The March 11, 2011 earthquake that shook northeastern Japan also reverberated throughout Japanese society, forcing it to reconsider many of things things that it had taken for granted—its usage of energy, its relationship to the natural environment, its relationship with the government, and its modes of organizing at the grass-roots level.  Almost immediately, writers took action.  Many figures known for their involvement in social issues, writers such as Ōe Kenzaburō, Tsushima Yūko, and Ishimure Michiko, began respond and publish statements to the press, helping to use their influence to help shape reconstruction efforts and talk about new directions for the Japanese nation.  

Perhaps the segment of the Japanese literary world where the seismic forces of 3/11 were felt most strongly, however, was the poetic world.  Many Japanese newspapers include regular columns that include free verse (shi), tanka, or haiku poems, but in just the few days after 3/11, poetry began to emerge from those small columns and take a more prominent place in the news, eventually finding its way into a central position in the discourse that had started unfolding across the nation. Poetry exploded into the mainstream, serving as one of the ways that the nation thought about and processed its own complicated feelings about the disasters. 

Because I was in Japan at the time and experienced the quakes, numerous aftershocks, and anxiety personally, I have been unable to forget it.  After a few weeks of uncertainty and great worry, everything I had come to Japan to do was cancelled, and so I cut my stay short and returned to the United States ahead of schedule.   As one way of working through the experience and my complicated feelings about returning to America, I began translating a number of poems about the quake and the resulting disasters, mostly poems written by poets whom I admire.  Most of those translations have been published in various journals, mostly online. 

Here is a collection of links to some of those translations.  Some appear with the original Japanese.  Most of the poems first appeared in the May 2011 special issue of Handbook of Contemporary Poetry 『現代詩手帖』dedicated to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown.  Some were also published in a special section in the daily newspaper Asahi shinbun published in commemoration of the first anniversary of the quake.  Others were published in various magazines or newspapers, but still, these poems are only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.  There are thousands upon thousands more poems out there.

TANIKAWA Shuntarō: “Words”　
谷川俊太郎「ことば」

WAGŌ Ryōichi: Pebbles of Poetry (Part I)
和合亮一『詩の礫』抄

TAKAHASHI Mutsuo: “These Things Here and Now”
高橋睦郎「いまここにこれらのことを」

YOSHIMASU Gōzō: “at the side (côtés) of poetry”
吉増剛造「詩のcôtésに」

ITŌ Hiromi: “Cooking, Writing Poetry”
伊藤比呂美「料理する、詩を書く」

ARAI Takako: “Half a Pair of Shoes” and “Galapagos”
新井高子「片方の靴」と「ガラパゴス」

HIRATA Toshiko: “Do Not Tremble” and “Please”
平田俊子「ゆれるな」と「どうか」

TANAKA Yōsuke: “Screaming Potato Field”
田中庸介「叫ぶ芋畑」

OHSAKI Sayaka: “Noisy Animal”
大崎紗香「うるさい動物」

Jeffrey ANGLES: “Return After Earthquake”
ジェフリー・アングルス「地震後の帰国」

The new volume (number of 11) of Mantis, the journal of poetry and translation published at Stanford, contains my translation of a series of poems by Yoko Tawada 多和田葉子 done for Worlds 2012, a writer’s conference that Tawada-san and I attended last year in Norwich, England. 

These poems were inspired by the shape of kanji and so the visual quality of the language is as important as the sound and meaning. Below is a picture, taken by Martin Figura last year in Norwich.  I am reading reading the translation, while at the side, just out of the frame of the picture, Tawada is holding up a print-out of the kanji that inspired that particular poem.

This photo is particularly amusing to me because the character “rice” (米) also is used as an abbreviation for “America” or “American.”  It rather looks as if Tawada-san is holding up a sign announcing my nationality.

Click here for information on how to order a copy of Mantis.

I just read Peter Minter’s essay about Japan, poetry, translation, and the productive power of forgetting in Southern Review.  From it comes this haunting passage.  Check out the entire essay by clicking here.

