“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premises too long.”
It has been far too easy to forget how much one’s perception of the vast English-speaking world, and relative comfort within one’s own seemingly secure and stable knowledge of it, is based on linguistic translation. Our collective sense of what Western culture (aka our inculcated reality construct) is about can loosely be said to be predicated on certain essential texts: The Holy Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and—let us not forget them—a corpus of Greek plays about murder, rape, incest, and other atrocities perpetrated by gods and persons of royal lineage. The first written-down Bibles were in Hebrew. Then as Greek became a common language, spoken by Jews in Egypt, the Septuagint was created, the Greek version of the New Testament, reigning for 600 years as the definitive biblical text, providing the core Christian liturgy and theology of the first three centuries AD. If we ventured to say we owe the basis for American democracy to the Greeks, essentially, we might well be said to have expressed our gratitude in English translation. For there is always something, someone, somewhere preceding us—not only in time, but in space.
Language is the seed that accompanies the constant diasporic movement of humans across the globe, in the same way that pathogens introduce disease to new populations without immunity. That analogy implies no judgement, simply the inevitability of language’s irresistible throb, its genius for infiltration. Languages bleed into one another, creating new dialects, expressing the concepts underlying startling and fertile new syncretistic cultural expressions—poetry not least among them. No political policy, no matter how starkly repressive, has ever been able to stop in a permanent way this dynamic movement, nor will ever succeed in doing so. We may often not be free, in political and economic senses, but censors notwithstanding, our language at its roots is free to continue its inexorable and subversive mutations. You the censor may hamper my individual saying, indeed may punish it, but the linguistic root of my saying will survive, whether or not shorn of its foliage and stem, as it is an eternal phenomenon living in history, not limited to any individual or even collective instance of its expression.
My former dissertation advisor, the genial and ingenious John Felstiner, used to say, with exquisite modesty, that “the translator operates under the aegis of the B+.” That is the most we can ever hope for, by virtue of not being the original sayer. Yet when one looks in a sustained manner at what literary translation has achieved, our shy tribe might let loose a spontaneous cry of pride. In no other way could so many literati and general readers have been exposed to the canon of the classics of world literature. Without Arthur Waley’s astounding 1925-1933 translation of the 1216-page The Tale of Genji, 源氏物語, Genji monogatari, written by lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, first translated into modern Japanese by Yosano Akiko, most of us would simply not have access to this robust tale of a disenfranchised emperor’s son. We would stare at the incomprehensible runes on each page and utter, inaccurately, and without irony, the phrase “It’s Greek to me.” Further, the original manuscript is lost, leaving only transcriptions and translations as evidence of its existence. As Walter Benjamin taught us, translation is a work’s afterlife.
Perhaps translators are modest because we are conscious that literature exists within an inherent economy of loss. We still smell the ashes of the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, accidentally incinerated by Julius Caesar in 48 BC during a civil war. Digital technology and the cloud do not comfort us because we know that they, contingent modalities safeguarding essential artistic expressions, are at bottom just as unreliable. “The Cloud,” like actual clouds, can drift away in wisps or rain upon the just and the unjust until it vanishes into the parched earth. Yet literary translation persists, for two reasons: 1) the world needs it in order to fully understand itself as a world 2) literature is par excellence a form of (self) translation, in both strict and loose senses. As George Steiner posits in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation:
translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.
In contemporary American poetry (both territorially and as a diaspora), ancient Greek literature, while important in individual cases, is no longer in the ascendant as the key communal point of reference. Even the most erudite and historically oriented contemporary poets draw succor and inspiration from a wide variety of sources, with no particular or predictable scale of prestige or usefulness. One might have read Euripides—if so, probably in translation—or he might not have. In the essays I have been writing, much of the initial thrust has been on tracing lyric from its source in the Greek poet Sappho through its many permutations, suggesting that the usefulness of her inspiration, and the first premise of lyric— “meant to be sung” —has not been outlived, even by the most paradigm-shattering attempts to reinvent this core truth. No matter the poet or the movement in North American poetry, or in English as a common language of diaspora, we have not entirely shed that heritage. It always manifests, always re-enters the conversation in some way.
