Shuntarō Tanikawa: The Art of Being Alone, Poems 1952–2009 - Review from TPJ V11

Shuntarō Tanikawa: The Art of Being Alone, Poems 1952–2009, Shuntarō Tanikawa, translated from the Japanese and with an introduction by Takako U. Lento. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press & Cornell East Asia Series (2011).

Reviewed by Alton Melvar M. Dapanas for Tokyo Poetry Journal Vol.11: Tokyo City // Slice (edited by Zoria Petkoska K. and Matias Chiappe)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The second time I came across Shuntarō Tanikawa was through his sanbunshi, or prose poem, “Scissors” (trans. William I. Elliot and Kazuo Kawamura) in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (ed. Jeremy Noel-Tod, 2018). In this sanbunshi, he, son of a philosopher and a modernist, asked, “Habit alone keeps me from using the other names. Or is it out of self-defense?” And what could be more epistemological than that? But in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, for the first time, I read Tanikawa’s “Rōsoku ga tomosareta” [The Candles were Lit] as shared by a Tumblr.com blog I followed back in the day, as well as his much anthologized “Words” where he wrote, “Words put forth buds / From the earth beneath the rubble”. 

Fast forward a decade to the midst of a pandemic. As a beginning translator, I found myself reading Tanikawa again, through his profiles and poems that were translated into several languages in my dream journals such as World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, and Poetry International, among others. The first question I asked was: How can one person possess the unlikely dual identity of being “Japan’s best-known living poet,” in the words of Jeffrey Angles, and one of the most inventive at the same time? Add the word ‘prolific’—sixty plus collections of poetry alone, in an ongoing career that spans seven decades—and we have a recipe for envy of every poet and translator. I do not include his work translating Peanuts comics and nursery rhymes, and writing children’s books and movie scripts; or that he also composes lyrics of songs, contributes satire for newspapers, comedies for the theater, and has had excursions into other audio-visual arts. 

This current collection Tanikawa Shuntarō: The Art of Being Alone, Poems 1952–2009, or more aptly a single-author anthology as it could be read as one, is translated by Takako U. Lento, who also provides a critical introduction to the poems, with the addition of occasional translations by W.S. Merwin, products of collaboration with the author himself. Lento, Iowa Workshop-schooled, is a skillful translator: rendering Tanikawa’s distinct poetic voice and reinforcing it for the Anglo-American reader. Her introduction is carefully crafted: in it Lento suggestively gestures how many external factors shaped Tanikawa’s poetry. A good resource not only for scholars and avid readers of the poet’s oeuvre, but also, on a larger scale, 20th century East Asian literature, as well as Japanologists, but also for non-academic Japanophiles and a generalist readership. Lento’s introduction is fitting because Tanikawa himself attracts an audience within and outside Japan whose literary tastes vary. I find it a good companion to another anthology I have read, Shuntarō Tanikawa: New Selected Poems (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2015), by his long-time translators William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura, who curated works from 62 Sonnets (1953) until Kokoro (2015) for the above mentioned book. In the introduction, Lento discloses what translators are mostly anxious about: the perpetual tensions between literal translations or ‘word-for-word’ (“bringing … the original cadence, diction, and feeling … to be as faithful as possible to the original”) and creative translations or ‘sense-for-sense’ (“feel [the poem’s] emotional charge, and … understand its connotations and significance”). Lento goes on to suggest that readers compare her translation and the book to those of others—Elliot and Kawamura come to my mind. 

