 times, cover-to-cover, and I can assure you I'll read it again. In a word: fascinating. ( )

as the name implies,,, ( )