Green Integer Books
jersey nfl jersey nba jersey jerseys jerseys yeezy jerseys yeezy watches jerseys jordans jerseys jerseys jerseys jerseys engineered wood flooring engineered hardwood flooring solid wood flooring wholesale engineered flooring

GREEN INTEGER

750 S. Spaulding Ave., Suite 112
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.


Home
Complete Catalog
* SALES *
Sun & Moon Catalog
Digital/PDF Catalog
Recent Titles
Best Sellers
Contact
About
Links

The Modern Fable

Nishiwaki Junzaburo

Translated from the Japanese with an Introduction by Hiroaki Sato




Price: U.S. $12.95
Nishiwaki Junzaburo
The Modern Fable
Series No.: 157
ISBN: 978-1-933382-66-1, Pages: 197
Japanese Literature, Poetry

Born in 1894, Nishiwaki Junzaburo began by writing poems in English and French, his first two books being published in London. His early poems of Ambarvalia (1933), although written in Japanese, maintained a startlingly foreign air, and throughout his long life, his work was described as a "translatory," a "violation of the mother tongue. Throughout his early career, Nishiwaki continued to publish work highly influenced by Western writing as represented in The Waste Land, Ulysses, and surrealism, through these poems revolutionizing Japanese poetry.

Perhaps his greatest book, in which he creates a kind of discourse between East and West, between the ancient and the modern, and between concretism and abstraction, was Kindai no gowu (The Modern Fable) of 1953.

This new collection of poetry by the great Japanese poet contains work from six of Nishiwaki's volumes: Ambarvalia, No Traveller Returns, The Modern Fable, The Third Myth, Slumber of a Gem, and Book of Rites—work published from 1933 to 1963—revealing his work to English language readers.

Nishiwaki died in 1982.



Book Review(s)




OYSTER BOY REVIEW, 2014

by Kathleen Hellen

Two worlds co-exist in the poetry of Junzaburo Nishiwaki (1894-1932): The first is associative, "whimsical" as Hiroaki Sato puts it in his introduction to The Modern Fable (2007), which contains translations from six of Nishiwaki's fourteen books of poems published between 1933 and 1963, and links the poet to the Surrealists in theory and practice.

The second world is conceptual, intellectual, linking Nishiwaki to the Postmodernists and giving heft to Ezra Pound's observation that Nishiwaki was writing in a "more vital english (sic) than any I have seen for some time."

In Nishiwaki's early work, Western allusions seem like inside jokes, everything from references to epic Greek and its philosophies and mythologies to Shakespeare, Keats, and Rilke. Western painters like Van Gogh and Matisse collaborate in Nishiwaki's image-making. Exotic landscapes dominate: Galilee and Smyrna, Capri, Ceylon. In Ambarvalia (1933), his style is marked by the parallelisms and repetitions frequent in Western poetry, his persona functioning like a sightseer in these strange geographies.

Until 1935, Nishiwaki, experimenting with new techniques, is fully engaged in the Surrealist Movement in Japan. He suddenly disappears. A period of silence follows, coinciding with the rise of Japan's militarism and its attendant suppression of speech, until the end of World War II. When he emerges a decade later, the poetry has distilled.

In No Traveler Returns, Nishiwaki unabashedly fuses Western and Eastern images and ideas. The title's allusion to Hamlet begs irony as poems situate in the landscape of Japan. Against a canvas of mountains and floating clouds, temples, the straw huts of villages recalling Basho's The Narrow Road of the Interior, the poet gives us Chaplin, Van Gogh, and Maupassant. Plural realities exist, worlds within worlds. The Japanese maid "hides in her trunk / a photograph of Greta Garbo."

Translations of Nishiwaki's work are complicated by his deliberate opaqueness. Sato in his introduction notes that some have criticized Nishiwaki's work as "translatory," referring among other things to the "ungainly effects brought about by Nishiwaki's attempt to re-create enjambment in Japanese." The voice is sometimes self-conscious, as Nishiwaki asks: "Is this trembling poem / a true poem?"

As in Basho's and the work of other haiku poets, themes of transience and loneliness find a home in The Modern Fable (1953) and Nishiwaki's later work. It is here the poet, no longer sightseer but voyeur, the outsider peering into "life's transient, tired window," begins his "long passionate journey" into the interior of the myth that is life, where "Deep deep dreams dream us." Nishiwaki works with words, with dialogue in a conceptual way. His world is sometimes hellish, Dantesque, a wasteland inhabited by prostitutes and palm readers, suicides and ghosts. The perspective is postmodern: "There's no other way than to adorn the eye with dreams / of words."

Writing between worlds, Nishiwaki does not surprise when he becomes in 1973 the first Japanese poet named as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1962, Nishiwaki was appointed to the Japan Art Academy. Pound in 1956 recommended him for the Nobel Prize.





 Recent Book Reviews
 America Awards
 Mr. Knife, Miss Fork
 Green Integer Review

  

Green Integer | 750 S. Spaulding, Suite 112 | Los Angeles, CA 90036
Contact Us

©2006, Green Integer , All Rights Reserved