In The Art of Being Alone, somehow historiographical, Lento traces the expanse of Tanikawa’s body of work like an aesthetico-historical timeline. After all, a project this expansive is much needed for Japan’s “first poet of the post-war period” (Bownas & Thwaite, 2009). Five of Tanikawa’s poetry collections have been translated here in full along with selections from other collections. This book begins with poems that are meditations on ecology from Tanikawa’s first collections—Alone in Two Billion Light Years (1952) and 62 Sonnets (1953). In “A Walk On A Cloudy Day,” he wrote, “<Nah, I won’t despair / I just miss the blue sky>,” while in the sonnet “19: Vastness”, he mused: 

In the vast expanse nobody notices 

Time dies 

I will stay aware of a vastness people can’t even imagine 

I will be mindful of my life and death 

among the things that are indifferent to me 

I walk on    as if I were one of those 

I stop looking 

Suddenly then I begin to live

One notices here the sense of witnessing found in many forms of literature, particularly in lyric poetry. But what makes this different is the I-persona’s outsider gaze, seeing things that other people don’t, seeing things from a particular vantage point of the outside looking in, seeing things as a human looking out into the natural world he is both part and not part of. This reminds me of what Eve Zimmerman wrote about Tanikawa: he “meditates on life from a detached, even bemused perspective” (2007). In “A Morning Takes Shape” from The Day Small Birds Vanish from the Sky (1974), moreover, we find a poetic persona directly telling us:

The morning was there

Cold water rushed out of the faucet 

The smell of miso soup filled the room

…

I saw the morning take shape 

surer than happiness, brighter than hope 

As one of the founders of Kai [Oar] in 1953, a group of lyric poets, along with Hiroshi Yoshino, Noriko Ibaragi, Kōichi Iijima, Hiroshi Kawasaki, Makoto Ōoka, and Toshio Nakae, Tanikawa’s early poems are described by Bownas and Thwaite (2009) as “fresh lyricism express[ing] Japan’s new hope, an alternative to the nihilism of the immediate post-war years”. In Letteratura Giapponese (2019), Tanikawa’s poetry is also introduced to an Italian readership as a “work of polyphony in texts intended for the radio or for the visual” [translation mine]. This is not surprising given Tanikawa’s interdisciplinary background in the arts. In the seemingly disparate poetic sequence found in Fragments of a Forged Talamaikan Manuscript (1978) and “Perspective” from The Map of Days (1982)—the collections which, in my opinion, established him as an avant-garde poet—that sonic and extra-textual quality is very evident. 

As a reader (and sometimes, writer) of a contentious genre and form, the prose poem, I would like to mention that translations of Tanikawa’s sanbunshi—from sanbun, ‘prose broadly conceived’, and the Chinese loanword shi, ‘poetry broadly conceived’—are a complete turnaround, the final tying of a knot to a thread. I say this because historically, the first sanbunshi were translations—indirectly from English to Japanese rather than directly from the Russian original, or jūyaku, translations of translations—of the prose poems by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. This made literary historians and scholars conclude that the sanbunshi is “conceived in criticism, then born through translation” (Mehl, 2021). Tanikawa’s early sanbunshi had Franco-Russian influences [see “A Chair” from On Love (1955) and the excerpts from Definitions (1975)], while the latter ones showed he had found his own poetic ground [see “Postscript” from minimal (2002) and the excerpts from Coca Cola Lesson (1980)], as if his oeuvre is a representative testament to the flourishing of the genre within Japanese literary tradition. And in so many ways, it is. 

Overall, this remarkable book, which comprises Tanikawa’s body of works, zooms straight into the often ignored nuances of being alone, something celebrated in introspective and individualistic Japan but frowned upon in the rest of the world, but not necessarily an unhealthy, self-destructive isolationism. It also delves into the connections, external and internal, that we forge, and maybe, just maybe, how we look out into the world. In several interviews, Tanikawa would point to having a ‘sheltered’ childhood with a middle–class upbringing as his ‘shield’ from the very history that was happening outside the walls of their well-to-do household. That surely was an influence, coupled with having a philosopher for a father and a musician for a mother. Perhaps that’s a germ for another book-length work by another literary scholar. Nevertheless, I may not be the acting spokesperson for all introverts, but consider this book about—and definitely a great poet’s personal take and artistic contribution on—being alone getting an introvert’s stamp of approval.