After hearing Hass read this poem, I began to call these instances “Even in Kyoto Moments.” I imagined Bashô in a city he had a powerful aesthetic connection to, hearing the cuckoo’s cry and experiencing this feeling that is both a recognition of a coming departure and also, in this anticipation of leaving, a feeling of longing for the precise moment in which the poet finds himself. I was drawn to this haiku so deeply precisely because I thought Bashô had articulated this human sentiment I had experienced but had never seen discussed before. It is the feeling of longing for something while still near it. Namely, the feeling of being in the presence of something tremendously beautiful or awe-inspiring and being so overwhelmed or amazed by it, that one begins longing for its presence in anticipation of having to leave, but before doing so. I immediately, whether at the suggestion of something Hass said in his reading or not, I cannot remember, took this poem to be an expression of an emotion I had felt before, but for which I had no word. Robert Hass’s translation of the poem is as follows: A particular haiku of Bashô’s implanted itself in my mind, and began to occupy my thoughts occasionally over the next few years. Poet Laureate, read some of his translations of the haiku of Bashô, Buson and Issa from his book, The Essential Haiku. On an early September day a few years ago, I sat in the grass of a Berkeley park and listened to Robert Hass, former U.S.
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