Kobayashi Issa

Kobayashi Issa (小林一茶, Kobayashi Issa ^? June 15, 1763 – January 5, 1827) was a Japanese writer, born Kobayashi Nobuyuki and nicknamed Yataro during his youth.

He is famous as the author of haiku.

Biography

It was the spring of 1763 in the city of Kashiwabara, in the former Japanese province of Shinano. His family was dedicated to agriculture, something common in feudal Japan in the 18th century .

When he was just a few years old, his mother died. He became the care of his grandmother and it was then that the little boy learned about haiku for the first time, from the hand of a poet from the town called Shinpo. However, his father soon remarried, an unhappy marriage. The problems with his stepmother did not take long to appear, and neither did the beatings: Yataro would remember having been beaten "more than 100 times in the same night." The situation became even more unbearable when his stepmother gave birth to his half-brother.

At the age of 14 he went to Edo, present-day Tokyo, sent by his father.

We know that it was there where he resumed contact with haiku. His days alternated between working at a Buddhist temple and studying with the poets Mizoguchi Sogan and Norokuan Chikua, at the Katsushika school of haiku. His talent soon came to light and Seibi Natsume became his patron.

At that time Issa did not yet exist. His poems were signed with the pseudonyms Kobayashi Ikyo or Nirokuan Kikumei. It was in 1792 when he definitively abandoned the name Yataro and adopted the literary name of Issa. & # 34; With the spring / Yataro was reborn / turned into Issa & # 34;, reads one of his haikus.

After a trip through southwestern Japan in 1795, Issa published his book of poems Tabishui.

In the following years he lived in different cities, he visited the legendary Kyoto, Osaka, Matsuyama, Nagasaki and many others. But although his fame as a poet increased, Issa knew poverty for many years. Years in which he was forced to work hard and make frequent trips. He even once returned to his homeland.

There, in Kashiwabara, his father died of typhoid fever. Problems arose again with his stepmother and his stepbrother, who prevented him for 13 years from inheriting the properties that his father always wanted to go to him. In the Diary of my father's death (1801) he recounts the lawsuits and details of his father's illness. It says about him that, despite the illness that consumed him, "he smiled happily at everyone who offered him poison, and despised anyone who forced him to take medicine". The body was cremated according to Buddhist rites, and Issa kept the bones from him.

At the beginning of 1810 he decided to settle permanently in Kashiwabara and married a young woman from the town. He was already 50 years old but a happy retirement did not await him; On the contrary, that was the most terrible time of his life. In the following 10 years he saw his four children die, and also his wife during the birth of the last of them. He remarried, now at the age of 62, but divorced a few months later. He still married for the third time. Then his house burned down, and he returned to absolute poverty.

The last months of his life were spent in a warehouse with a dirt floor. He died in the winter of 1827, without seeing the birth of his last daughter.

Some haiku from Issa:

Till my feet
When and how did you get here,
Snail?

Me neither.
I found a home.
Late autumn.

Run the dew.
In this dirty world
I don't do anything.

If it wasn't you,
too big.
It would be the forest.

Publications in Spanish of his poems

Fifty haikus, Translation by Ricardo de la Fuente and Shinjiro Hirosaki. Introduction and notes by Ricardo de la Fuente. Bilingual edition. Madrid, Ediciones Hiperión, 1986. 5th edition, 2007. ISBN 978-84-7517-514-0.

Poems of maturity, bilingual edition (Japanese and Spanish), with selection, prologue and notes by Josep M. Rodríguez. Ed. Juan de Mairena, Córdoba, 2008. ISBN 978-84-936387-2-6.