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Unimpaired Spirit. Henderson's book not only introduces haiku in the clear accompanying text, but is the first really successful attempt at haiku translation. Through it, haiku may well become a fad on U.S. campuses. A professor of Japanese at Columbia University before his retirement four years ago, Henderson inherited from his father a love of Japanese art and literature, nourished by several long visits to the country. Existing haiku translations dismayed him. Most of his 375 translations rhyme, on the very reasonable premise that Japanese haiku might rhyme too but for the limitations of a language in which all words end in n or a vowel.
Above all, Henderson's patient translations (one took him 25 years) capture, unimpaired, the evanescent haiku spirit, which has enchanted Japan for untold centuries:
There a beggar goes!
Heaven and earth he's wearing for his summer clothes.
-Kikaku (1661-1707)