Translation, Poetry, and so many Possibilities

Translation has intrigued me since I was a kid going to a French school on the east coast of Canada. It opened up a magical space that I moved through each day, thrilled to have a language that my parents could not speak. When I started learning Japanese, I felt I was just a few months away from being able to read poetry in Japanese. Haha! I was years away from an elusive goal but the optimism, the naivete that I’d get there soon helped buoy my efforts.

I started translating poetry when I was living in Tokyo and studying at Hosei University. Translating together with other poets was a way to connect and share our work.  I soon found that navigating from Japanese to English involves a lot of re-creating. I met Yuka Tsukagoshi and was immediately impressed by her poems and careful approach to reading. Originally from Gunma, she writes poetry, fiction, and is an excellent translator. From 2009–2011, I worked with Tsukagoshi to edit and translate a bilingual poetry journal,  Eki Mae. We would meet at a diner with a drink bar and spend hours going over poems. Ayumu Akutsu contributed poems and did the layout and graphic design. We published three volumes before I moved back to California: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 3. We created the journal ourselves and shared our poems as well as poems of poets who we admire. This is typical of poetry journals in Japan. Poets tend to be members of a poetry circle or poetry journal that they publish collectively as a group. Together, we translated poems by Fumiko Yamanaka, Brenda Hillman, and  Ilya Kaminsky and published them as featured poets followed by our own poems.

More recently, I’ve contributed to the journal Crossing Lines which brings together the work of writers in Tokyo, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area. All poems are published in both English and Japanese. Mizuho Ishida and Yutaka Nimomiya founded the journal together. They were both students of Shigeyoshi Hara at Dokkyo University in Saitama. Shige is an expert in Bay Area poetry and has taught generations of students about the poetry movements in and near San Francisco. The vision for Crossing Lines to connect geographichally specific poetry conversations developed out of their studies with Shige. Mizuho is a poet living near Tokyo and the head priest of the Enzo-in Buddhist temple.Yutaka is a wonderful translator who did graduate work at Dokkyo and is currently running Crossing Lines. The poems are translated by a vibrant team of poets and scholars dedicated to contemporary poetry. They meet once a month to discuss their translations in a group called Nomads.

Since 2016, I’ve worked with Ayako Takahashi, a Kobe based scholar and translator known for her scholarship on Gary Snyder and ecopoetry. We meet in person when we can and regularly over Zoom. Ayako is a phenomenal scholar and an excellent reader of poetry. She translates the poems and sends me notes. Then, I translate them, and we meet and talk through them line by line by line. We can usually do a stanza or 4-6 lines in an hour. It’s possible, probable, that I’m the one who slows us down. 

Getting the poem to live again in English is hard and takes a lot of spinning through possibilities. I like the making of it, the process of it so I’m not pushing to get it shored up or completed. If it weren’t for Ayako’s prodding, we’d never finish anything. 

Our most recent work, Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi, was published with Vagabond Press in 2023. Ayako Takahashi and I spent six years translating the poems. Wago lives in Fukushima City and teaches Japanese literature in a high school. The collection starts with tweets from the first days after 3.11, during the meltdown of the nuclear power station Fukushima Daiichi, and follows the catastrophe for ten years. It includes an interview with Wago and poet Brenda Hillman, connecting two poets who are writing ecopoetry and exploring how poetry and teaching can be forces of change. 

Translations from this collection are online in Two Lines, and Poetry Northwest. Dave Seter wrote in a review in Tupelo Quarterly, “when ecopoetry succeeds in conveying  both emotion and scientific detail, it achieves the remarkable: it remains a form of art. The poems in Since Fukushima meet that test. “

Ayako Takahashi and I are now translating the writings of Kora Rumiko, a prizewinning feminist poet and essayist barely known overseas. Her poems are sparse and fierce. Drawing attention to the destruction wrought by war and capitalism, her work voices resistance and gendered oppression. 

At a time when Japanese modernist poets were looking to surrealism and European literary movements, Kora was bringing attention to poems and literary movements from other parts of Asia and Africa. For many years, she translated and published a journal of poetry from Asia and Africa. She also worked to establish a prize celebrating women poets in Japan. 

Getting inside her work has been an incredible journey so far. We visited her archives in Tokyo in February 2024, where I saw Kora’s work in a larger context. I saw the handwritten drafts and revisions of some of her most celebrated poems. It’s wonderful to be immersed in her poems and to bring her work to an English-language readership. Our first translations of her work are published in Four Ways Review.

I love reading work in translation and know that it’s immensely important that we can have literary connections across languages. The work is hard but also nourishing. What keeps me with it is the sense of connection not just with the poets but also with the poems and how translating them is a way to keep them alive.