Saturday, May 1, 2010

109 - "Basho!!!"

My friend Earl is increasing his interest level in baseball.  He's even joined his company team, is taking practise, and has his first game of the year.  He also posted pictures, which I have adapted.

The title of this entry is Basho!!!  Basho was a highly regarded Japanese poet whose name happens to sound like a home run drive in English:




The Japanese verse in the second panel is one of Basho's haiku, a highly stylized poem.  I really have no idea if I have the correct kanji (Japanese form of pictogram-based writing).  It might be more legible in Klingon.  I apologise if I got it wrong.  Anyway, from what I know, the haiku goes as follows:

  Along this path
I go alone
This spring evening

Too bad Basho lived a couple of hundred years before the invention of baseball.  I bet he would have loved the game.

The verse was translated by William N. Porter.  Ideas for the above images come from Earl's photographs, but I also took inspiration from Mizushima-san, the legendary Japanese baseball artist.