The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry: Translation and Form, 2021
In The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry, Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji... more In The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry, Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji-era Japanese poets and readers to the challenge introduced by European verse and the resulting crisis in Japanese poetry. Amid fierce competition for literary prestige on the national and international stage, poets and critics at the time recognized that the character of Japanese poetic culture was undergoing a fundamental transformation and that the stakes were high: the future of modern Japanese verse. Mehl documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. He examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi, a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse but eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.
Online Encyclopedia of Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes, 2024
Niikuni Seiichi (1925-1977) was a poet best known for his investigations of the visual aesthetics... more Niikuni Seiichi (1925-1977) was a poet best known for his investigations of the visual aesthetics of the Japanese written language. During his lifetime, his works came to be associated with the international movement known as concrete poetry, an association that Niikuni himself recognised – albeit with the qualification that Niikuni claimed to have only heard of concretism after he had been publishing for several years (Kanazawa 2008: 190-191).
As a native of Sendai, a city in northern Honshu, Japan, Niikuni began his writing career at a remove from Tokyo, which was the centre of the Japanese publishing world and the Japanese city with arguably the strongest ties to international artists and artistic movements. While in Sendai, Niikuni contributed to various coterie magazines. But with his relocation to Tokyo in late 1962, his productivity surged. His first book of poems, _0 on_, was published in 1963. From 1964 onwards, Niikuni collaborated and communicated with artists in other countries, including Brazil, France, the United States. In 1965, with a group of like-minded Japanese artists and poets, Niikuni formed the Geijutsu Kenkyū Kyōkai (Association for Study of Arts), which published a journal of the same name (styled ASA). Niikuni’s collaboration with the French poet Pierre Garnier led to the publication in 1966 of their coauthored volume _Poèmes franco-japonais_ (French-Japanese Poems) and other works.
Over the coming years, Niikuni’s work appeared in exhibitions of concrete poetry around the world and was published in several anthologies. But long hospitalisations for poor health – he had been afflicted by a chest ailment since youth (Fujitomi 2009: 35) – sometimes hampered his work. He died at age 52.
Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception,... more Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception, largely because of two factors: its early publication history; and the theft, in early 1954, of the notes that Kawabata would have used for completing the text. Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Senbazuru (1952), at the urging of the critic Nakamura Mitsuo, was published in book form before serialization had finished. The sequel to Senbazuru, later titled Namichidori (serialized 1953–1954), was still unfinished when Kawabata’s notes were stolen, and he left the text in a state that he himself described as mikan, ‘incomplete’. The seemingly unresolved quality of the text is even more apparent when one considers that the two last-written chapters of Namichidori were subsequently not included in published versions of that text, giving the impression that the sequel to Senbazuru ends inconclusively. The present essay examines the narrative as a whole, inclusive of the two concluding chapters. The theory of finance in literature is applied to a pivotal episode near the end of Namichidori (characters invest in the stock market); and thing theory is used to show that, in crucial ways, the narrative ends conclusively, if all the extant chapters are read as a whole.
Stephen Miller, editor, Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Intimacy, and Erotics, 1886-2014 (University of Michigan Press), pp. 343-365., 2022
This chapter begins with a brief biography of the tanka poet Kasugai Ken (1938-2004) and is follo... more This chapter begins with a brief biography of the tanka poet Kasugai Ken (1938-2004) and is followed by translations of forty tanka on themes related to AIDS and HIV. The tanka are given in triplicate: the text in Japanese is followed by both a transliteration into Roman letters and a lineated translation.
This paper examines "The Human Chair," James B. Harris's 1956 translation of Edogawa Ranpo's stor... more This paper examines "The Human Chair," James B. Harris's 1956 translation of Edogawa Ranpo's story "Ningen isu." Four paragraphs are omitted from Harris's translation, and I examine some of the possible reasons for that omission. I also consider classroom strategies for discussing the translation with students. Notably, my present conclusion about the omission is that, barring some new archival discovery, the reason why the paragraphs do not appear in Harris's translation is probably indeterminable.
Tawada Yoko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined... more Tawada Yoko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined difference in her work by focusing on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one’s first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal traits of Tawada’s work is its incorporation of wordplay based on coincidental resemblances between words in unrelated languages (e.g., German and Japanese). Tawada’s work on wordplay adapts Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the interpretation – or translation, in his occasional metaphor – of dreams and thus embraces a capacious understanding of translation. But – here is the intertextual comparison – when Tawada translates her own work, as when she rewrites her novel Yuki no renshuusei in German as Etueden im Schnee, sometimes a wordplay that is central to one version is omitted in the other, with important consequences for interpretation. Finally, Tawada’s polyglot oeuvre, taken in the aggregate, is characterized as a strategic continuation of a tradition of polyglot authorship – a claim that is, I argue, further underscored by themes in Tawada’s recent fictions.
