February 2012
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TAKAHASHI Mutsuo 高橋睦郎 reading "As for this moment"... →
The Asahi Shinbun online is posting a series of poems about the earthquake written by some of Japan’s most important contemporary poets in commemoration of the first anniversary of the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster. The poems come with a film of the poet reading his or her work.
Just now, I watched Takahashi Mutsuo’s contribution to the series, a stunning...
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January 2012
8 posts
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Nominations Solicited for the 2012 ALTA National...
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) invites publishers to nominate translations published in 2011 for consideration for ALTA’s National Translation Award. The translator selected for this award will receive a cash prize of $5,000.
To be eligible for the 2012 National Translation Award, the translation must be:
by an American citizen or U. S. resident
from any language into...
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December 2011
17 posts
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“When young Americans today say that sexuality “just doesn’t matter,” it is often...”
– Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, in If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (via fiveoclockbot)
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“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on...”
– Article 11, The Barbary Treaties 1786-1816 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796
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World Literature, Fluency, and Translation
In a recent blog entry in the New York Review of Books website, Tim Parks, a translator of Italian, wrote an incisive article called “Translating in the Dark” about some of the many problems and issues involved with translation. I was struck by some of his statements about the humanist desire to make all literature, from everywhere in the world accessible.
So why is it...
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NPR review of new MITSUSE Ryū 光瀬龍 translation →
NPR recently ran this review of the new translation of the 1967 novel MITSUSE Ryū’s 光瀬龍 Ten Billion Days and Hundred Billion Nights 『百億の昼と千億の夜』, translated by Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander. This wild science fiction novel covers the entire history of the universe, from Big Bang all the way to the universe’s death through entropy. How’s that for a big scale novel?! ...
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ITŌ Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 reading "Coyote" 「コヨーテ」 →
Poetry International posted a video of the always wonderful poet ITŌ Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 reading her poem “Coyote” 「コヨーテ」, from her 1987 book On Territory 1 『テリトリー論１』 (Shichōsha, 1987). In this often anthologized poem, Itō talks about her family history, the belief in magic in their home, and the folkloric, almost shamanistic beliefs that the older generations of her family espoused. At the...
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WatchGay rights are human rights!
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Human Rights Day speech in Geneva left me with tears in my eyes. Never have I heard such a strong official statement from the U.S. government about this issue. I cannot help but feel like a new day is dawning on this critical struggle for dignity, a fight against ignorance, intolerance (often in the name of religion), and...
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The Internationality of Poetry and Translation →
A recent discussion on the ALTA Talk e-mail list about the translatability of poetry led me to a well-written, provocative article by Art Beck in the newest e-issue of Rattle Poetry. In particular, I was struck by this passage.
In June, [Rainer Maria] Rilke sent her [Marina Tsvetaeva] a copy of his just released Vergers, a volume of poems he’d written in French. He vaguely wondered whether he...
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November 2011
14 posts
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PDFs of thousands of Japanese books available free...
Voyager Japan releases 4,000 Japanese eBooks on Internet Archive
Voyager Japan, Inc. in Tokyo, Japan, in conjunction with the Internet Archive in San Francisco, California, has released 4,000 Japanese ebooks in PDF format from Japan’s public domain book archive, Aozora Bunko. Aozora Bunko, or “Blue Sky Library,” advocates for the increased availability of free Japanese literature online and is...
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From the Bible to the Latest Swedish Thriller:... →
The 400th anniversary celebrations for the King James Bible and the constant presence of Stieg Larsson in English bestseller lists have contributed to a new appreciation of the art of the good translation
Robert McCrum wrote this article for the UK newspaper The Guardian. Click here for the full article. Some highlights are below.
Lately in the US the appetite for “foreign...
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“We just find ourselves here. With our individual birth we just “wake-up” and...”
– The Mystery I Am Thankful For, by Adam Frank (via fiveoclockbot)
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"American Readers' Translation Privation" →
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article called “American Reader’s Translation Privation” by Carlin Romano this week about the sorry state of translation in America. Click here for the entire article, but I have taken a few telling snips and pasted them below.
Complaints about the rarity with which American publishers pay attention to foreign books date back...
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"Japanese Language and Literature Capture... →
Western Michigan University just published this little article about me, including in it several photographs of me as a fifteen-year old in Japan in 1987.
Some of the other photos show me with the prominent poets ITŌ Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 and TAKAHASHI Mutsuo 高橋睦郎. Click here for the article and more embarrassing photos.
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David Bellos on translation →
David Bellos, the author of the new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, did an interesting interview with NPR recently. Below are some highlights, but click here to go the NPR webpage and to hear the entire interview.
Interview Highlights
On why translation is integral to relating to others
“We translate all the time. If we refuse to...
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Gordon Massman review of "Killing Kanoko: Selected... →
The poet Gordon Massman just wrote this ebulliently enthusiastic review of my translation Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō (Action Books, 2009).
Sometimes a moment—unexpected–hits you between the eyes, like a 22-caliber stinger hollow-point fired close range and you just shock alive, you’d been dead but didn’t know; thin blood trickles from a narrow hole and you shock alive like...
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Poetry Kanto No. 27 →
This year’s issue, number 27, of the always awesome journal POETRY KANTO is now available. (This issue contains several of my own poems and translations.) If you wish to receive a free copy, while copies last, just notify Alan Botsford by e-mail < alan@kanto-gakuin.ac.jp > and include your name and mailing address.
The offer applies to anyone interested in reading this...
Robinson Jeffers: "Shine, Perishing Republic" →
Shine, Perishing Republic
By Robinson Jeffers
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and...
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ANCIENTS: Issue # Japan (20th-21st Century... →
Poet Brandon Shimoda has just compiled this second issue of Ancients, an e-anthology that contains links to lots of previously published poems available on the web. This issue is dedicated entirely to contemporary Japanese poetry in English translation, and contains of links to super cool poems, videos, and concrete poetry.
records-ancients-matters:
ANCIENTS Issue # JAPAN is composed...
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"My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me"... →
The exciting book My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer just won a 2011 World Fantasy Award for best anthology. This collection contains lots of creative and imaginative re-tellings on traditional fairy tales. Among them is my translation of ITŌ Hiromi’s 伊藤比呂美 “I Am Anjuhimeko” 「わたしはあんじゅひめ子である」, a radical feminist...
October 2011
12 posts
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Discovery of Mongol Ship in Sea Near Nagasaki →
Marine archeologists say that the ancient wreckage of a ship discovered in the seabed off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, belongs to the ancient “lost fleet” of ships belonging to China’s 13th century Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. Click here for more information.
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Jeffrey ANGLES "Writing the Love of Boys" →
A big section from the introduction of my book Writing the Love of Boys, about the ways that a key group of early twentieth-century Japanese authors helped re-invent the language used in Japan to talk about love between men, is on Google Books.
The beautiful cover image is a painting called “Portrait of Two Boys” 二人少年図 painted in 1914 by the painter and poet MURAYAMA Kaita 村山槐多, one...
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Haruki Murakami: How a Japanese writer conquered... →
BBC News writes, “At midnight in London, and the same time next week in America, bookshops will open their doors to sell Haruki Murakami’s latest novel to eager fans. This is not Harry Potter, it’s a 1,600-page translation from Japanese. So why the excitement?” Click here to find out.