One of the best-known haiku of all times is Matsuo Bashō’s brief evocation of a frog jumping into an old pond and generating the sound of water. Countless English translations of these verbal brushstrokes have been offered, ranging across the full spectrum from scrupulous verbosity to onomatopoeic minimalism. The relevance of this haiku for translation does not only lie, however, in the multiplicity of its renditions: the very image it evokes could be read as an analogy for the haiku itself, an agile, slick creature, suddenly immersed in a fluid and generally opaque environment – that of a foreign language – and leaving behind little more than an echo. James Shea has risen to this age-long challenge in his beautifully crafted translation of Applause for a Cloud, Kamakura Sayumi’s latest collection (Black Ocean, 2025). A poet in his own right, Shea brings a crystalline language to the dense and endlessly changeable process of translation, offering English-language readers a ride along Kamakura’s intercontinental itinerary, including stops in Morocco and Italy.
The expansiveness of Kamakura’s geographical experiences matches the depth of her personal journey, encompassing her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Yet, her tone is neither grandiose nor dramatic. The world Kamakura creates, and Shea returns to us, is at the same time much more mundane and philosophically – but unassumingly – rich than we might expect, given such coordinates. It is a world of details (‘My husband absent – | in the dishwater | a knife seems to be drowning’), of habits (‘Placing a plate | on a plate, waiting | in vain for spring’), of moods (‘I’m not going to cry – | like that ceiling | remaining so firm’), of quotidian encounters (‘A tulip blooms alone | and trembles when | held by two people’). Most of all, it is a world of interconnection between human and more-than-human experiences.
As Shea remarks in his short but illuminating introductory note, the frequent use of personification is a Kamakura hallmark, ‘a feature more prevalent in her work than in other contemporary or even classical haiku poets. Kamakura has said she likes the way anthropomorphism opens her imagination and allows for haiku that are not focused solely on reality’ (9). The appropriateness of anthropomorphism to a post-anthropocentric worldview is indeed at the heart of current post-humanist debates. In that context, Kamakura’s unguarded position is in agreement with that of the American philosopher Jane Bennett, who encourages us through her vital materialism to ‘cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism – the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature – to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world’.
Traces of Shinto animism thus merge seamlessly into a universal corporeality, in a collection whose backbone is made of animals’ non-conceptual knowledge (‘The skylark cries out, | wanting to know | the sky a bit better’), multiple voices from the surrounding environment (‘Summer’s over | mutters a goblin | in the tree crotch’), and cross-species dialogues (‘Let’s ask the seagulls | about the origin of the sky | that blankets the sea’). The very sections the collection is divided into – Light, Sand, Clouds, and Wind – speak of a world that is as concrete as it is ethereal and ever-changing, without either of these conditions being in contradiction with the others. In such fluid interconnection of states, human agency is at the same time decentred (‘In the time of cherry blossoms, | eyelashes are suddenly | called toward the sky’), reprimanded (‘Do you realize? | You just sat | on a violet’), disseminated (‘The river empties | into the sea – its eyes and | mouth wide open’), and set in continuity with everything else (‘The cherry blossoms | and all those smiles | will scatter eventually’). Pain, grief, joy, and cheerfulness are on equal footing in this ever-expansive agential world, where the passage of time is accepted in its contradictory necessity: ‘A tree dies so the | wind can rise | and play more’, but also, in the eponymous haiku: ‘Applause for a cloud – | you did such a fine job | of calling for spring’.
The collection is further enriched by sparse and unobtrusive endnotes, which guide the Western reader through Japanese flora and traditions. It is certainly possible to respond immediately to a haiku like this: ‘In a field of mustard flowers | just a few ways | for the light to return home’. But it is also engrossing to learn from Shea’s note that ‘Mustard flowers or canola flowers are prolific wildflowers in Japan, and evoke gaiety and brightness. They grow in vivid yellow fields during the late spring’ (252). Or: ‘I want to believe the blue | I saw in my first dream | of the new year was a bird’. There is certainly no need to fill in every gap here, but it is fascinating to know that ‘In Japan, it is believed that the first dream of the new year, hatsuyume, can predict your fortunes for the year. The most auspicious visions are of Mount Fuji, hawks, and eggplants, in that order’ (254).
Finally, if the materiality of Japanese kana is foregrounded by Kamakura (‘The ra of sayonara | leaned on a | beech tree’), but is inevitably lost to a Western reader, together with the concrete aspect of kanji (‘The character for death | I write in the wind | is not separate from the wind’), Shea manages to engage the English language in several successful phonic contrivances, premised on onomatopoeia (‘That crow – | now be good | and stop crying’), repetition (‘Colder and colder – | no more counting | all those stars tonight’), and assonance (‘Blow after blow – | what do you want, | winter wind?’). Multilingual readers are able to compare such solutions with the original Japanese versions, thanks to the impeccable clarity of the facing mise en page.
The overall effect is that of a finely woven fabric that invites us to read and re-read, find internal and external connections, follow arrows that intersect the pages but start and no doubt end somewhere else. And if we find ‘In the morning, | an intravenous drip with the speed | of a lotus opening’, there is no cause for despair, rather acceptance that life is made of rhythms and events – big and small – that transcend our own: ‘This is a swaying | water lily leaf – | won’t you take a seat?’.
Kamakura, Sayumi. Applause for a Cloud. Translated by James Shea. Black Ocean, 2025.
Claudia Dellacasa is Lecturer in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow, working on environmental humanities projects on eco-polyphony and rewilding stories. She is the author of Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs (Legenda, 2024).