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    The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa
    The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa
    The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa
    Ebook171 pages1 hour

    The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

    By Chika Sagawa

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation • The electrifying collected works of “one of the most innovative and prominent avant-garde poets in early twentieth-century Japan” (The New Yorker).
     
    Translated by and with an introduction by Sawako Nakayasu

    An important and daringly experimental voice in Tokyo’s avant-garde poetry scene, Chika Sagawa broke with the gender-bound traditions of Japanese poetry. Growing up in isolated rural Japan, Sagawa moved to Tokyo at seventeen, and begin publishing her work at eighteen.She was immediately recognized as a leading light of the male-dominated Japanese literary scene; her work combines striking, unique imagery with Western influences. The results are short, sharp, surreal poems about human fragility and the beauty of nature from Japan’s first female Modernist poet.
     
    The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

    AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateAug 11, 2020
    ISBN9780593230022
    The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

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      Book preview

      The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa - Chika Sagawa

      Cover for The Collected Poems of Chika SagawaBook Title, The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, Author, Translated and with an introduction by Sawako Nakayasu, Imprint, Modern Library

      Translation copyright © 2015 by Sawako Nakayasu

      Introduction copyright © 2020 by Sawako Nakayasu

      All rights reserved.

      Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

      MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

      Originally published in trade paperback and in slightly different form in the United States by Canarium Books, in 2015.

      The translation of this book was made possible by a generous grant from the Japan Foundation.

      ISBN 9780593230015

      Ebook ISBN 9780593230022

      modernlibrary.com

      randomhousebooks.com

      Cover design and illustration: Ella Laytham

      ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Introduction by Sawako Nakayasu

      Poems

      Insects

      Morning bread

      My picture

      Rusty knife

      Black air

      It is snowing

      Green flames

      Departure

      Blue horse

      Visibility through green

      Beard of death

      Seasonal monocle

      Blue sphere

      Fragment

      Glass wings

      Circuit

      Illusory home

      Ocean of memory

      Blue road

      Portrait of winter

      White and black

      Ribbon of May

      Mystery

      Opal

      Dream

      In white

      Green

      Sleeping

      The mad house

      Shapes of clouds

      Wind

      Day of snow

      The day the bell tolls

      The city possessed

      Waves

      Like a cloud

      Please cover me with dirt every year

      To awaken

      To the vast blooming sky

      Gate of snow

      Simple scenery

      Spring

      Dance hall

      Dark summer

      Constellation

      Ancient flowers

      One other thing

      Backside

      Blemish on the grape

      Snow line

      Promenade

      Conversation

      Late gathering

      Climbing to heaven

      Mayflower

      Dark song

      Afternoon of fruit

      Flower

      Afternoon

      Meerschaum

      End of summer

      Finale

      A plain, moonlit night

      Prelude

      Seasons

      Words

      Downfall

      Composition in three primary colors

      Ocean bride

      Song of the sun

      Mountain range

      Ocean angel

      Voices of summer

      Seasonal night

      The street fair

      1.2.3.4.5.

      Newly Collected Poems

      Falling ocean

      Tree spirits

      Flower

      Flowers between the fingers

      Lavender grave

      Smoke signals

      Night walk

      Larks of the flower garden

      Wind is blowing

      Seasons

      Prose

      Notable poems from the second year of publications by Shii no ki

      While waiting for Christmas

      Winter diary

      Chamber music

      Crystal night

      Had they been the eyes of fish

      My nighttime

      Kinumaki-san and his poetry collection, Pedal Organ

      On Bucolic Comedies by Edith Sitwell

      Bouquet of fog

      Like fairy tales

      When passing between trees

      Ema Shōko and my radiant dreams

      Diary

      Dedication

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      INTRODUCTION

      SAWAKO NAKAYASU

      Sagawa Chika*1 is Japan’s first female Modernist poet, whose work resonated deeply with, and helped shape, the most dynamic shifts and developments in the poetry of the era. I know this now after spending almost two decades with Chika’s poetry, but at the time of my initial encounter in 2002, she was generally considered a minor poet—some even questioned my decision to translate her work in the first place.*2

