On the Road of the Beats in Japan

January 9, 2020 | in Essays | by Taylor Mignon

Who will carry on the Rexrothian torch to penetrate the nucleus of Japanese poetry and art in Japan?

The recognition of Japanese poetry is too often superficially doomed to the annals of tradition—and it’s understandable: what satisfies the Western fascination with the land of zen better than a haiku? But for those of us in search for something wilder, one only has to look back a few decades. Maddened and dazed, when the Beats exploded onto the global arts and literature scene, a new, ecstatic, insurrectionary poetry redefined the text, and poets from across the Pacific responded. Now, below is your crash course on the multitudinous and creatively proliferating intersection between Japan and Beat Poetry, by an expert at the scene of the beautiful crime, Taylor Mignon (with editorial assistance from translator and poet Jordan A. Y. Smith and Simon Scott).

This essay was originally published as the introduction to Tokyo Poetry Journal 5: Japan and the Beats.

It is the early 1990s, past midnight, and I am on a couch in a house in Yoyogi. The doorbell rings, and there’s knocking at the door. Shrugging off my slight inebriation, I scamper down the stairs to find cops who are enquiring about the loud TV, as the host had passed out, sound still blaring. I explain that the owner of the house made the disturbance, turn down the volume, and the cops leave.

The passed-out proprietor is Nishida Shunji, publisher of The Plaza: A Space for Global Human Relations, a bilingual journal of poetry, art, and prose. This was sometime after I had answered an ad in The Japan Times calling for a rewriter for Hitachi Review, a journal of technical articles written by Japanese engineers. With little idea of what I was rewriting, that production led us to what we really wanted to do, which was edit The Plaza. Mr. Nishida—a brilliant character, who liked to be called Leo—was a disheveled Japanese gentleman who could play a mean game of chess, liked to cycle, and often went around with his fly (social window) open. The connections made here at this job contributed to facilitating the meeting of several heavyweight Objectivist, Beat, and avant-garde poets.

One of the submitters to The Plaza was poet and editor Sherry Reniker, who had a knack for writing colorful correspondence and an experimental edge. At around that time, she was editing broadsides for the imprint published by Karl Young from Wisconsin, Light and Dust Books, whose authors included Morgan Gibson and a number of Japanese visual poets. Through her generous lead, I would correspond and eventually meet both Morgan and Objectivist poet Cid Corman, the latter based in Kyoto and the poet who first published Gary Snyder (Riprap, 1959) through his Origin press. (Cid told me he had met William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Paris, at about the same time he was putting Naked Lunch together, and thought that he was very disarming and quite approachable, not at all acting in a manner of affected notoriety as one could expect from someone of Burroughs’ reputation.) The Plaza would prove to be fertile ground to publish the koan-like poetry of Morgan, the nature poetry of Antler (who goes by that name only), Jeff Poniewaz, and Sherry and Cid, much with a Beat bent. READ MORE…

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Waldeen’s Neruda: Translating the Dance

March 6, 2019 | in Essays | by Jonathan Cohen

She understood the essential relationship between poetry and music and their common root in dance. This was her secret.

Yesterday’s Translation Tuesday featured Pablo Neruda’s “Coming of the Rivers” sequence in an astonishing and previously unpublished translation by Waldeen. How did Waldeen capture the voice and tone of Neruda’s poetry so accurately, and why have such elegant translations remained in obscurity for almost seventy years? Poet and translator Jonathan Cohen, a close friend of Waldeen, explains the history—and the secrets—behind her Neruda translations.

Waldeen von Falkenstein (1913–1993)—known as a dancer and writer by her first name alone—has yet to receive the full recognition she deserves for her work as a translator of Pablo Neruda’s poetry. The poetic achievement of her translations and their influence on American poetry merit more attention. Waldeen’s elegant renderings of poems that would form Neruda’s epic masterpiece, Canto General (1950), translations that she published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, introduced Neruda and his image-driven poetics to many readers. Among them were poets like the Beats looking for alternatives to the prevailing formalist mode of verse, who found in him, through her, a model poet.

Waldeen achieved fame in Mexico as the founder of modern dance there. In 1956, Diego Rivera, one of the principal gods of Mexican art, lavished praise on Waldeen for her contribution to Mexican culture (“In each of her dance movements, she offered our country a jewel”). His tribute to her appeared in a major newspaper of Mexico, where he went beyond his accolades of her dance work to also celebrate her as a poet-translator: “I can bear witness to this not only by the intensity of emotion I felt in the verses of this beautiful and admirable woman, but through the testimony, as well, of our Walt Whitman of Indo-America, Pablo Neruda, who wrote to her, deeply moved, after she translated poetry of his into English: ‘Waldeen, thank you, for your poems of my poems, which are better than mine.’ ”

What’s New in Translation? August 2017

August 7, 2017 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Catherine Belshaw, Paul Worley, and Sohini Basak

Not sure what to read next? Here are three of the most thrilling new releases from around the world.

With Asymptote you can be sure to have the latest reading recommendations. True to form, we bring you a selection of the exciting new books this month. Which one is going to claim a place in your bookshelf?

Kholin Front Cover Promo 72dpi at 1000 pixels_3

Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems by Igor Kholin, translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich, Ugly Duckling Presse.

Reviewed by Paul Worley, Editor-at-Large, Mexico

English language readers already enamored of poets such as the Roman Catullus or the more recent Charles Bukowski will find a similarly humorous, difficult, and enthralling companion in the pages of Russian Igor Kholin’s (1920-1999) recently translated Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems from Ugly Duckling Presse. An autodidact whose experiences in the military included a near-death experience in World War II, Kholin in many ways perhaps serves as a vital counterpoint to the American Bukowski insofar as both writers, despite the fact that they are writing throughout the Cold War between their respective countries, cast an unrelentingly critical gaze on the societies they inhabit, bearing witness to abuse, the dirty, and the neglected, and rendering these as poetry. The translators note that although Kholin’s “occasionally unrestrained misogyny” may rankle the sensibilities of many readers, they nonetheless felt compelled to leave his attitude in their translation as “it seems to constitute part and parcel of his self-positioning and character” (9). Along those lines and, in tandem with Bukowski, one also wonders about the extent to which the writer’s misogyny is not a gendered version of a broader misanthropy from which the poet does not even exclude himself. After all, the poetic Kholin muses on the possibility that thinking he is “a creep…It’s not such a leap” (80), as well as understanding he is one for whom wine is “made” and shit is “laid” (85). As he criticizes his social circle for their faults and flaws in his diary, a passage written in a friend’s handwriting takes on the subject of Kholin himself, claiming the poet is “intellectually limited” (46) and that his “advice on writing is naive” (48). Perhaps unsurprisingly, marginal notes in the poet’s own hand describe these as “the best thing Yodkovsky [the friend] has ever written” (49).