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