Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan

Description

‘The aim of this project has been to translate or transform poems originally written in Japanese into poems that live and breathe as poems in English.’

This anthology collects 10 of the finest contemporary women poets working in Japan today and offers translations that reinterpret the work as poetry in English. The result is an edgy, compelling, beautiful group of works, presented in a bi-lingual format, that challenges perceptions of contemporary Japanese life, culture and history.

Poetry from:
ARAI TAKAKO
ISHIKAWA ITSUKO
ITO HIROMI
HIRATA TOSHIKO
KAWAGUCHI HARUMI
KONO SATOKO
MISAKI TAKAKO
MISUMI MIZUKI
NAKAMURA SACHIKO
YAMASAKI KAYOKO

From the Introduction of Poet to Poet by Rina Kikuchi:

I came to realise what we were trying to translate was not what was written on the page, but rather, what was not written. The goal of translation then for me became to re-create in English what one sees and feels when one reads the original poem in Japanese.

From the feature on Poet to Poet in the Japan Times:

The poems chosen explode with emotional sagacity across a wide variety of topics. There is black humor, sarcasm, pragmatic wit and lucent intelligence, and the poems cover topics ranging from wartime “comfort women” to kamikaze pilots and connections between strangers to cross-cultural alienation, including feelings of isolation within families or within your own country after living abroad.

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