This paper discusses the innovative use of AI computer algorithms in the creation of tanka, a for... more This paper discusses the innovative use of AI computer algorithms in the creation of tanka, a form of Japanese poetry. From the recent forays into computer-generated poetry in Japan, I look at two computer programs in particular: the instant tanka generator "Inu-zaru," created by Sasaki Arara, and the "gūzen tanka" Twitter bot by programmer Inaniwa. These programs engender new paradoxical models of technology-mediated authorship and reading, whereby human agency is at once subtracted from the composition process while also being presupposed as a necessary component in the participant reader. Such forms of reading and writing shed new light on theoretical matters such as the death of the author even as they pose intractable questions concerning international copyright conventions.
Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), a significant modern Japanese poet, spent some five months in Europe in... more Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), a significant modern Japanese poet, spent some five months in Europe in 1912. While she was in Paris, her presence in the city caused such a stir among Japanese expatriates that several French newspapers ran articles about her. In the main, those articles depicted Akiko as a feminist inasmuch as they quoted her views on the situations of women in France and Japan. The last of those articles, which appeared in _Les Annales politiques et littéraires_, a weekly magazine, included an introduction explaining Akiko’s importance by the article’s author, Léon Faraut (dates unknown). That introductory matter presented a handful of French translations of Akiko’s verse, both tanka and shintaishi (new-style poetry)—some of the earliest European-language renderings of her work. The present article is a translation of Faraut’s article, following a short preface.
The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville, 2021
A close look at the beginnings of the modern Japanese prose poem, focusing on the Meiji period (1... more A close look at the beginnings of the modern Japanese prose poem, focusing on the Meiji period (1868-1912).
The edited volume in which this essay appears includes new scholarship on traditions of prose poetry in many literatures, languages, and periods. My contribution examines some of the earliest translated prose poems into Japanese (Turgenev, Baudelaire), as well as some of the first Japanese poets who composed original prose poems in modern Japanese.
Full citation: “The sanbunshi (prose poem) in Japan.” In Michel Delville and Mary Ann Caws, eds., Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, 262-280. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
“The Long Sleep of Belatedness: Nonsynchronism and Modernity in Maruoka Kyūka’s ‘Rippu ban unkuru... more “The Long Sleep of Belatedness: Nonsynchronism and Modernity in Maruoka Kyūka’s ‘Rippu ban unkuru’ (1886) and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s Ahl al-kahf (1933).” Japanese Studies 39.1 (2019): 27-41.
This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Hakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out of sync with the recognized, official timeline; dismayed and alienated, their reactions indicate how drastically the world changed while they slept. Both texts allude to contemporary conditions in modernizing Japan and Egypt – representing the distresses of those who were perhaps unwilling to embrace rapid, irreversible Westernization – and are self-conscious of their formal novelty. Kyūka’s text is a ‘new-style poem’, retelling a story by an American author who was then unknown in Japan; al-Hakīm’s play is a philosophical drama of a sort that was unprecedented in Arabic literature. Belatedness is thus represented, in each of these texts, from a vehemently neophilic (and implicitly pro-modernity) perspective.
Irisawa Yasuo provided 161 endnotes to his own poem, parodying the methodologies used in scholarl... more Irisawa Yasuo provided 161 endnotes to his own poem, parodying the methodologies used in scholarly editions of classic texts. Citation: "A Translation of Irisawa Yasuo’s _Waga Izumo, Waga chinkon_ (Part II)." Monumenta Nipponica 72:2 (2017), pp. 223-264.
A translation with critical introduction of Irisawa's landmark 1968 poem (first of two parts: sec... more A translation with critical introduction of Irisawa's landmark 1968 poem (first of two parts: second part in December 2017). The critical introduction (pp. 31-49) places the poem in social, literary critical, and political context, highlighting the poem's connection both with Japanese mythology/mythography and with Irisawa's poetic theory. The poem itself (pp. 51-65) was a parody of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," with a strong component of visual poetry. The second part (forthcoming) is a translation of Irisawa's 161 explanatory notes to the poem. Citation: Scott Mehl, "A Parody in the Ruins: A Translation of Irisawa Yasuo's Waga Izumo, Waga Chinkon (Part I)," in _Monument Nipponica_, vol. 72, no. 1 (2017), pp. 31-70.
A translation of one of Honda Shugo's essays, which sparked a major debate in postwar Japanese li... more A translation of one of Honda Shugo's essays, which sparked a major debate in postwar Japanese literary and cultural criticism.
(in Atsuko Ueda, Michael Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., _The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism 1945-1952_ [Rowman & Littlefield, 2017], pp. 3-18.)
Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this essay analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning tha... more Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this essay analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s _Zapiski iz podpol’ya_ (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki’s _Kokoro_ (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man’s argument may, as this essay shows, be analyzed in terms of logical truth-tables to demonstrate that, however thorough the underground man’s argument may appear, it does not consider the counterexample of selfless altruism. This omission prepares the way for the underground man’s rejection of Liza at the climax of the second part of the novel. Sōseki’s novel, too, contains a confession, namely Sensei’s testament, in which Sensei relates how he arrived at his belief that humanity is fundamentally selfish. Sensei’s style of reasoning is primarily inductive, in contrast with that of other characters in Sōseki’s novel, and the present essay argues that Sensei’s style of reasoning is a primary cause of his suicide. In each novel, then, there is a sustained consideration of how and to what extent a style of reasoning is bound up with a character’s fate.
(in _Comparative Literature Studies_ vol. 54, no. 3 [2017], pp. 489-517)
This paper is about the origins of a holistic concept of "poetry" in modern Japanese literature.
... more This paper is about the origins of a holistic concept of "poetry" in modern Japanese literature.
Kitamura Tōkoku’s 北村透谷 1891 text Hōraikyoku 蓬莱曲 (Song of Mt. Hōrai), often regarded as one of the first examples of free verse in modern Japanese, puzzled its contemporary audience, who were uncertain whether to categorize it as drama, poetry, or prose. In his Preface to the play Tōkoku gave a clue for interpreting the text: he alluded to the debate over poetic form that had taken place in late 1890 and early 1891 in response to the serialization of Yamada Bimyō’s 山田美妙 essay “Nihon inbun ron” 日本韻文論 (On Japanese poetry). Bimyō had argued for an inclusive definition of poetry, one that he claimed was applicable to all varieties of verse. For Bimyō, poetry was defined by form alone; in response to Bimyō, many other critics insisted that what was most important in poetry was a suitably poetic content, not form. This debate was part of a broader semantic shift toward a holistic concept of poetry, of which Japanese poetry was one subset—alongside English poetry, German poetry, and so on. Tōkoku’s Hōraikyoku was, in an idiosyncratic way, a contribution to the debate over the forms that a broadly conceived “poetry” could take.
(Southeast Review of Asian Studies, vol. 38 [2016], pp. 38-56.)
Taking William James's model of the stream of consciousness as its primary lens, this essay inves... more Taking William James's model of the stream of consciousness as its primary lens, this essay investigates Hagiwara Sakutaro's appropriations of James's work to show that there is a disjunction between Hagiwara's early poetry and his poetry criticism. To put it crudely, much of Hagiwara's early poetry, which was probably written _before_ his engagement with James's work, appears to be written in what we may provisionally call a stream-of-consciousness style; yet when Hagiwara later incorporates James into his theoretical work on poetics, the American psychologist's model of consciousness is transformed into a description of the difference between the (philosophical, psychological) object and the subject. There are thus two contrasting aspects of Hagiwara's work that this essay aims to juxtapose: the continuities that appear to be the salient feature of many of Hagiwara's early poems, and the discontinuities upon which he established his poetry criticism. (Paper available in _Japanese Language and Literature_ vol. 49 no. 2 [2015], pp. 259-295.)
In his essays on the dynamics of cultural change, the semiotician Yuri Lotman proposes a model to... more In his essays on the dynamics of cultural change, the semiotician Yuri Lotman proposes a model to explain the fact that when an area of culture— poetry, for example—develops a set of self-descriptions—such as poetry criticism, histories of poetry, and so on—that area of culture (or semiotic system, to use Lotman's term) is in a position to become rigidly self-repeating: once it draws up rules for itself, then there is the possibility that it will follow those rules. The semiotic system is described as having become rigidified, under such circumstances. Lotman posits another alternative: the semiotic system might instead choose to break or alter its own rules, renovating and transforming itself by incorporating elements from other semiotic systems. In this essay I argue that the appearance of modern Japanese free-verse poetry can be explained using a modified version of Lotman's model. It is common for historians of modern Japanese poetry to say that the poet Kawaji Ryūkō was the first to publish free-verse poetry in Japanese (in 1907). This essay places Ryūkō's work in context, characterizing it as a synthesis of a number of elements from the contemporary criticism—the principal among these being the current of negative criticism of Japanese poetry, on the one hand, and the current of positive response to Western free-verse poetry, on the other. By synthesizing elements from various strands of poetry and poetry criticism, Ryūkō created a poetic form that is now prevalent in the Japanese poetry establishment today.
In the first half of the twentieth century, when Japanese and Arabic poets began writing free-ver... more In the first half of the twentieth century, when Japanese and Arabic poets began writing free-verse poetry, many terms were proposed as labels for the new form. In addition to the calques on " free verse, " neologisms were created to name the new poetry. What is striking is that, in these two quite different literary spheres, a number of the proposed neologisms were the same: for example, in both Japanese and Arabic the terms prose poetry, modern poetry, and colloquial poetry were proposed (among others) as alternatives to the label free poetry. This essay provides an annotated list of the neologisms in Japanese and Arabic, with a list of English terms for comparison; and by referring to the contemporary Japanese and Arabic criticism on the topic of poetic innovation, this essay attempts to explain the similarity between the Japanese and Arabic neologisms. In short, the Japanese and Arabophone arguments in favour of adapting the free-verse form were based on similar premises regarding modernity, freedom, and a vision of literary history that was rooted in an evolutionary theory of genre development.
