AustLit

Michael Ackland (2002) comments: 'Stewart completed three books of haiku. The first, A Net of Fireflies, became his financial mainstay, thanks largely to American sales, the book having been reprinted twenty-five times by 1986, after which it was republished in a gift-book format.' ('Harold Stewart December 14, 1916-August 7, 1995', Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 260: Australian Writers, 1915-1950 (2002)). Michael Heyward (220) says it sold over 50,000 copies. (The Ern Malley Affair (1993)).

Greg McLaren comments: 'In his two collections of translation of haiku, A Chime of Windbells and A Net of Fireflies, Stewart argues the case that two lines of rhyming iambic pentameter, the "heroic couplet", is the ideal medium for translating haiku from Japanese to English. This remains an idiosyncratic view, in part because, as I have suggested, there is a general consensus about the significance of the relationship between form and content of the haiku in Japanese. The formal replication of that relationship in other languages can differ, but rarely to the extent seen in Stewart's work. Additionally, most haiku writer-translators demonstrate some flexibility in these areas, but Stewart's reactionary insistence that his own method was the method of translation provides a marked exception to contributions to this discussion.' ('Some presence inevitably shows through': Harold Stewart's haiku versions', Australian Literary Studies 22.4 (October 2006): 460-471).