The Poems of Nakahara Chuya.

Heinrich, Amy V.

Nakahara Chuya (1907-37), who "loathed politics and society" and"never had a job in his fife," seems to have spent most of his short, sad life writing poetry about feeling sorry for himself. This can, of course, be the source of good poems, such as "The Voice of Life," which opens with the following stanza: "I am already fed up with Bach and Mozart, / and completely fed up with that happy, easy-going jazz. / I am living like an iron bridge under a cloudy sky after rain. / I am pressed by things forever desolate." "Cold Night" creates a sense of the heaviness of the unsubstantial.

In the winter night

my heart is grieving,

grieving without reason . . .

my heart is rusty, purple.

Behind the solid door,

old days' abstraction.

On the hilltop,

cotton seeds burst open.

Here the firewood smoulders,

the smoke, as if it

knows itself, ascends.

Without being invited,

without wanting to,

my heart smoulders . . .

But much of the work from Nakahara's two published collections, Goat Songs and Songs of Past Days, as well as a few uncollected poems included in the volume, seems simply self-indulgent.

In their introduction to the poems the translators provide a brief biography of a poet whose work was not widely read or critically acclaimed until well after his death. Their narrative of his life is clearer than their attempts at characterizing Nakahara's poetic voice; in one description "the important thing [about a poem] . . . is the pure registration of the moment and mood," while in another "his work constantly laid stress on meaning." It is easier to find poems in the collection that illustrate the first statement. A moment and mood is captured in "Song of a Summer Day," using visual images, the sensation of strong sunlight, the sound of trains' whistles. The poet's use of repetitions, learned from Western poetry, is frequently quite effective, as in "Tree Shade," which uses the same verse to begin and end the four-stanza poem: "A shrine gate in the light, / elm trees tremble slightly; / a summer noon's green shade / soothes my remorse." When Nakahara looks carefully at something or someone outside himself, he seems to be most successful, as in the following stanza from "Song of die Sheep":

There was a nine-year-old child;

she was a girl-child.

It was as if all the air in the world was hers

and as if that air was something you could lean on.

And on it she leaned her head

when she was talking to me.

Frequently, however, he looks only at himself, and finds himself empty and unfocused: "my mien is indolent, fitful, / susceptible to others, liable to flatter; thus, / despite myself, I do the stupidest things."

The translators' aim was "to introduce Nakahara Chuya to English-speaking audiences as a poet, not to act as an adjunct to school or university Japanese courses." It is not clear why these are seen to be mutually exclusive goals; more is lost by providing few of the accoutrements of scholarly work -- specially romanized Japanese for the poem -- than is gained by ignoring them. Neither have the translators always succeeded in producing Versions of Nakahara's poems which function as tolerable English verse." The last stanza cited above seems an unduly awkward English rendering of the words of a poet said to have had "an unerring ear for his native language." The poem "Soiled Sorrow," on the other hand, seems just right Certainly this is a book and a poet worth some time and attention.