The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry: Translation and Form, 2021
In The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry, Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji... more In The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry, Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji-era Japanese poets and readers to the challenge introduced by European verse and the resulting crisis in Japanese poetry. Amid fierce competition for literary prestige on the national and international stage, poets and critics at the time recognized that the character of Japanese poetic culture was undergoing a fundamental transformation and that the stakes were high: the future of modern Japanese verse. Mehl documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. He examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi, a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse but eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.
Online Encyclopedia of Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes, 2024
Niikuni Seiichi (1925-1977) was a poet best known for his investigations of the visual aesthetics... more Niikuni Seiichi (1925-1977) was a poet best known for his investigations of the visual aesthetics of the Japanese written language. During his lifetime, his works came to be associated with the international movement known as concrete poetry, an association that Niikuni himself recognised – albeit with the qualification that Niikuni claimed to have only heard of concretism after he had been publishing for several years (Kanazawa 2008: 190-191).
As a native of Sendai, a city in northern Honshu, Japan, Niikuni began his writing career at a remove from Tokyo, which was the centre of the Japanese publishing world and the Japanese city with arguably the strongest ties to international artists and artistic movements. While in Sendai, Niikuni contributed to various coterie magazines. But with his relocation to Tokyo in late 1962, his productivity surged. His first book of poems, _0 on_, was published in 1963. From 1964 onwards, Niikuni collaborated and communicated with artists in other countries, including Brazil, France, the United States. In 1965, with a group of like-minded Japanese artists and poets, Niikuni formed the Geijutsu Kenkyū Kyōkai (Association for Study of Arts), which published a journal of the same name (styled ASA). Niikuni’s collaboration with the French poet Pierre Garnier led to the publication in 1966 of their coauthored volume _Poèmes franco-japonais_ (French-Japanese Poems) and other works.
Over the coming years, Niikuni’s work appeared in exhibitions of concrete poetry around the world and was published in several anthologies. But long hospitalisations for poor health – he had been afflicted by a chest ailment since youth (Fujitomi 2009: 35) – sometimes hampered his work. He died at age 52.
Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception,... more Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception, largely because of two factors: its early publication history; and the theft, in early 1954, of the notes that Kawabata would have used for completing the text. Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Senbazuru (1952), at the urging of the critic Nakamura Mitsuo, was published in book form before serialization had finished. The sequel to Senbazuru, later titled Namichidori (serialized 1953–1954), was still unfinished when Kawabata’s notes were stolen, and he left the text in a state that he himself described as mikan, ‘incomplete’. The seemingly unresolved quality of the text is even more apparent when one considers that the two last-written chapters of Namichidori were subsequently not included in published versions of that text, giving the impression that the sequel to Senbazuru ends inconclusively. The present essay examines the narrative as a whole, inclusive of the two concluding chapters. The theory of finance in literature is applied to a pivotal episode near the end of Namichidori (characters invest in the stock market); and thing theory is used to show that, in crucial ways, the narrative ends conclusively, if all the extant chapters are read as a whole.
Stephen Miller, editor, Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Intimacy, and Erotics, 1886-2014 (University of Michigan Press), pp. 343-365., 2022
This chapter begins with a brief biography of the tanka poet Kasugai Ken (1938-2004) and is follo... more This chapter begins with a brief biography of the tanka poet Kasugai Ken (1938-2004) and is followed by translations of forty tanka on themes related to AIDS and HIV. The tanka are given in triplicate: the text in Japanese is followed by both a transliteration into Roman letters and a lineated translation.
This paper examines "The Human Chair," James B. Harris's 1956 translation of Edogawa Ranpo's stor... more This paper examines "The Human Chair," James B. Harris's 1956 translation of Edogawa Ranpo's story "Ningen isu." Four paragraphs are omitted from Harris's translation, and I examine some of the possible reasons for that omission. I also consider classroom strategies for discussing the translation with students. Notably, my present conclusion about the omission is that, barring some new archival discovery, the reason why the paragraphs do not appear in Harris's translation is probably indeterminable.
