from Death Sentence
Hagiwara Kyojiro
translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita
Using an imaging software, the target text was first superimposed on top of the source text in order to approximate the positional relationship of the textual and visual elements. Although the orientation of the source text is vertical, the entire page was rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise for the sake of readability in the target text. As a result of prioritizing the text, some of the visual cues are lost for English readers, most notably the smoke stacks in “Soot and Smoke.”
Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899–1938) was born in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, Japan. His early works consisted of traditional waka and tanka poetry, but his interests shifted toward modern verse forms during the late 1910s. By the 1920s, Hagiwara was involved in editing two anarchist/DADA coterie journals during his short lifetime: Red and Black and MAVO. The latter was also an arts and performance group that was influential to many neo-avant-garde movements in postwar Japan. He died of hemolytic anemia in 1938. He was forty years old.
Sho Sugita writes and translates poetry in Matsumoto, Japan. He is the translator of Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems of Hirato Renkichi (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and author of Native Genius (The Elephants, 2018), a chapbook of poems-on-translation.
