To celebrate the launch of the issue, Xi Xi winning the Newman Prize for Chinese literature , Hong Kong’s resident online literary journal, is organizing an and the guest editor of ’s Winter 2019 issue in an interview with Poupeh Missaghi, our editor-at-large in Iran—and Chris Song, one of the winners of the which announced its results a few weeks prior. on April 27 at Bleak House Books, where eight contributors will be reciting and discussing their works. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, founding co-editor of ’s Hong Kong feature, will also speak about the conception of the special edition ..read more

Elisa Taber: Kenneth Rexroth famously commented on Japanese poetry and translation, “It is (…) more essentially poetic. Many, especially Japanese, editors and translators have been embarrassed by this intensity and concentration and have labored to explain each poem until it has been explained away.” You seem to encapsulate, rather than expound, the meaning of each verse, by translating the tanka form in three lines rather than the customary five. Were you wary of over-explaining Tawara’s work? last month. Carpenter describes the wry self-awareness that comes across in Tawara’s poetry wit ..read more

One of the submitters to The Plaza: A Space for Global Human Relations was poet and editor Sherry Reniker, who had a knack for writing colorful correspondence and an experimental edge. At around that time, she was editing broadsides for the imprint published by Karl Young from Wisconsin, , whose authors included Morgan Gibson and a number of Japanese visual poets. Through her generous lead, I would correspond and eventually meet both Morgan and Objectivist poet , the latter based in Kyoto and the poet who first published Gary Snyder ( 1959) through his Origin press. (Cid told me he had met Wil ..read more

This week for Translation Tuesday, Spotted as if with falling blood, ” These fragments from Japanese luminary Yonezawa Nobuko revel in the fusion of concept and image in miniature. Inspired by the Symbolist tradition, Yonezawa’s poetry seems to refract the very words that make it up, allowing for subjective particulates to surface from the flow of experience and conspire with the reader. In this skillful translation, the concrete style of the original is maintained, so that the form of the stanzas themselves seem to impress a visual coherence and solidity to the movement of the language. As if ..read more

XYS: I find that most Japanese writers have this very regulated schedule. Well, mutually exclusive in terms of lifestyle, but my first book was about corporate finance theory. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and got my MBA in corporate finance in my twenties, and I wrote a book of poetry by applying such theories of the Black-Scholes option model, etc., to describe Japanese society at that time—which was peaking economically, and everyone was sensing that the burst of the bubble was not so far away, yet we kept going and going and going. That was an overlap. So I had always been an ou ..read more

Chieko, who wanted to return home so badly writes: “The Chieko Poems tell the story of the poet’s love for his wife. Reading the anthology chronologically, we begin with poems that describe the passion of their early romance and elopement against the wishes of their parents, following along as the poems become concerned with the trauma of Chieko’s mental illness and early death in 1938. Even after she is gone, Chieko remained the central figure in Kotaro’s life, and he would continue to write poem after poem about her. [. . .] The Chieko Poems are unforgettable as much for their early romance ..read more

One of my favorite examples of this is the word in the Tsugaru dialect of “udade.” Depending on the age of the person you’re talking to, they might say this word only means something really bad or uncomfortable, whereas young people are more likely to use it meaning cool and good—the same way you use “yabai” in contemporary standard Japanese (like certain expletives in English used in either positive or negative connotations). But actually, I think this word comes from the Manyoshu, which is an ancient collection of poetry. In the text, there’s the word “utate” and that word is an intensifier ..read more

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver distinctive poetry from  . In simple, colloquial free verse, sensitively preserved by translator John Newton Webb, a person is standing on the top of a hill. the children circled round and raised their hands ..read more

In its overarching theme of “Coexistence,” ’s monumental 50th issue draws together the quiet, the forgotten, and the unseen, allowing us to inhabit worlds that are not our own. From the bright unease of simultaneously veers away from and embraces this selfishness ), to the dedicated love in ’s Winter 2024 Issue examines the relationships we have with each other, with the world, and with ourselves. is a work of empathy—of putting on a parent’s shoes, of imagining the pain and the love of the life that led to yours. The lives of our parents are distant, disconnected from our own. Even for those ..read more

a person is standing on the top of a hill ..read more