Tawada Yoko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined... more Tawada Yoko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined difference in her work by focusing on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one’s first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal traits of Tawada’s work is its incorporation of wordplay based on coincidental resemblances between words in unrelated languages (e.g., German and Japanese). Tawada’s work on wordplay adapts Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the interpretation – or translation, in his occasional metaphor – of dreams and thus embraces a capacious understanding of translation. But – here is the intertextual comparison – when Tawada translates her own work, as when she rewrites her novel Yuki no renshuusei in German as Etueden im Schnee, sometimes a wordplay that is central to one version is omitted in the other, with important consequences for interpretation. Finally, Tawada’s polyglot oeuvre, taken in the aggregate, is characterized as a strategic continuation of a tradition of polyglot authorship – a claim that is, I argue, further underscored by themes in Tawada’s recent fictions.
This paper discusses the innovative use of AI computer algorithms in the creation of tanka, a for... more This paper discusses the innovative use of AI computer algorithms in the creation of tanka, a form of Japanese poetry. From the recent forays into computer-generated poetry in Japan, I look at two computer programs in particular: the instant tanka generator "Inu-zaru," created by Sasaki Arara, and the "gūzen tanka" Twitter bot by programmer Inaniwa. These programs engender new paradoxical models of technology-mediated authorship and reading, whereby human agency is at once subtracted from the composition process while also being presupposed as a necessary component in the participant reader. Such forms of reading and writing shed new light on theoretical matters such as the death of the author even as they pose intractable questions concerning international copyright conventions.
Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), a significant modern Japanese poet, spent some five months in Europe in... more Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), a significant modern Japanese poet, spent some five months in Europe in 1912. While she was in Paris, her presence in the city caused such a stir among Japanese expatriates that several French newspapers ran articles about her. In the main, those articles depicted Akiko as a feminist inasmuch as they quoted her views on the situations of women in France and Japan. The last of those articles, which appeared in _Les Annales politiques et littéraires_, a weekly magazine, included an introduction explaining Akiko’s importance by the article’s author, Léon Faraut (dates unknown). That introductory matter presented a handful of French translations of Akiko’s verse, both tanka and shintaishi (new-style poetry)—some of the earliest European-language renderings of her work. The present article is a translation of Faraut’s article, following a short preface.
The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville, 2021
A close look at the beginnings of the modern Japanese prose poem, focusing on the Meiji period (1... more A close look at the beginnings of the modern Japanese prose poem, focusing on the Meiji period (1868-1912).
The edited volume in which this essay appears includes new scholarship on traditions of prose poetry in many literatures, languages, and periods. My contribution examines some of the earliest translated prose poems into Japanese (Turgenev, Baudelaire), as well as some of the first Japanese poets who composed original prose poems in modern Japanese.
Full citation: “The sanbunshi (prose poem) in Japan.” In Michel Delville and Mary Ann Caws, eds., Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, 262-280. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
“The Long Sleep of Belatedness: Nonsynchronism and Modernity in Maruoka Kyūka’s ‘Rippu ban unkuru... more “The Long Sleep of Belatedness: Nonsynchronism and Modernity in Maruoka Kyūka’s ‘Rippu ban unkuru’ (1886) and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s Ahl al-kahf (1933).” Japanese Studies 39.1 (2019): 27-41.
This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Hakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out of sync with the recognized, official timeline; dismayed and alienated, their reactions indicate how drastically the world changed while they slept. Both texts allude to contemporary conditions in modernizing Japan and Egypt – representing the distresses of those who were perhaps unwilling to embrace rapid, irreversible Westernization – and are self-conscious of their formal novelty. Kyūka’s text is a ‘new-style poem’, retelling a story by an American author who was then unknown in Japan; al-Hakīm’s play is a philosophical drama of a sort that was unprecedented in Arabic literature. Belatedness is thus represented, in each of these texts, from a vehemently neophilic (and implicitly pro-modernity) perspective.
Irisawa Yasuo provided 161 endnotes to his own poem, parodying the methodologies used in scholarl... more Irisawa Yasuo provided 161 endnotes to his own poem, parodying the methodologies used in scholarly editions of classic texts. Citation: "A Translation of Irisawa Yasuo’s _Waga Izumo, Waga chinkon_ (Part II)." Monumenta Nipponica 72:2 (2017), pp. 223-264.
A translation with critical introduction of Irisawa's landmark 1968 poem (first of two parts: sec... more A translation with critical introduction of Irisawa's landmark 1968 poem (first of two parts: second part in December 2017). The critical introduction (pp. 31-49) places the poem in social, literary critical, and political context, highlighting the poem's connection both with Japanese mythology/mythography and with Irisawa's poetic theory. The poem itself (pp. 51-65) was a parody of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," with a strong component of visual poetry. The second part (forthcoming) is a translation of Irisawa's 161 explanatory notes to the poem. Citation: Scott Mehl, "A Parody in the Ruins: A Translation of Irisawa Yasuo's Waga Izumo, Waga Chinkon (Part I)," in _Monument Nipponica_, vol. 72, no. 1 (2017), pp. 31-70.
A translation of one of Honda Shugo's essays, which sparked a major debate in postwar Japanese li... more A translation of one of Honda Shugo's essays, which sparked a major debate in postwar Japanese literary and cultural criticism.
