Matsuo Bashō

Matsuo Bashō is widely considered the greatest haiku poet who ever lived. His travel journals rank among the finest in any language. He transformed a parlor game into high art, elevated seventeen syllables into something that could hold the weight of an entire landscape. Before all of that, he spent four years as a clerk in the Edo waterworks department.

He was, essentially, a bureaucrat who managed pipes.

Then he quit, moved into a hut by the river, and a student planted a banana tree outside. Bashō admired the tree specifically because it was useless. It bore no edible fruit. Its leaves shredded in the wind. He loved it so much he named himself after it. From that point forward, the greatest poet in Japanese history introduced himself as "Matsuo the Banana."

In 1686, he wrote a poem about a frog jumping into a pond. Seventeen syllables. It became the most famous poem in the language. What made it revolutionary was one small defiance: every poet before him had written about frogs croaking. Bashō wrote about the splash. You do not spend four years managing water infrastructure without developing strong opinions about what water sounds like.

That poem has been translated into English at least 135 times. There is an entire book, One Hundred Frogs, devoted solely to translations of this single poem. Sonnets. Limericks. Experiments in the style of e.e. cummings.

Seventeen syllables about a frog hitting water. The waterworks clerk got the sound right.