Against the sheer existential horror of all we forget, each poem in a life becomes a fugitive, delicately precise machine for remembering an event and its organic dislocations. A poem is like an ark for a moment or series of moments, a small vessel amidst a sea of epic or reflexive forgetfulness that we glide off headlong toward our friends and readers or indeed future selves. Perhaps that is what our species has been doing for thousands of years, making poems to send information forward and outward so others can see and remember. Madeleines for the survivors. Holographs of the forgotten. Genealogies of invisibility.

Since its founding decades ago, Poetry Kanto has been instrumental in introducing many Japanese poets to the English-speaking world.  Recently, the editors of Poetry Kanto placed all of its annual issues since 2005 online.  This means that a small treasure trove of Japanese poetry is suddenly accessible to anyone with a computer.  

I have published a number of poems in Poetry Kanto over the years, including translations of Tada Chimako 多田智満子 (2007), Itō Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 (2012 and 2011), Arai Takako 新井高子 (2012), Minashita Kiriu 水無田気流 (2007),and my own poetry (2011).  Click the links above to go directly to the pages for each of these writers.

対談の日本語の原文はこちらにあります。

I recently stumbled upon this dialogue between the poet Takahashi Mutsuo 高橋睦郎 and the designer Hara Ken’ya 原研哉, in which they explore a number of topics having to do with art, language, and the power of words.  One of the several things that struck me in this dialogue, were Takahashi’s comments on his attempts to move away from “individuality.”  Considering that these come from one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Japanese letters (and an author on whom I’ve done a lot of critical work), these comments struck me as somewhat surprising.

I have never believed in the concept of “individuality” at all…Imagine that there is an apple and a peach, and that I am to paint a picture of them. At this time, my individuality is not necessary. What is necessary is the individuality of the peach and the apple. I should express and return that individuality as accurately as possible. I should return a peach and an apple. At that time, I require only the individuality of the peach and the apple. Perhaps my own individuality can be of use in accomplishing this, however revealing my own individuality is not the ultimate goal.

Speaking from my perspective, the more I express my own individuality, the deeper I fall into a hell from which I may not be able to rescue myself. I think that the modern hell is a hell created when everyone asserts themselves all the time.

So what is the purpose of expression? In the end, it is to redeem oneself from the hell of one’s own individuality through those subjects a person wants to express.

Whereas most people tend to think of language as a tool to assert individuality, Takahashi suggests that instead, it ought to more properly represent a tool to overcome individuality, to allow the outside world to travel through the self.  In his other work, he has suggested that the image of a unified self is always predicated on a sort of lack or absence—a knowledge that the self is not total but, rather, cut off from the outside world through the prison of the body.  Perhaps language is not a tool for conveying individuality after all, but merely a means to allow the outside world to flow through us and, in the process, to assuage the pain of being formulated through absence.

高橋睦郎『十二の遠景』英訳の表紙
ミネソタ大学出版部

University of Minnesota Press just published my translation of Twelve Views from the Distance, the memoirs of TAKAHASHI Mutsuo, originally published in Japan in 1970.  The book is a beautiful object: the cover is embossed, and the design shows a small boat floating on a distant sea.  In many ways, this captures the right mood for this memoir, in which one of Japan’s most important poets looks across the distance of the years and remembers his poverty-stricken youth in Kyushu during World War II.

On the back of the book are two blurbs.  The first is by Edmund White, the great American known for his bold, homoerotic memoirs.  (I was thrilled that White, whom I read with such interest during my own adolescence and coming out, agreed to write the blurb for my translation.)

Twelve Views from the Distance is a wrenching memoir about growing up in southern Japan during the war and just afterward in an extremely poor family of day laborers.  Utterly dependent on his hard-bitten grandmother and his often absent mother, Mutsuo Takahashi withdraws into himself and lives in his very rich imagination.  That he was destined to become Japan’s leading gay poet may or may not be obvious from these painful but lyrical memories.

The other is from MISHIMA Yukio, who wrote the following in 1970, just a few months before his dramatic suicide. 

Mutsuo Takahashi has managed to achieve firm prose that, while unmistakably the work of a poet, shines with a black luster much like a set of drawers crafted by a master of old. This book is a magnificent collection of sensations and of memories, much like the toys we might find in a dark closet. The part toward the end in which the theme of his ‘search for a father’ crystallizes in a copy of an erotic book radiates a certain tragic beauty.

My translation of this book was supported through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN Translation Fund.  Thank you for believing in this project. 