(in Atsuko Ueda, Michael Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., _The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism 1945-1952_ [Rowman & Littlefield, 2017], pp. 3-18.)
Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this essay analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning tha... more Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this essay analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s _Zapiski iz podpol’ya_ (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki’s _Kokoro_ (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man’s argument may, as this essay shows, be analyzed in terms of logical truth-tables to demonstrate that, however thorough the underground man’s argument may appear, it does not consider the counterexample of selfless altruism. This omission prepares the way for the underground man’s rejection of Liza at the climax of the second part of the novel. Sōseki’s novel, too, contains a confession, namely Sensei’s testament, in which Sensei relates how he arrived at his belief that humanity is fundamentally selfish. Sensei’s style of reasoning is primarily inductive, in contrast with that of other characters in Sōseki’s novel, and the present essay argues that Sensei’s style of reasoning is a primary cause of his suicide. In each novel, then, there is a sustained consideration of how and to what extent a style of reasoning is bound up with a character’s fate.
(in _Comparative Literature Studies_ vol. 54, no. 3 [2017], pp. 489-517)
This paper is about the origins of a holistic concept of "poetry" in modern Japanese literature.
... more This paper is about the origins of a holistic concept of "poetry" in modern Japanese literature.
Kitamura Tōkoku’s 北村透谷 1891 text Hōraikyoku 蓬莱曲 (Song of Mt. Hōrai), often regarded as one of the first examples of free verse in modern Japanese, puzzled its contemporary audience, who were uncertain whether to categorize it as drama, poetry, or prose. In his Preface to the play Tōkoku gave a clue for interpreting the text: he alluded to the debate over poetic form that had taken place in late 1890 and early 1891 in response to the serialization of Yamada Bimyō’s 山田美妙 essay “Nihon inbun ron” 日本韻文論 (On Japanese poetry). Bimyō had argued for an inclusive definition of poetry, one that he claimed was applicable to all varieties of verse. For Bimyō, poetry was defined by form alone; in response to Bimyō, many other critics insisted that what was most important in poetry was a suitably poetic content, not form. This debate was part of a broader semantic shift toward a holistic concept of poetry, of which Japanese poetry was one subset—alongside English poetry, German poetry, and so on. Tōkoku’s Hōraikyoku was, in an idiosyncratic way, a contribution to the debate over the forms that a broadly conceived “poetry” could take.
(Southeast Review of Asian Studies, vol. 38 [2016], pp. 38-56.)
Taking William James's model of the stream of consciousness as its primary lens, this essay inves... more Taking William James's model of the stream of consciousness as its primary lens, this essay investigates Hagiwara Sakutaro's appropriations of James's work to show that there is a disjunction between Hagiwara's early poetry and his poetry criticism. To put it crudely, much of Hagiwara's early poetry, which was probably written _before_ his engagement with James's work, appears to be written in what we may provisionally call a stream-of-consciousness style; yet when Hagiwara later incorporates James into his theoretical work on poetics, the American psychologist's model of consciousness is transformed into a description of the difference between the (philosophical, psychological) object and the subject. There are thus two contrasting aspects of Hagiwara's work that this essay aims to juxtapose: the continuities that appear to be the salient feature of many of Hagiwara's early poems, and the discontinuities upon which he established his poetry criticism. (Paper available in _Japanese Language and Literature_ vol. 49 no. 2 [2015], pp. 259-295.)
In his essays on the dynamics of cultural change, the semiotician Yuri Lotman proposes a model to... more In his essays on the dynamics of cultural change, the semiotician Yuri Lotman proposes a model to explain the fact that when an area of culture— poetry, for example—develops a set of self-descriptions—such as poetry criticism, histories of poetry, and so on—that area of culture (or semiotic system, to use Lotman's term) is in a position to become rigidly self-repeating: once it draws up rules for itself, then there is the possibility that it will follow those rules. The semiotic system is described as having become rigidified, under such circumstances. Lotman posits another alternative: the semiotic system might instead choose to break or alter its own rules, renovating and transforming itself by incorporating elements from other semiotic systems. In this essay I argue that the appearance of modern Japanese free-verse poetry can be explained using a modified version of Lotman's model. It is common for historians of modern Japanese poetry to say that the poet Kawaji Ryūkō was the first to publish free-verse poetry in Japanese (in 1907). This essay places Ryūkō's work in context, characterizing it as a synthesis of a number of elements from the contemporary criticism—the principal among these being the current of negative criticism of Japanese poetry, on the one hand, and the current of positive response to Western free-verse poetry, on the other. By synthesizing elements from various strands of poetry and poetry criticism, Ryūkō created a poetic form that is now prevalent in the Japanese poetry establishment today.