At the same, it matters greatly to understand that for a substantial number of poets—whether through sheer range of intellectual interests, or because they may in some way associate their verse with being “of the diaspora”—it is only accurate and just to establish that one’s sources are manifold and that, ultimately, “the tradition” is ever mutable, even in retrospection. When we look at a seismic movement such as modernism (the temblor-like repercussions of which we, as poets, are still living out), it is vital to also look at sources that do not have Sappho and her poetic progeny as primary artistic lineage.
In preparing to consider the impeccable (and for our purposes, aptly named) debut collection of the Japanese (and rather American) poet Yuki Tanaka, Chronicle of Drifting, one is wise to look at Sappho’s tribe, while also honoring his heterogeneous influences, both Western and non-Western. To be sure, in an interview with New England Review, Tanaka immediately positions himself in the tradition of the flaneur: Charles Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, and Frank O’Hara. And certainly I have no idea whether Tanaka ever cracked the spine of The Tale of Genji, which in any case is not a poem.
And yet—not inconsequential in the slightest—it so happens that Tanaka, a professor in Tokyo, has great experience in translating modernist poetry from Japanese into English. You are not familiar with modernist Japanese poetry, you say? Nor was I. Not to fear, for Tanaka and fellow poet Mary-Jo Bang together spent eight years translating poems by a (not yet sufficiently) celebrated poet and artist, Shuzo Takiguchi, offering a remedy for our corporate ignorance of it, resulting in the volume A Kiss for the Absolute.
Andrew Houwen makes the argument that modernist Japanese poetry has long been overlooked and written off as being simply derivative of European models to the extent it does not adhere to what are considered “authentic” Japanese poetic forms, such as haiku and waka. He says that “Japanese responses to movements such as Imagism and surrealism” were falsely gauged to be “merely a translation of Western texts.” 20th century painter and poet Kitasono Katue, whose visual works are displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is held out as an exemplar of the relative self-sufficiency of Japanese modernist painting and poetry—or perhaps better said, evidence that Japan’s modernism was engaged in an equal give-and-take with European modernism.
Peter Kalliney captures the spirit of the (elastic) times more accurately with what he denominates “the aesthetics of motion” in his concept of descriptive cosmopolitanism, arguing for an expansion of our understanding of modernism on a global scale, via a comparative approach that would “alter our perceptions of the cultural center, whatever that might be, as well as the cultural margins, wherever those might be.”
So it is that Shuzo Takiguchi can draw both from the ancient stream of Japanese classical poetry, featuring a resonant and reverberant simplicity of image (what we probably first think of when we think of Japanese poetry) yet write a series of zesty homages to French surrealist painters. His words are almost invariably simple yet contain elusive and suggestive aspects, as is also the case in the 10th century poetry of Izumi Shikibu.
I cannot say
which is which:
the glowing
plum blossom is
the spring night’s moon.
Today, we would call the above an ancient trompe l’oeil, as in René Magritte’s famous Ceci ne’est pas une pipe. One art dealer has described Magritte’s method as “the use of ordinary objects in an unusual context, creating a sense of mystery and encouraging the viewer to question their perception of reality.” Here is a translation of “René Magritte” by Shuzo Takiguchi, translated by Tanaka and Mary Jo Bang.
On the shredded shore
a silk hat burns
like a mirror trick,
like a human echo
burns a silk hat endlessly.
The hat burns on and on, yet improbably is not consumed. Both a mirror trick and an echo, it reflects back what the viewer or mirror projects upon it, making the illusion real, even if not probable.
And here is elusive simplicity, from Katue’s “Monotonous Solid”:
needle
of white cone’s
distance
needle of bread and
water
lead moon
repudiates
red flag
dream’s
butterfly’s
burst
on
top of smashed plates
still voluptuously
fragrant
black firearm
Both poems feature lyric imagery shorn of context. The burning silk hat, like Magritte’s pipe, is a “mirror trick,” a verbal trompe l’oeil. It is aflame with beauty and mystery, as it refuses to burn to ashes. Katue offers the wonder of smashed plates, lyrical because they are “voluptuously fragrant.” As so often, there exists an implied whole story, possibly important, yet one inaccessible to us. Or perhaps, like gifted kindergartners given slips of paper with individual words written upon them in crayon, we will mix and match them various times to come up with our own set of stories, undaunted by not having the entire plot handed to us. Katue’s prankish title “Monotonous Solid” seems to suggest as much, daring us not to be so dull as to become enabled by gratuitous explanation.
