by Chika Sagawa
It is not so much about searching for boundaries, but rather the precise snapping together of the infinite allusions on either side of that single line, with the cross-sections of a leaping field of vision. And yet, the highs and lows of artistic rhythm are determined by whether that field of vision is near or far.
While this statement resonates with André Breton’s definition of surrealism as the juxtaposition of “two distant realities,” it also enfolds the Cubist collapsing of foreground and background. Her relationship to visual art is further articulated in her prose text “Had they been the eyes of fish”:
I believe that the work of a painter is very similar to that of a poet. I know this because looking at paintings wears me out. Though I doubt there are many poems that are written with the same attention to the effect of color- or motif-based composition; the mood engendered by shadows; and lines determining their point of contact with space within a composition. I suspect that most poems are written with whatever random thought occurs to the poet. In some cases that’s fine, although poems like that are already ruined. They are banal and have a short life span.
Fish eyes are more spherical than those of humans—with a greater refractive index, they are capable of bending light at a sharper angle. Furthermore, the fact that this refractive index changes throughout the lens provides for a sharp image with no optical aberrations, in spite of the spherical lens. In poetry, Chika’s precisely broken lines allow us to read her poems not as fixed, stable objects, but as something more architecturally complex, inviting us to read, or see, the poem from multiple angles.
Modernism in Japanese poetry was more than just a break from the past. It was a difficult negotiation between old and new, one for which Sagawa Chika had special aptitude. Formally her poetry displays a radical break from traditional Japanese poetry (waka), and yet poems such as “Blue horse,” “Spring,” and “Seasons” use nature to depict seasonal change, very much in the spirit of waka. In contrast to the open exaltation of nature so typical of waka, though, Chika’s depictions of nature tend to be threatening and ominous: “All shadows drop from the trees and gang up on me” (“Black air”). Chika’s poems are neither conclusive, epiphanic, chronological, nor narrative. Instead, they originate in perception and emotional response, taking a form akin to collage and montage.
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Institutional efforts to standardize the Japanese language had been initiated in the Meiji era and continued into the 1920s, but Chika and her fellow writers felt free to draw from foreign vocabulary, including words in Portuguese, Dutch, German, French, and English.*16 Likewise, creative use of orthography left room for the use of certain kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) that have since disappeared. Chika’s poetry is exemplary of this multilingualism. Although the translations in this book do not emphasize these elements, some of her poem titles, such as “The mad house,” “Finale,” and “The street fair,” were originally written in English. Other poems use words written directly in English or via the phonetic katakana script used for foreign words.*17 Furthermore, even different versions of the same poem can illustrate how rapidly language use was evolving. For example, the “bread” in her poem called “Morning bread” was, upon first publication, written with the Chinese characters “麵麭,” but was republished a year later with the same word written in katakana as pan (パン), taken from the Portuguese word pão and homonymous with the French pain.
Chika’s work lived at the intersection of languages. Thus her literary translations also show her combining and remixing in this mode as well. Some of her poems are populated with Western personages that figure in the poems she translated—these include the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff’s “Queen in May”*18 as well as the sailors in the poems of Harry Crosby. They also showcase Chika’s unique ability to transform lines from the works she translated.
GATE OF SNOW
There are outdated beliefs piled up around that house.
—Already pale, like gravestones.
Cool in summer, warm in winter.
For a moment I thought flowers had bloomed
But it was just a flock of aging snow.
The last three lines are adapted from lines by Reznikoff: “The house is warm in winter, cool in summer”; “I thought for a moment, The bush in the backyard has blossomed”; “it was only some of the old leaves covered with snow.” Her beautiful compression of Reznikoff’s lines forges a middle ground between the writing and the translating of poetry. Chika transplants the lines of this Objectivist poet to a space that resonates more generally with her own tense relationship with the natural world.
A closer look at the activity of the Modernist poets opens up new relationships between translation, multilingualism, originality, and authorship. Moving one word of a text into a different language can be seen as a kind of microtranslation. The notion of a translator owning the words of a translated text upsets the assumed hierarchy that makes the original text primary, and the translated text secondary, and thus inferior. Ono Yū, an editor who scoured used bookstores in Japan assiduously collecting Chika’s poems, in addition to beautifully publishing her collected poems, also published a collection of texts that Chika translated from English to Japanese. Here is a body of literature that might offer new insight into the relationship between translation and literature, beyond the current limits of our inherited practices.
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In 1935, Chika was diagnosed with late-stage stomach cancer, and she succumbed to the disease in January 1936. Her last publications were excerpts of diary entries from her hospital stay, but even in earlier poems, the threat of death was never very far away.
