interview Alan Botsford--WINGSPAN

brief review of Mari L'Esperance THE DARKENED TEMPLE -- by Alan Botsford

THE DARKENED TEMPLE by Mari L’Esperance  

THE DARKENED TEMPLE by Mari L’Esperance. University of Nebraska Press, 2008, 100 pp. $16.95 (paper).

(Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Born in Kobe, Japan and raised in California, Guam and Japan, Mari L’Esperance (PK 2007) has written a book of poetry entitled The Darkened Temple (Bison Books, 2008). This is a book of poems that does the work, to use L’Esperance’s words, of “shouldering,” “hauling,” “sifting,” ”bracing” and “hunkering down” in the face of loss. In its conception, in its craftsmanship, in its moral bearings, in its production design, in its ambition, and, not least, in its humanity, it is a book that will resonate as only the authentic can.

-- Alan Botsford

review of Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz America & Other Poems by Ayukawa Nobuo -- Alan Botsford

AMERICA & OTHER POEMS, by Ayukawa Nobuo. Selected and translated by Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz. Kaya Press, 2008, 152 pp., $14.95 (paper).

Brief review by Alan Botsford

For anyone needing an accurate set of coordinates for modern post-war Japanese poetry, Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz's deftly written preface to their new translation of Ayukawa Nobuo's 'America & Other Poems' would be a good starting point. With their sure grasp of backstory--biographical, political, social--that informs the poems, the translators do the reader a great service by providing fascinating and comprehensive context (see also Additional Materials & the superb Afterword on translation). But the real pleasures of this book are the poems themselves. Ayukawa, a founding member of the famous Arechi, or Waste Land group, is a poet of immense seriousness and resourcefulness whose Melvillian view of the U.S. is bracing. (Amazingly, he never visited America in his lifetime.) Translation-wise, the idiom these English versions achieve shine with hard-earned integrity and multi-faceted, diamond-like clarity. Many of the poems first appeared in journals in the U.S. and Japan, among them Poetry Kanto. The translations have undergone a metamorphosis, with each successive incarnation-- to this editor's ear and eye-- improving upon the previous one. A case in point is the poem entitled 'Ishmael', first published in Poetry Kanto in 2005 featuring a second stanza as follows:

He, who didn't say at all

from where and why he came,

was the chosen one.

Ishmael, who wandered barefoot

strongly believing in the heritage of the human soul,

he was the chosen one.

In the 2008 version, the stanza is divided in two:

There's something decent about this man

who never said a word

about where he came from

or why.

There's something decent about

this Ishmael

who wandered barefoot,

believing only in the transmission

of the human soul.

The changes speak for themselves. A breakthrough has occurred. And these stanzas are only one of a multitude of luminous examples among the poems. This writer finds the multiple renderings that a good translation undergoes sometimes mesmerizing. William I. Elliott and Kawamura Kazuo—‘godfathers’ of poetry translation in Japan--offer proof when comparing, say, one of their many Tanikawa poems translated years ago with the same poem revised years later. Often the difference can be a real study of honing one's craft. Oketani & Lowitz’s 'America & Other Poems' by Ayukawa Nobuo displays a similar dedication to and excellence in craft.

-- Alan Botsford

review of Jane Jortiz-Nakagawa Aquiline -- by Alan Botsford

AQUILINE by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. Printed Matter Press, 2007, 65 pp., $12.00 (paper).

Brief review by Alan Botsford

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet who works, or one should say plays, with (and among) multiple literary and non-literary sources. A long-term resident of Japan, she makes hay with the English language any way she can, and for the many experimental impulses she follows, the results--some dodgy, some very moving—throw interesting light on the relation between poet and language, between (non) comprehensibility and (non) context, between word and flesh.

There’s a fallenness embedded in the life and experience of flesh that she will not shy away from, and which indeed she makes--despite deflections and reflections of all kinds-- into her main subject: The body betrays, is forever a wound, wounding:

My eyes sting, my body

Flat and immobile

I want to crush my head against

The dark sparkly pavement

But hers are takes on much more than the fallen world in all its inglorious Faustian bargains (“stepping over the bodies of the dead” etc.). ‘Sparkly,’ in the above-cited poem for example, offers wit, a word choice-- by eschewing ‘sparkling’-- which has ethical ramifications. Joritz-Nakawaga won’t be seduced by anything less than her own resistances to language (“loss of being price of comedy” indeed—this reviewer is not so sure). The distances traversed, and treasured, between “Her stunned immobile/ Body” and “my stunned immobile body” suggest elusive dramas that move in and out of focus, in and out of view. The unsaid, the unread, the as it were undead all converge in cinematic/real-time actions and axioms (i.e. “our natural language is translation & we cannot get it right”). In sum, these are poems swollen with physicality, half-felt presences, and an intelligence that leaves nothing off its radar. “Who is speaking for us, among the/ colonized clouds…” she asks in her long poem ‘Evil Nature (3)’. Perhaps we can ask instead-- who is speaking for us in (as she writes) “our wounded beauty”? The short answer is, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa does.

-- Alan Botsford