The work of these two Japanese poet-artists, Katue and Takiguchi, shows that Japanese modernism, seemingly paradoxically, derives its effects simultaneously from classical simple indirection and modernist surrealism. Translators Tanaka and Bang have this to say of the translated volume:
The poems are surprisingly contemporary and often exuberantly erotic in a way that is inimitably Takiguchi’s. While the prose poem form had been introduced into Japanese poetry by the time Takiguchi was writing, as had the playful punning and exploitation of double meanings (kakekotoba), what is distinctive about his poems is that they were inspired by the French Surrealist method of automatic writing. This stream-of-consciousness approach creates digressions and associative leaps that end up revealing a great deal about Takiguchi’s obsessions and preoccupations. His incorporation of Western signifiers becomes a playful element in its own right.
Tanaka himself seems to have been very much in on the game of cultural translation, showing that it works in both directions. For Tanaka, translating a poetic forebear’s work seems to have provided a natural starting point for his own inclinations as a writer, which resulted in Chronicle of Drifting. He and Takiguchi alike are flaneurs, lyrical drifters with a keen sense of the absurd and a ready way of offering surprising images that open up a world of absurdity, sometimes tender, but which can just as likely turn suddenly violent, allowing contemplation of serious themes.
“Death in Parentheses” is one such example. It begins:
He came home with his right leg made a bit shorter
but they didn’t notice. A landmine did it, he said
to himself, and I was the only one who heard him
because I followed him everywhere like a son.
This scene of simile-filial sorrow pulsates absurdly between the speaker’s devotion to the man with the short leg and his observation of the man’s casual cruelty.
When he killed a butterfly, he’d take off the wings first,
then crush it with his fingers and smell it.
In this graphic scene of minuscule mayhem, how distant we are from William Wordsworth’s “To A Butterfly”:
Here rest your wings when they are weary;
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!
Come often to us, fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
In Tanaka’s poem, the man’s mutilation of insects gets reported in the most matter-of-fact manner, without judgement, as if it were a normal everyday occurrence. Likewise the man’s musings, which most people would characterize as delusional, are perhaps the ravings of a person with mental illness. The man wants to build a “huge power plant”; otherwise the two of them might disappear. They trade perspectives, not arguing, more like Beckett characters, each of which holds a private truth irreconcilable with any other. The speaker “points out” many recent deaths, adding randomly that tomatoes are “no longer plump,” and that the branches of maple trees look like veins without fat. Suddenly, the mentioned power plant appears, “prettier than I thought,” and the speaker feels like kissing it before realizing he might burn his lips in the process, after which “I won’t be able to speak to anyone with my charred mouth.” The poem ends with the memory of the “son” seeing this man at some future time, when he is “in bed, old and delirious.” There is an esoteric quality in these verses that contradicts its straightforward-yet-disjointed presentation. It is almost as if the son figure were inhabiting a fever-dream.
“Death in Parentheses” is a characteristic Tanaka poem. Existence remains choppy, a series of jump-cuts and instantaneous digressions, all of them obeying an obscure logic and tending toward a meaning-laden pointlessness. One key difference between existentialist writers and surrealists is that the latter seldom get grim and studiously refuse to take anything, including death, overly seriously. The language employed can be incongruous, but it tends toward simple vocabulary, in itself easy to understand, which is complicated rather by seeming mismatches and logical non-sequiturs. Here, a story is offered, or rather a series of events, but there are many gaps to fill. To begin with, we have no context for these men, what they mean to each other, why one is following the other. The tone is comparatively emotionless, as the speaker simply states facts to us, as if this landscape, and the two characters within it, had motives that are self-evident.
The more one reads Tanaka, the easier it is to see that surrealism, certainly as he practices it, in certain respects is not that far away from the classical Japanese poetry of a millennium ago. It invites us to dwell on clearly asserted, superficially straightforward images, banishing any possible impatience while those images manifest in their suggestive depth. It is not so much indeterminacy as plain old ambiguity. But one need not look only at Western models of interpretation to consider this issue. Michele Marra, in “Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning” draws on post-structuralist philosophy in asserting “the role played in medieval Japan by self-contradictory modes of interpretation that privilege both the fluidity of Becoming and the metaphysical presence of Being.” Further, she states that “the rejection of the dualities of one and many, inner and outer, subject and object, and mind and body has been at the core of Japan’s philosophical tradition since time immemorial.”