Plans to publish a collection of her poetry did not come to fruition before her death. Ito Sei compiled and edited her work, publishing it with Shōshinsha that same year. Later, in 1983, Shinkaisha published a new edition that included poems discovered after the initial publication. The 2010 edition, upon which this translation is based, likewise added a few recently discovered texts.
Posthumous publication required that editorial decisions be made on Chika’s behalf. Thus the poems are arranged in the order of initial publication, with the collection including all poems that have been published in any form. In a few instances, such as with “Beard of death” and “Illusory home,” poems are so similar that one could argue that they are two versions of the same poem, but the editors have chosen to include both. The appendix of the 2010 edition includes extensive notes regarding variations on published versions of poems, through which one can see the differences in punctuation and style that might otherwise have been unified by the poet herself, had she been given the chance.
Chika’s early death, along with the effects of World War II, prevented her work from finding a strong foothold in literary history. Even for writers who lived through the war, Modernist experimentation created a special set of difficulties. An FBI-like organization called the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu, also known as the Shisō Keisatsu or “Thought Police,” had taken to arresting writers and intellectuals whose work was deemed unpatriotic. Poets were pressured by the government to prove their loyalty by writing patriotic verse. “Virtually every avant-garde poet cooperated with the war effort […]. Almost any poet could serve equally well as an example, and a similar scenario of capitulation would have been observed.”*19 Another prominent example is that of Nishiwaki Junzaburō, who abandoned his avant-garde pursuits in favor of the politically “safer” activity of researching classical Japanese literature.
While Japanese women poets have historically had a stronger presence in traditional poetic forms, there were very few who participated so rigorously in the intellectual explorations of the avant-garde. In that light, note the following words from Nishiwaki Junzaburō, upon Chika’s death:
Her poems were extremely honest, with a certain poetic heat at the
core. There was absolutely nothing contrived in it; her poems felt truly alive. Even though she was a woman, I could see that her poems were enlivened by an intellectually clear and graceful thinking.*20
Nishiwaki’s mention of Chika’s gender may seem patronizing to us today, but he made this statement in 1936. Rather, it is proof that their Modernist community was indeed male-dominated. Shi to Shiron, the nucleus of Modernist writing in Japan, published work by only a handful of women, and of them, Chika was the first and most prominent. Thus her work is notable for transcending this massive gender divide. Unfortunately, these are the same qualities that contributed to her obscurity, as her writing was not easily legible within established frameworks of “women’s poetry,” and later, of “Japanese poetry.”*21
Nationalistic tendencies continued in Japan as literary criticism picked up again after the war. This included the tendency to promote anything that appeared “authentically” Japanese, rather than that which seemed too heavily influenced by the West. Many of Chika’s strongest champions were themselves pushed into oblivion by the cultural tides. Moreover, Western translators of Japanese poetry were attracted (through largely Orientalist inclinations) to work that read easily as “authentically Japanese.”
Over the last few decades, Chika’s poetry has steadily developed a contemporary audience. Reading her work in conjunction with that of other Modernists, beyond Japan and globally as well, highlights both the aspects of her work that are unmistakably Modernist and those that are entirely unique to her work. Chika has been an influence to many poets, most notably Yoshioka Minoru, one of Japan’s greatest postwar poets. Her book is said to be one of the few that Yoshioka took with him while he was stationed in Manchuria during the war. The connections are visible—the prismatic architecture evidenced in Chika’s poems foreshadows the layered montage in the poems of Yoshioka.
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In addition to contributing to a wider conversation about global modernisms, Sagawa Chika’s work makes a unique contribution to present-day considerations of multilingualism and translation in poetry. Chika has unfairly been cast as a “minor Modernist” or, a bit more lovingly, “everybody’s favorite unknown poet.” Fortunately, these labels are fading quickly, as more people have come to read, know, admire, and translate Sagawa Chika’s honest, experimental, and sensually rich poetry. As Chika wrote in her poem “Smoke Signals”: “And as life is burned / The time has come to spring into action.” First, the action of reading this book.
Updated March 2020
Providence, Rhode Island
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SAWAKO NAKAYASU writes and translates poetry and performances. Her forthcoming books include Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From (Wave Books), Pink Waves (Omnidawn), and an anthology of twentieth-century Japanese poetry, coedited with Eric Selland (New Directions). Other books include The Ants (Les Figues, 2014), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), a translation of the butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi’s Costume en Face (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), which is a multilingual work of original and translated poetry. She is currently working on a digital scholarly publication provisionally titled The Past and Future of Chika Sagawa, Modernist Poet, which considers the poetry of Chika Sagawa across a range of disciplines, temporalities, and media. She is Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.
*1 The book’s title uses the Western convention, but here Japanese names are given surname first. In Japan there is also a tradition of referring to admired poets by their first name, in this case, Chika. A better-known example is the haiku poet Bashō, whose full name is Matsuo Bashō.
