から 62 のソネット

Why, when there are so many exceptional books of contemporary Japanese poetry published each year, am I choosing to translate Shuntaro Tanikawa’s 1953 book, 62 Sonnets? First, I believe this is an important book that deserves an updated translation and a wider English-language readership. And second, I’m not alone in thinking that Tanikawa’s name and works should be as familiar to English-language readers as those of Miłosz, Celan, or Tranströmer; this book feels like a good first contribution to celebrate his work and legacy.

In these translations I’ve tried to align to Goethe’s third “epoch,” “in which the translator identifies so strongly with the original that he more or less gives up the uniqueness of his own nation.” What I mean by this is that I have tried to maintain both the precision and crispness of Tanikawa’s language and images while also embodying the defamiliarizing and even destabilizing experience of becoming enmeshed into another language and another culture.

I believe part of the depth and resonance of these poems relies on Tanikawa’s masterful ability to lean into the ambiguity inherent in the Japanese language. I have also tried to maintain this balance of precision and ambiguity to emphasize the potential for personhood and animism in nonhumans—to enact the competing and coexisting energies of materialism and metaphor. I believe this layered opening of consciousness and act of orphic empathy to be both one component of the Japanese ethos and part of Tanikawa’s project more broadly.

Indeed, in the face of the ongoing climate crisis and several geopolitical conflicts, I believe we need this book of poems at this moment, not only to help us grapple with the certainty of immense and imminent change, but to help us manifest this change in a way that might enable us to navigate toward openness, ecological integration, and ontological reconciliation with our fellow humans and to nonhumans alike. Tanikawa’s ability to marry a philosophy of the quotidian to a sense of radical empathy, I believe, can help to prepare us for a more inclusive, and hopefully a much more strange, relationship with our planet and to each other.