These insights are easily illustrated in looking at the last poem Basho wrote before he died (though Basho claimed that, in a sense, all his poems were death poems).
On a journey, ill:
My dream goes wandering
Over withered fields.
Tabi ni yande
Yume wa kareno o
kakemeguru
Here, as in Tanaka’s “Death in Parentheses,” the poet rejects the dualities of inner and outer, subject and object, that Marra speaks of. The dream, generated from “within” him, wanders off on its own, autonomous, as the speaker prepares to die. A state of mind is embodied as if continuing to exist in the physical world—not a ghost, mind you, but what we could call a state of consciousness. With ringing simplicity, that dream takes on an independent existence, reincorporates, the mind becoming a body of its own, one capable of continuing the journey. There is no sense of contradiction conveyed in this matter-of-fact tercet.
Tanaka offers another such journey, five centuries later, in “Homecoming.” A boy leans on a horse, as he looks far ahead, while someone waits.
He thinks, Make our journey last
A little longer.
Soon, the duality of horse and man breaks down, for the horse is insubstantial, metamorphic, yet material, “made of white threads.”
Pull them out,
and the horse would lose its strength
and collapse into a man. The idea
is comforting. He could tell the horse,
who is now a man, he is tired
and cannot go on.
Only in Tanaka’s monistic world could this collapse get perceived as “comforting.” This poem, despite its innocuous tone, represents the same shattered dualism as in Basho’s death poem. A horse is a man, simple as that. The sense of philosophical depth is created without much ado, through plain declarations which at the same time suggest categories of being in flux. Metamorphosis is presented as a simple fact of life, hardly worthy of remark. It is here one can see the close congruencies, improbable as it seems, between the ancient tradition of Japanese poetry and the concerns of Tanaka the French-surrealist-inspired modernist.
In order to arrive at such a conclusion, it is helpful to think of modernism globally, a capacious set of aesthetic concepts that play out differently in different arenas, keying off the lengthy traditions of disparate cultures and societies that do not necessarily agree with one another entirely about what poetry is, rather each staging its own fusion with a lyric tradition, one that might not lead back to Sappho and the Romantics. Yet, in the end, they offer the possibility, not of effacing those traditions but, yes, coming to similar conclusions without positing universality that overrides one’s own immediate domain.
Tanaka casually goes his own way. He took his MFA at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers in Austin and a Ph.D. at the University of Washington. He is an Americanist in spirit and training. He mentions W.S. Merwin and many other American poets among his influences and favorite reads. He writes beautiful couplets compatible with the work of many a lyric poet in the English tradition, as in “Exhibition of Desire.”
Would you like a slice of pear or a slice
of amethyst? Both taste of nightmare and we,
mice in silk kimonos, rustling across
a fragile bridge. Nearly identical, sick
of the vast, Midwestern sky, quiet as dry
starfish.
The “mice in silk kimonos,” despite its gesture toward one of those consecrated icons of Japanese identity, seems equally the kind of thing that James Wright or James Tate would have written, in reflecting on the essential strangeness of the “normal” Midwest and how its promised yet elusive wholesomeness leaves one exhausted because, in the end, it leaves the “taste of nightmare” in one’s mouth. Wright’s famous poem ending “I have wasted my life” comes to mind upon reading Tanaka’s “Discourse on Vanishing,” which begins thus:
I will start with modern inventions: growth,
abundance, which brought out a world
filled with the dying. Nothing happens.
Often, Tanaka sounds this quietly plaintive note of an aggrieved almost whisper regarding the inevitable disillusion of the American (or Japanese?) dream, to be suffered through with a certain resigned stoicism. And in Wright’s famous above-mentioned poem with its long-winded title, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” there is, as it happens, a butterfly, right in the poem’s opening!
