The Anglo-Latin haibun

On school exercises and literary form

The most recent issue of Rattle, which just reached me in Paris, has a focus on the haibun, described by the editors as ‘the combination of haiku with prose (and sometimes other forms of writing), popularized by Bashō in 17th-century Japan’. The majority of the published examples — 22 of them — take the form of a single paragraph of prose followed by a …