In the first half of the twentieth century, when Japanese and Arabic poets began writing free-ver... more In the first half of the twentieth century, when Japanese and Arabic poets began writing free-verse poetry, many terms were proposed as labels for the new form. In addition to the calques on " free verse, " neologisms were created to name the new poetry. What is striking is that, in these two quite different literary spheres, a number of the proposed neologisms were the same: for example, in both Japanese and Arabic the terms prose poetry, modern poetry, and colloquial poetry were proposed (among others) as alternatives to the label free poetry. This essay provides an annotated list of the neologisms in Japanese and Arabic, with a list of English terms for comparison; and by referring to the contemporary Japanese and Arabic criticism on the topic of poetic innovation, this essay attempts to explain the similarity between the Japanese and Arabic neologisms. In short, the Japanese and Arabophone arguments in favour of adapting the free-verse form were based on similar premises regarding modernity, freedom, and a vision of literary history that was rooted in an evolutionary theory of genre development.
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Mehl documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. He examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi, a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse but eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.
Papers by Scott Mehl
As a native of Sendai, a city in northern Honshu, Japan, Niikuni began his writing career at a remove from Tokyo, which was the centre of the Japanese publishing world and the Japanese city with arguably the strongest ties to international artists and artistic movements. While in Sendai, Niikuni contributed to various coterie magazines. But with his relocation to Tokyo in late 1962, his productivity surged. His first book of poems, _0 on_, was published in 1963. From 1964 onwards, Niikuni collaborated and communicated with artists in other countries, including Brazil, France, the United States. In 1965, with a group of like-minded Japanese artists and poets, Niikuni formed the Geijutsu Kenkyū Kyōkai (Association for Study of Arts), which published a journal of the same name (styled ASA). Niikuni’s collaboration with the French poet Pierre Garnier led to the publication in 1966 of their coauthored volume _Poèmes franco-japonais_ (French-Japanese Poems) and other works.
Over the coming years, Niikuni’s work appeared in exhibitions of concrete poetry around the world and was published in several anthologies. But long hospitalisations for poor health – he had been afflicted by a chest ailment since youth (Fujitomi 2009: 35) – sometimes hampered his work. He died at age 52.
on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one’s first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal traits of Tawada’s work is its incorporation of wordplay based on coincidental resemblances between words in unrelated languages (e.g., German and Japanese). Tawada’s work on wordplay adapts Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the interpretation – or translation, in his occasional metaphor – of dreams and thus embraces a capacious understanding of translation. But – here is the intertextual comparison – when Tawada translates her own work, as when she rewrites her novel Yuki no renshuusei in German as Etueden im Schnee, sometimes a wordplay that is central to one version is omitted in the other, with important consequences for interpretation. Finally, Tawada’s polyglot oeuvre, taken in the aggregate, is characterized as a strategic continuation of a tradition of polyglot authorship – a claim that is, I argue, further underscored by themes in Tawada’s recent fictions.
The edited volume in which this essay appears includes new scholarship on traditions of prose poetry in many literatures, languages, and periods. My contribution examines some of the earliest translated prose poems into Japanese (Turgenev, Baudelaire), as well as some of the first Japanese poets who composed original prose poems in modern Japanese.
Full citation: “The sanbunshi (prose poem) in Japan.” In Michel Delville and Mary Ann Caws, eds., Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, 262-280. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Hakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out of sync with the recognized, official timeline; dismayed and alienated, their reactions indicate how drastically the world changed while they slept. Both texts allude to contemporary conditions in modernizing Japan and Egypt – representing the distresses of those who were perhaps unwilling to embrace rapid, irreversible Westernization – and are self-conscious of their formal novelty. Kyūka’s text is a ‘new-style poem’, retelling a story by an American author who was then unknown in Japan; al-Hakīm’s play is a philosophical drama of a sort that was unprecedented in Arabic literature. Belatedness is thus represented, in each of these texts, from a vehemently neophilic (and implicitly pro-modernity) perspective.
(in Atsuko Ueda, Michael Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., _The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism 1945-1952_ [Rowman & Littlefield, 2017], pp. 3-18.)
(in _Comparative Literature Studies_ vol. 54, no. 3 [2017], pp. 489-517)
Kitamura Tōkoku’s 北村透谷 1891 text Hōraikyoku 蓬莱曲 (Song of Mt. Hōrai), often regarded as one of the first examples of free verse in modern Japanese, puzzled its contemporary audience, who were uncertain whether to categorize it as drama, poetry, or prose. In his Preface to the play Tōkoku gave a clue for interpreting the text: he alluded to the debate over poetic form that had taken place in late 1890 and early 1891 in response to the serialization of Yamada Bimyō’s 山田美妙 essay “Nihon inbun ron” 日本韻文論 (On Japanese poetry). Bimyō had argued for an inclusive definition of poetry, one that he claimed was applicable to all varieties of verse. For Bimyō, poetry was defined by form alone; in response to Bimyō, many other critics insisted that what was most important in poetry was a suitably poetic content, not form. This debate was part of a broader semantic shift toward a holistic concept of poetry, of which Japanese poetry was one subset—alongside English poetry, German poetry, and so on. Tōkoku’s Hōraikyoku was, in an idiosyncratic way, a contribution to the debate over the forms that a broadly conceived “poetry” could take.
