Translator’s Preface “Lyric poetry has to be exorbitant or not at al.” GOTTERIED BENN, TRANSLATED by PIERRE JORIS Sakutard Hagiwara (1886-1042) was a defeated man by the time he published Hyotd ("The Iceland,” in his own English) in 1934. Five years earlier, his wife, Ineko, had eloped with a man who attended dance parties he hosted in his house, destroying any semblance of family life Hagiwara had maintained despite his dissolute behavior, frequent bar hopping with or without friends the least of it. He was forced to leave Tokyo, the center of literary and artistic activities, and return with his two daughters to Maebashi, Gunma, a “barren, barbarous blank paper zone utterly devoid of any cultural tradition,” as he called his hometown. In xo17, Hagiwara’s book of poems, Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the “Moon), had opened up new tersitory in Japanese poetry by using the language in which “poetry appears concretely in words themselves,” as the poct Kotard Takamura putt, But nov the mental, psychologi- cal makeup that had enabled Hagiwara to write poems to create an “illusory internal realism,” in the words of a later poet, Tard Naka, seemed to have long deserted him. ‘Those were the poems published in Howling at the Moon and his second book, Aoncko (Blue Cat), in 1923, The change was clearest in the "poetic diction” he employed in The Iceland, effectively his third poetry collection. And Hagiwara felt uneasy about it—so uneasy that he wrote a full throated defense of the diction two and a half years later“L wrote the poems in The Iceland all in Chinese-style language for writing,” he began his apologia, “On the Poetic Diction of The Ice- land.” By “Chinese-style,” kanbur-ch3, he meant the style developed ‘through the longtime Japanese practice of “translating” classical Chi- nese writings as literally as possible, retaining as many Chinese words and phrases asis feasible, The results usually come acrossas terse and “masculine” against the agglutinative indigenous Japanese language, ‘which can sound more sinuous and “feminine.” By “language for writing,” bunshd-go, he was referring to the style used in writing, as opposed to spoken language, although he may have meant more of bungo, classical language with compressed verb inflections. In his ‘mind, bunsho-go also included archaisms such as nanji, which is com parable to the English “thou.” “That I wrote them in language for writing was to me a clear ‘retreat’ [his English,” Hagiwara continued. "The reason was that, beginning with my maiden poetry col lection Howling at the Moon, Uhad resisted [writing] poetry in classical literary language and worked toward a new creation of free verse in spoken language and a bold destruction of the poetry already made. For me to write poems in literary language now was, against my history tll then, certainly to decamp toward the rear. ‘And yet, Hagiwara pleaded, he had to make the “self humiliating, retreat” out of psychological necessity. in writing the poems in ‘The Iceland, “language for writing” ‘was to me the absolutely needed poetic diction. To put it an- other way, it was impossible to express the emotions and senti- ments of that poetry collection in a language other than that for writing, At the time my life was bankrupt, a spiritual crisis ‘was pressing down on me. [felt fury at everything, l constantly felt like shouting out loud. When I wrote Ble Cat, I was in the midst of inaction andllassitude, drowningin dreams of opium, and still held a vision in my mind. But, by the time I wrote The Iceland, 1 had long lost that vision. Only fury, hatred, desola- tion, denial, skepticism, all the fierce emotions remained in my ‘mind, The spirit that The Iceland held out as poesy could in fact bbe summed up in what's contained in the word “scream.” He then turned to explaining how modern-day spoken Japanese, ‘which he had earlier used to its maximum advantage, lacks “tension, how it is “viscous,” “inarticulate,” “deficient of bounce in rhythm, and so forth. That spoken language—"cadenceless, viscous, as ling ing as spider web"—was most appropriate to Blue Cat, but not here, with The feeland, Hagiwara argued, In these, Hagiwara also resorted to a heavy or philosophical (if you will vocabulary thats seemingly undigested. Irreflected his ab- sorption in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both of whom he mentions inhis apologia ("Schopenhauerean world of nihiity”;“sentimentsand imagination with a flexibly strong Will like Nietesche’s poetry”; and “Nietzsche curses German as a language for military commands”). ‘These and other Western philosophers had been or were being trans- lated into Japanese with certain urgency atthe time Hagiwara began ‘writing, with the translations studded with neologisms created by combining Chinese characters. In fact, in his apologia Hagiwara con- cdemns such Chinese-based neologisms as language you can’t under- stand by ear alone, a “visual language that's monstrous.” only to say that without them he would nothave been able to write The Iceland.Hagiwara ends his apologia with a note of resignation permitted only in a recognized master. “After desperately struggling and suffer ingin my attempt to discover a new Japanese language, I, in the end, went back to old Japanese,” he wrote, “In that respect, [might as well say Ihave abandoned my cultural mission as a poet.” Most of the linguistic features Hagiwara regretted using in The Iceland are hard to bring across in translation. And his use of punc- ‘uation in his poems was exceedingly odd. This oddity has been re- tained in my translation to the extent I deemed possible, even though this may make the results appear careless at times—the problem compounded by the fact that the Japanese language does not have anything comparable to capital letters of the English alphabet, let alone the custom of beginning each sentence with a capital letter. ‘The anomalous diction and style of Hagiwara’s original, how- ‘ever, endow many of the poems with an “obdurate fervor” and the “tone of lamentation’ associated with certain classical Chinese po- try, as Taro Naka pointed out—exactly the effects Hagiwara wanted to create in pouring out his grief and disconsolation. The language in The Iceland was, as he said, what he needed to express what to him ‘was “the uniform protyle expression of poetic passion”—Iyricism. HIROAKI SATO Author's Preface Lyrical poetry in recent times on the whole has been biased toward sensitivity, has run to Imagism, or has indulged in intellect’s design construct, forgetting the uniform protyle expression of poetic pas sion. In fact, this kind of poetry is thought innocent in today's crit: cism, categorized as it is in the section of primitive forms of poetry. Nonetheless, when you think of it, the ultimate of multiple colors ‘ends in a primary color, the ultimate of complexity in simplicity, and the ultimate of all advanced artstries in artless, natural singleness ‘The [Greek] idea that poetry as art attains in the finality of its histori cal development exists in the simplest protyle of so-called Poesie, that fs, the innocent, pure lamentation of poetic passion. (In this sense, thisauthor thinks thatthe Japanese tanka and haiku will be the future forms modern poetry idealizes) Such ratiocinations aside, the small number of poems included in this poetry book are, at least to the author, genuinely passionate poems of lamentation that innocently, directly, expressed only the purest stirrings of poetie passions. In other words, the author dis- ‘carded all artistic intents and artistic ambitions and wrote “just as the heart dictated,” leaving himself to whatever moved him naturally. Accordingly, he himself does not want to ask the world about the value of this book of poems. A correct criticism of this book must be that is not so much a work of artas a record of the author's real life, an acutely written diary of his heart ‘The author's pas life was that of a disconsolate iceberg that drifts and flows in the polar regions of the northern seas. Looking at the phantom ke auroras from various spots ofthe iceberg, he yearned, suffered, rejoiced, sorrowed, at times getting angry with himself, as