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
This butterfly is not the harbinger of happy thoughts: It is the messenger leading to the conclusion “I have wasted my life.” Let us not forget as well that Wright, like Tanaka, also translated from other languages, poems of alienation such as “Eternidades” by Juan Ramón Jiménez.
The dawn brings with it
that sadness of arriving, by train,
at a station that is not one’s own.
Like Tanaka, he tended to choose poets who suited his own temperament and emotional register. In doing so, he, like other poet-translators, contributed to enriching and altering the history of Western lyric. One of the beautiful things about modernism and postmodernism is that they began to offer us, for aesthetic purposes, the possibility of viewing literary history synchronously, as a flattened plane across which are spread all the literary histories of the world, atemporal or existing simultaneously. Perhaps this is what Ezra Pound (another famous, albeit loose, translator) meant when he referred to his Cantos, and to epic form in general, as “a poem containing history.”
It is doubtful that the hyper-erudite Pound was suggesting reenactments of famous battles or doing extensive historical research on the Italian patronage system to understand its political and economic impact. He used what facts he needed regarding the House of Malatesta and discarded the rest. The seeds of what is now referred to as “transcultural literary history” had already been sown in him a century ago. This reality is what has allowed more poets such as Tanaka to emerge, self-conscious flaneurs who easily wander the literary world, sampling both its ease and its malaise, in order to write a “chronicle of drifting,” essentially stateless, less invested in a depth model of space and time and history writ large, more invested in the freedom simultaneity has to offer.
Even the idea of “influence” can be limiting, given how each “era” labors under the ultimately delusional restriction of hoping to surpass the previous one in insight and achievement. As we well know, individual reputations wax and wane, while specific eras come in and out of vogue. For this reason, fierce lyricists give supposedly separate eras equivalence, borrowing freely from myriad sources, out of sync, in and out of time, even if those respective eras’ premises conflict. It is not in the least surprising that 10th century Izumi Shikibu, with whom I began this essay, and James Wright—like the speakers of some of Tanaka’s poems—can casually occupy together an equivalent space and time. This concept offers the antidote to Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.”
In a sense, most of Tanaka’s “characters” are flaneurs like him, protean and restless alter egos. The above-quoted “Discourse on Vanishing” to be sure adds to the chronicle of woe, with multiple instances of humans and natural phenomena dying: “fleeting desire, to last longer”; “shadowed by clouds that pass away”; “broken ghost”; “stasis, deadlock”; “no birdsong”; “waves which threaten to encrust a diver”; “a boy collapses over the basin.” And more flatly, “’He is dead.’ ‘He is dead. Prospects seem grim. Yet the speaker of this poem is a wanderer-observer, not getting overly wrapped up in scenarios—rather, waiting to see how things evolve. Perhaps these are not his people, or his scene of nature. He is curious but not elegiac or overly emotional, nor does he exercise excessive restraint. Rather, what is, is, and what will be, will be.
And sure enough, halfway through this five-part poem, things begin to change. In the midst of the reckoning appears this declaration:
Now, life can swerve, leaving the afterimage
of its absence; an old wine bottle behind it,
the arm of a woman, the green sky flickering.
There is a dream, as in Basho. But it is not Wright’s reverie of a wasted life. The poem does not end with the pessimism of W.S. Merwin’s “A Last Look”:
they will live in a world without a leaf
where the rain is misfortune
No, rather we receive a mixed report, as in many of the poems in Tanaka’s Chronicle of Drifting, of continuous hope among a continuous cycle of diminishment, destruction, and posthumous karmic rebirth.
This is an end in view, beginning
over and over. People spring to life,
watching the breath of a wounded animal.
A faint chirping from somewhere—
unseen, forgotten cages.
Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premises too long. Because, after all, perhaps he has not yet seen it all. He is a witness, arriving at the fortuitous hour of revelation, departing before attachments that lead to suffering can form. This discreet version of the “I” as a drifting, neutral observer in the war zone that is life—not Tanaka’s only attitude, but a prevalent one—offers a valuable refinement of the poetic speaker, less self-centered, at most a participant-observer. Of his many gifts in this sterling debut collection, Tanaka’s discreet and subtle management of tone sits uppermost. In offering it consistently, he invites us, too, whether casual reader or professional poet, to commit to our own drifting, which just might, if carefully husbanded, lead to our own chronicle.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