Bob Hicok, Poetry, February 2010
Reposting inspired by the Sandy Hook shootings

The always fantastic online literary journal Guernica  published my translations of the poem “at the side (côtés) of poetry” by the avant-garde Japanese poet YOSHIMASU Gōzō 吉増剛造. This poem is his response to a request byAsahi shinbun for a work about life in the post 3/11 world, and it appeared in an online collection of poets by major contemporary poets, as well as in the leading Japanese poetry journal Handbook of Contemporary Poetry 『現代詩手帖』.  This translation will also appear in a collection of Gōzō’s work currently being edited by Forrest Gander. 

Translating Gōzō’s work is not easy, considering how often it employs word play, sound associations, play across multiple languages, and even random-seeming personal asides; however, the results, I think contain many of the same playfully messy, challenging, and brilliant turns of the original.  Check it out by clicking here.

私の吉増剛造の英訳は『Guernica』というネット上の文学誌に載りました。アメリカの詩人、フォレスト・ガンダーは現在、剛造の英訳詩集を編集しているところなので、私に翻訳を一編依頼しました。これはその結果です。原文は『朝日新聞』の3・11の特集にも、『現代詩手帖』にも載った「詩の傍（côtés）で」です。フランス語も韓国語が交わる剛造の作品は決して英訳しやすくないが、結果は前衛的でポストモダンで、かなり面白いではないかと思います。

Jack Gilbert: “Trying to Have Something Left Over”
From Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Thanks to Matt Bell for posting this on his blog.

The new October 2010 issue of Gendaishi techō 現代詩手帖 [Handbook of Contemporary Poetry] is a special issue dedicated to the translation of poetry, and it contains a number of articles about translation, roundtable discussions, original works of poetry, and some translations themselves. 

Among them, is my own poem called 「同居人」 (The Co-habitant) in which I use the image of a stalker outside a house, rather like one might see in a horror/suspense film, as a metaphor for the work of a translator.  Also in the same issue is a transcript of a talk that I did last year in Tokyo with the talented poet Tanaka Yōsuke 田中庸介 and the haikuist and translator Miyashita Emiko 宮下惠美子.

田中恭吉・画、萩原朔太郎著『月に吠える』感情詩社、大正6年
TANAKA Kyōkichi illustration for HAGIWARA Sakutarō’s groundbreaking, first book of poetry Howling at the Moon, published in 1917.  Hagiwara is often considered the “father of modern Japanese poetry.”

ウォルト・ホイットマンの手書きの原稿
Walt Whitman, Original manuscript for the “Calamus” poems 

The “Calamus” poems, first published in the third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860),  describe Whitman’s longing for the companionship and love of men. By treating the subject of love between men so boldly, these poems became some of the most infamous pieces of poetry in mid-19th century America.  Not only was the book banned in Boston and other places, it resulted in Whitman losing his job and suffering at the hands of critics.  Now, however, these poems are an essential part of American poetic history, and Whitman occupies a rightful place as one of the great visionaries of American letters.  Happy Banned Books week, Whitman!

この詩は『草の葉』第三版（一八六〇年）に収録されたが、男性同士の性愛を描写しているため、批評家に「猥褻」と思われて、ボストンで発禁本になった。ホイットマンは仕事を失って、多くの人に批判されたが、現在『草の葉』は「アメリカ自由詩の出発点」として永遠に歴史に残る。

For more photographs of the manuscript, click here.

Poetry Reading in Fifteen Languages:  A Symphony for the Senses
Portage District Library (Portage, MI)
Sunday, September 30, 2:00-4:00 PM

As a celebration of this community’s diversity, the Portage District Library and the Department of World Languages and Literatures of Western Michigan University are collaborating on a poetry reading in fifteen languages.  We are bringing together area residents from different areas of the world, asking them to select a favorite poem or read a poem of their own in their language.  We encourage the audience to sit back and let the rhythms, movement and intonations flow over them and evoke personal feelings and meanings.  We will distribute translations into English as well. No registration required.  Free. Reception with foods from around the world will follow.

Contacts:
Marsha Meyer, Portage District Library: MMeyer@portagelibrary.info
Cynthia Running-Johnson, Department of World Languages and Literatures, WMU: c.running-johnson@wmich.edu