The Unseen Kyoto

The works below were among poems carefully chosen by Satō for her prestigious Kyoto Writers Residency in October this year, which featured Satō alongside writers from around the world. Thanks to the Ritsumeikan University-based translator, scholar, and author Professor Kyoko Yoshida, who arranged translations for Satō’s residency, this is the second time that Hiromitsu Koiso and I have worked together to translate her work.

As translators who appreciate one another’s bilingual poetic output (both of us work in both Japanese and English), Hiro and I collaborated fluidly, almost unconsciously, when faced with the daunting task of translating the crystalline poetry of Ayaka Satō. The underlying confidence and lucidity of the poems—a quality difficult to apprehend in isolation, lying as it does across the poems—is paradoxically a heavy task for translation, since the efficient mechanics of such poetry means that so many interdependent parts must be maintained in translation. This was our task, and so, we never found ourselves asking one another how we might better make our drafts conform to modes of English-language haiku or tanka present today, or how to make certain Japan-specific elements more explicit in English. Instead, the drafts were approached as contemporary poems by a poet whose indomitable self-presence spans the variety of forms she works in. Satō’s apparent lack of anxiety about crossing lanes, if you like, from so-called traditional modes and the tropes they bear, to contemporary ones, has given the translators in turn the confidence to commit most of all to the language.

Satō-san’s meticulous and probing commentary during the production of these English translations meant that the poet’s subjectivity, a radical component of much contemporary free-verse Japanese poetry, easily assumed the role of diligent auditor of the translations’ production. Thus the poet stands large here, if unobtrusively in that paradoxical lyric poetry way, with all of the elusiveness, self-awareness, emotiveness and wit this entails.

Now, the reader is, in one way or another, absent from Satō’s autumnal Kyoto found across these works of distinct poetic form. The transposition of Satō’s situation-embedded, context-driven, always implicatory style—a trait typical of haiku that can also be found in her free-verse poems—was our primary focus. As it happens, Satō-san is an eager runner, and the animated runner’s eye seems to coruscate within the observant, mobile poetry generated. We sought to render that coordinated balancing act the poems engender between the minutiae of a memory-infused but highly detailed “unseen Kyoto” that Satō-san vividly charts, and the more immediate percepts of the real, a kind of hovering between the lucid and the turbid that required fairly committed redrafting between us and, later, with the poet.

Satō-san’s advice often proved clarifying. For example, she asked that the implied Kyoto of miyako in the title of “The Unseen Kyoto” be made explicit in the English version. The obviousness of the implication was not evident in one of our drafts’ choice of “The Unseen Capital”. Overall, the poet might be said to have sought greater lucidity where we the translators had leant on the “unseen” dimensions of the poems. The poet evidently understood better than anyone else the stakes of that impossible balancing act the poems perform. The advice from Satō-san was highly consequential and a significant learning experience in understanding how poets may make work translated into a second language their own. Honouring the poet’s urge that the reader be adequately coordinated such that the gravity of particular words and observations were sustained in translation, the directionality of implied addresser and addressee preserved, and so on, became for Hiro and me the central assignment to respond to. In the end, we are proud to say that in readings for the prestigious Kyoto Writers Residency the poet made the English translations very much her own before a multilingual audience.

We might look to Satō and her generation for a new trend of permissiveness, clarity, and immediacy, developed toward a poetics transcending genre divisions between haiku, tanka, and contemporary free verse, and a new personalization of the place of these genres in an artist’s lifeworld. Such a trend carries an implicit endorsement in that confident, witty, and eagle-eyed poetic mode of Ayaka Satō found here.