*2 Over my years of engaging with translation, literature, and education, I have come to feel there are elitist and careerist tendencies in the field that are toxic to the art. My thanks go to Keith Waldrop, who taught me and others to translate out of love, and to translate for art.
*3 See Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology, edited by Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross, which includes Sagawa’s prose piece “When Passing Between Trees.”
*4 Her given name, “愛,” was pronounced “Chika” or “Ai.”
*5 Scholarship by Toshiko Ellis and William Gardner points to the activities of poets such as Anzai Fuyue (1898–1965) to show that contact with other Asian countries as a result of Japanese expansion had a specific relationship to the development of Japanese avant-garde poetics. See Toshiko Ellis, “The Topography of Dalian and the Cartography of Fantastic Asia in Anzai Fuyue’s Poetry,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 41, No. 4, East-West Issue (2004), 482–500, and William Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006).
*6 Toshiko Ellis, “The Japanese Avant-Garde of the 1920s: The Poetic Struggle with the Dilemma of the Modern,” Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter 1999).
*7 This earthquake destroyed over half of Tokyo, leaving more than 100,000 people either missing or dead.
*8 John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902–1978) (Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 24.
*9 It was only a few decades earlier that waka was the only way for poetry to be written. In the Meiji era, Japanese poetry saw the development of a new branch of poetry that was radically different from waka, and the long-standing traditions of tanka and haiku. First was the arrival of shintaishi, which was later referred to as jiyūshi (free verse poetry). Waka continues to be written to this day, but ever since the Meiji era, Japanese poetry has been divided into these two main branches, with poets from one side rarely connecting with poets on the other.
*10 Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, 1999).
*11 Sagawa Chika, Sagawa Chika Zenshishū (The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika) (Shinkaisha, 1983), 224.
*12 The Arcueil Club, which later became the VOU Club, comprised many avant-garde poets of the day, including Nishiwaki Junzaburō. It was named after Arcueil, the Parisian suburb where the composer Erik Satie lived. Literary coteries were quite active at the time, printing self-produced journals that featured the works of their members.
*13 Kitasono Katue, Kīroi Daen (Yellow Oval): Essays, Criticism, Scraps (Hōbunkan, 1953). Quoted by Komatsu Eiko in Ekoda Bungaku (Seiunsha, 2006), 92.
*14 The journal that Chika edited with Kitasono Katue was called Esprit and is referred to in several of her prose texts, like “Winter diary” and “Chamber music.”
*15 Chiba Sen’ichi, “Umi wa mitsuru koto nashi” (The ocean never waxes), Sagawa Chika Zenshishū shiori (The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika, insert) (Shinkaisha, 1983).
*16 Here the term “borrowed” seems appropriate, as many words failed to find a permanent place in the Japanese lexicon.
*17 For an alternative version of my translation of Sagawa that foregrounds the multilingual, see Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011).
*18 This poem was collected in Reznikoff’s book Jerusalem the Golden (1934). The fact that Chika published her translations in 1931 indicates that she most likely encountered it in an earlier journal publication.
*19 Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning, 138. The chapter “The Quicksand of Fascism” gives a fascinating discussion of this issue via the work of Kitasono Katue. See also Samuel Perry, Five Faces of Japanese Feminism: Crimson and Other Works, for an example of a female proletariat writer who was arrested and jailed for antiwar activism, but also succumbed, eventually, to the pressures of the times.
*20 Sagawa, Sagawa Chika Zenshishū, 239.
*21 By contrast, a poet like Yosano Akiko was innovative (and revolutionarily feminist) within the prescribed tradi
tional form of the tanka. Her open, passionate poetic style directly addressed her feminine body, sexuality, and desires and made her poetry wildly popular among young women. She was extremely prolific over her long life and career, and had the strong support of her influential poet husband, Tekkan, who championed her work above his own. Toshiko Ellis discusses the importance of Yosano Akiko, Sagawa Chika, and Ito Hiromi in “Woman and the Body in Modern Japanese Poetry,” Lectora 16 (2010): 93–105.
POEMS
INSECTS
Insects multiplied with the speed of an electric current.
Lapped up the boils on the earth’s crust.
Turning over its exquisite costume, the urban night slept like a woman.
Now I hang my shell out to dry.
My scaly skin is cold like metal.
No one knows this secret half-covering my face.
The night makes the bruised woman, freely twirling her stolen expression, ecstatic.
MORNING BREAD
In the morning I see several friends escaping from the window.
Temptation of the green insect. In the orchard a woman stripped of her socks is murdered. Morning, sporting a top hat, tags along from behind the orchard. Carrying a newspaper printed in green.
I, too, must finally go down the hill.
The city cafés are beautiful glass spheres, and a troop of men have drowned in wheat-colored liquid.
