The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo: Modernism in Translation.

Heinrich, Amy V.

The term translation in Hosea Hirata's title carries a double meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo includes translations of Nishiwaki's essays on poetic theory and his poems; and the notion of "translation" plays a large part in Hirata's understanding and explications of both the poetics and the poetry. The first translated selection in part 1, "Profanus" from Surrealist Poetics (Chogenjitsushugi shiron, 1929), begins, "To discourse upon poetry is as dangerous as to discourse upon God"; it ends: "It is dangerous to discuss poetry. I have already fallen off the cliff." The next selections, "The Extinction of Poetry" and "Esthetique Foraine," certainly illustrate the dangers and are heart going. The poetry translations themselves, however, of Ambarvalia (1933), No Traveller Returns (Tabibito kaerazu, 1947), and Eterunitasu (1962), make the perilous journey through Nishikawa's literary world deeply rewarding. The discussions in part 2, "Modernism in Translation," in which, among other things, Hirata returns to the dangers posited in "Profanus," in "Modernist Poetry in Japan," "Pure Poetry and Reality," "The Detour of Translation," and "Ambarvalia to Eternity," are substantial guideposts.

Nishiwaki plays with texts of European and Japanese literature, with language and translation, and with his readers, such as presenting in Ambarvalia translations from European languages of both his own and others' poetry as his own Japanese poems; or in particular nodes of significance, as in "The Sun" from Ambarvalia: "The countryside of Karumojin produces marble./Once I spent a summer there./There are no skylarks and no snakes come out./Only the sun comes up from bushes of blue damson/and goes down into bushes of damson./The boy laughed as he seized a dolphin in a brook." In Hirata's discussion of the poem he helps the reader see how Nishiwaki created "an exemplary space of literature that is formed by the strata of various fictionalizing strategies." It is particularly satisfying to see how the orthography of the Japanese written language was manipulated for poetic ends in new and startling ways.

The development of Hirata's understanding of Nishiwaki's poetics and poetry draws successfully on readings of European postmodernist thinkers, and concludes: "What a poem attempts to convey is not the 'meaning' of the origin of the poem, but the 'nonmeaning' of the origin, that is, the origin itself before the movement of supplements begins to operate." Still, even as it tries to move toward its own extinction, "the poem," as Hirata writes earlier, "seduces and calls forth my writing's coming-into-being. It prompts my writing to approach it, to approximate it, to appropriate it." In Hirata's translations the poems do this; his discussions as well elicit responses. And in spite of Nishiwaki's rejection of symbols and "meaning," I at least am still drawn to find meaning in the reappearances in these poems of dolphins and gemstones, of acorns and desolation.

Amy V. Heinrich Columbia University