This and That
Selected Short Poems of Zen Master Ryokan
Translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater
Paperback
ISBN 9781966608158
$22.99
eBook available
March 24, 2026
Zen poems of everyday awakening.
A fresh translation of short poems by the Japanese Zen poet Ryokan that reads well as modern American poetry, accompanied by an introduction and commentaries on the poems from the translators. Most of the existing translations are stiff, or sentimental, or awkward as poems in English. This effort is comparable to Gary Snyder’s Han-Shan poems, or Thomas Merton’s Chuang-Tzu.
One of the greatest poets of the Edo period and certainly one of the most loved, Ryokan was a highly original and eccentric master artist and Zen practitioner. A solitary hermit who begged for food and lived among the poor, often in dire need himself, his offbeat poems are moments of everyday awakening, characterized, as was his personality, by both austerity and playfulness. This translation aims to retain Ryokan’s charm without undue sentiment or saint-making, allowing for his rougher edges to appear.
John (aka Isaac) Slater has lived since 1999 as a Trappist monk at the Abbey of the Genesee in New York, where he’s novice director. He’s published collections of his own poems, a co-translation, The Tangled Braid: Ninety-Nine Poems by Hafiz of Shiraz, and Do Not Judge Anyone: Desert Wisdom for a Polarized World forthcoming from Liturgical Press (spring 2025). He has been drawn to the work and figure of Ryokan for more than thirty years. He lives in Piffard, NY.
Stan Ziobro lives in Charleston, SC. After earning a certificate in Asian studies from Kansai University in Osaka, Japan, he graduated from the University of Rochester in philosophy and Japanese. His graduate degrees are in religious studies from Wake Forest University and The Divinity School at University of Chicago. He’s worked as a professional translator of Japanese since 1998. Translations include those incorporated in James L. Ford’s Jokei and Buddhist Devotion in Early Medieval Japan (Oxford University Press, 2006). He lives in Charleston, SC.
“[T]hese are fine weavings. Strange and new and a bit bereft. The poems convey a hyperconsciousness of the weirdness of things, of leftovers, of impenetrable shapes, one or two of which trigger a memory of an irretrievable time.... I think it is how people see the world when they are dying, as little traces of intelligence woven into substances and tools. Unanalyzable. All surface.” —Fanny Howe
“The quiet in these poems arises out of minutely observed, eloquent details. By building these small containers with such tenderness and skill, John Slater has made our world calmer, funnier and more caring. We’re lucky to have such an eye and mind among us.” —Tim Lilburn, Canadian poet and essayist