(Southeast Review of Asian Studies, vol. 38 [2016], pp. 38-56.)
Mehl documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. He examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi, a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse but eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.
As a native of Sendai, a city in northern Honshu, Japan, Niikuni began his writing career at a remove from Tokyo, which was the centre of the Japanese publishing world and the Japanese city with arguably the strongest ties to international artists and artistic movements. While in Sendai, Niikuni contributed to various coterie magazines. But with his relocation to Tokyo in late 1962, his productivity surged. His first book of poems, _0 on_, was published in 1963. From 1964 onwards, Niikuni collaborated and communicated with artists in other countries, including Brazil, France, the United States. In 1965, with a group of like-minded Japanese artists and poets, Niikuni formed the Geijutsu Kenkyū Kyōkai (Association for Study of Arts), which published a journal of the same name (styled ASA). Niikuni’s collaboration with the French poet Pierre Garnier led to the publication in 1966 of their coauthored volume _Poèmes franco-japonais_ (French-Japanese Poems) and other works.
Over the coming years, Niikuni’s work appeared in exhibitions of concrete poetry around the world and was published in several anthologies. But long hospitalisations for poor health – he had been afflicted by a chest ailment since youth (Fujitomi 2009: 35) – sometimes hampered his work. He died at age 52.
on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one’s first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal traits of Tawada’s work is its incorporation of wordplay based on coincidental resemblances between words in unrelated languages (e.g., German and Japanese). Tawada’s work on wordplay adapts Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the interpretation – or translation, in his occasional metaphor – of dreams and thus embraces a capacious understanding of translation. But – here is the intertextual comparison – when Tawada translates her own work, as when she rewrites her novel Yuki no renshuusei in German as Etueden im Schnee, sometimes a wordplay that is central to one version is omitted in the other, with important consequences for interpretation. Finally, Tawada’s polyglot oeuvre, taken in the aggregate, is characterized as a strategic continuation of a tradition of polyglot authorship – a claim that is, I argue, further underscored by themes in Tawada’s recent fictions.
The edited volume in which this essay appears includes new scholarship on traditions of prose poetry in many literatures, languages, and periods. My contribution examines some of the earliest translated prose poems into Japanese (Turgenev, Baudelaire), as well as some of the first Japanese poets who composed original prose poems in modern Japanese.
Full citation: “The sanbunshi (prose poem) in Japan.” In Michel Delville and Mary Ann Caws, eds., Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, 262-280. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Hakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out of sync with the recognized, official timeline; dismayed and alienated, their reactions indicate how drastically the world changed while they slept. Both texts allude to contemporary conditions in modernizing Japan and Egypt – representing the distresses of those who were perhaps unwilling to embrace rapid, irreversible Westernization – and are self-conscious of their formal novelty. Kyūka’s text is a ‘new-style poem’, retelling a story by an American author who was then unknown in Japan; al-Hakīm’s play is a philosophical drama of a sort that was unprecedented in Arabic literature. Belatedness is thus represented, in each of these texts, from a vehemently neophilic (and implicitly pro-modernity) perspective.
(in Atsuko Ueda, Michael Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., _The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism 1945-1952_ [Rowman & Littlefield, 2017], pp. 3-18.)
(in _Comparative Literature Studies_ vol. 54, no. 3 [2017], pp. 489-517)
Kitamura Tōkoku’s 北村透谷 1891 text Hōraikyoku 蓬莱曲 (Song of Mt. Hōrai), often regarded as one of the first examples of free verse in modern Japanese, puzzled its contemporary audience, who were uncertain whether to categorize it as drama, poetry, or prose. In his Preface to the play Tōkoku gave a clue for interpreting the text: he alluded to the debate over poetic form that had taken place in late 1890 and early 1891 in response to the serialization of Yamada Bimyō’s 山田美妙 essay “Nihon inbun ron” 日本韻文論 (On Japanese poetry). Bimyō had argued for an inclusive definition of poetry, one that he claimed was applicable to all varieties of verse. For Bimyō, poetry was defined by form alone; in response to Bimyō, many other critics insisted that what was most important in poetry was a suitably poetic content, not form. This debate was part of a broader semantic shift toward a holistic concept of poetry, of which Japanese poetry was one subset—alongside English poetry, German poetry, and so on. Tōkoku’s Hōraikyoku was, in an idiosyncratic way, a contribution to the debate over the forms that a broadly conceived “poetry” could take.
(Southeast Review of Asian Studies, vol. 38 [2016], pp. 38-56.)