One Hundred Poems from Old Japan

“…one of the most respected and oft-quoted compilations of the Japanese poetic canon. Translated with both grace and precision, the poems are elegant expressions of the depth of human emotions blended with evocations of the natural world in which they lived. A must-read for anyone interested in Japanese culture or poetry in general.” —William Scott Wilson, renowned translator of Japanese literature

Michael Freiling studied computer science at the University of San Francisco, where he also found the time to take poetry classes and became interested in Japanese literature. In 1977, he received a Henry Luce scholarship and was assigned to study at Kyoto University for a year. He spent most of that time studying Japanese and translating Heian-era poetry. He returned to Kyoto years later, in 2014, where he began writing poetry in both English and Japanese. His work has been published in anthologies and in the haiku journals Seashores and Frogpond. In 2018, he was asked to help translate a collection of senryu poems written by Japanese-Americans who were unlawfully imprisoned during World War II; it was published in 2023 under the title They Never Asked (Oregon State University Press).