      I first learned of Chika in John Solt’s Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue, where he reflects upon his choice of PhD dissertation topic: I could have focused on any of a dozen fine poets active before the war—such as Takiguchi Shūzō, Nishiwaki Junzaburō, Haruyama Yukio…and Sagawa Chika (1911–36). I was intrigued to hear Solt mention a female name among this male-dominated group of poets, and my initial research indicated that Chika’s work was long out of print, nearly impossible to access. The single exception was that a sixteen-year-old with the username Ririka had typed and posted all of Chika’s poems on her blog. This is where I first read, and fell in love with, the extraordinary poems of Sagawa Chika.

      Chika’s poems are delightfully surreal. Interrupted by thoughts, fish climb the cliff is the final line of the poem Afternoon, while in another poem, The sky has countless scars. / Hanging like elbows (Like a Cloud). Elsewhere, I found a sensual, emotional complexity: Fingers stained with cigarette tar / Caress the writhing darkness. / And the people move forward (Backside). I had never before read poetry quite like Chika’s. I was still new at translating Japanese poetry, but I thrilled at the idea of sharing this work with other people.

      To this day, I have only taken one formal workshop in literary translation, taught by the great poet and translator Keith Waldrop in the spring of 2002. Beginning to translate can be a fraught endeavor—there is a seeming abundance of potential errors, pitfalls, and failures. There is an assumption that one should be translating the very best texts in the most accurate, faithful rendering. Waldrop, brilliant iconoclast that he is, eschewed most conventional wisdom and encouraged us to translate what we most wanted to translate, and to make it better in the translation—he refused the conventional thinking that a translation was, by default, inferior to the original text. Thanks to his teachings—as well as my own youthful boldness—when I came across the poems of Sagawa Chika, the fact that she was a little-known poet, and that I was only beginning to translate, did not dissuade me.

      It is now evident to more people that Sagawa Chika was a singular and deeply compelling poet, part of a global literary modernism.*3 Her influences include the Modernist Anglophone writers whose work she translated, as well as work from European literary and artistic movements, much of it translated or imported by her peers. Within this context, Chika’s poems have a particularly idiosyncratic way of merging elements from her nature-filled upbringing with the cosmopolitan bustle of Tokyo. Despite her early death at the age of twenty-four, and her subsequent omission from the Japanese literary canon, her poems have leaped over time to reach a wider audience today. It is proof of the importance of her remarkable œuvre, created in less than six years of poetic production during one of the largest social and cultural shifts of her nation’s history.

      —

      Sagawa Chika was born in 1911 as Kawasaki Chika (川崎愛),*4 to a family that owned apple orchards in Yoichi, Hokkaido, a small rural city with a population of about sixteen thousand. Nestled between the mountains and the sea in the far north of Japan, it is buried in deep snow for much of the winter. Frail from birth, Chika had difficulty walking until the age of four, and had problems with her vision. She had no father figure, but instead grew close to her half-brother, Kawasaki Noboru. Against her family’s wishes, she entered a girls’ high school, and then went on to attain her license to teach English. In 1928 at age seventeen, she again disregarded her family’s advice and moved to Tokyo, following her brother who had gone four years prior, as well as his friend Ito Sei, who had left for Tokyo four months before Chika and with whom she had a brief romantic relationship. By the time Chika arrived and moved in with her brother, the two young men had established some literary connections in Tokyo and helped usher her into their milieu.

      Decades before Chika was born, the Meiji era (1868–1912) saw the overhaul of many fundamental aspects of Japanese government, economy, society, and culture. The old shogunate system was dismantled and eventually replaced with Japan’s first constitution. Industrialization accelerated the rise of its military and paved the way for a

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