ONE HUNDRED MORE POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE - trans. KENNETH REXROTH
While the book’s design would have you thinking otherwise, it seems incorrect to credit these poems to Rexroth. I love Rexroth, he’s one of my favorite Beats, and he’s someone who nurtured a deep fascination with and long-time study of Japan. Having just started trying to learn Japanese myself I’m not anywhere near a place where I could critique or have an opinion about the accuracy of the translations. I do know enough to be deeply impressed, it’s not a very easy language. The library here doesn’t have the original, 100 Japanese poems, so I can’t say if he blew his load on the first collection and these are all leftovers. Even if they were, I really enjoyed a lot of them. There are actually 109 poems, all quite short, from a variety of authors writing across 10 centuries and I would say about 25% of them hit pretty hard a few had me writing them down for later. I really enjoyed Otomo No Tabito’s “Better get drunk and cry/ Than show off your learning/ In public” and an anonymous poem that reads, “I loathe the twin seas / Of being and not being / and long for the mountain / of bliss untouched by / the changing tides” As you might be able to tell, there doesn’t seem to be any thematic throughline or artistic preoccupation or even time-period or poetic school that all the poems share besides the fact that Rexroth likes them. That last poem about the mountain untouched by the changing tides is followed with a poem about oral sex that isn’t even the best oral sex poem in the book. That honor belongs to a poem by Marichiko that compares getting eaten out to floating away “forever in / An orchid boat / On the River of Heaven.” Marichiko is a contemporary (1974) woman who we learn very little about in the scant translation and authors’ notes in the back. Rexroth produced a rooster of poets that is about half women but gives us very little information about most of them. The notes will occasionally comment on the translation of a particular Japanese word of help explain an allusion but overall, the notes left me wanting a lot more. Rexroth clearly knows a lot about these people and has thought a lot about Japanese poetics and translation and all sorts of related matters, I wish he’d chimed in more at the end to help us understand some of this stuff better. For example, the last poem in the book, a Haiku from Ishii Rogetsu, reads, “Roasting Chestnuts / The terrorist’s wife / Is so beautiful” not a single not on that beguling poem. What Japanese word is he translating for “terrorist”? Is “The terrorist’s wife” a figure that exists in the Japanese imagination? Rexroth leaves it for us to ponder. I would love to get my hands on more of his translations. Inshallah I’ll be able to comment on the accuracy of translation question before too long. 109 blow-job poems