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Collected
Tanka translated
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AKITSU Ei, Ms
Akitsu Ei, born in Japan in 1950, has challenged the unequal status of women.
Before her, women were mostly satisfied with looking after their families, and
thus wrote tanka about their husbands and children. AKITSU rejects such a
traditional way of women's life and emphasizes equality between man and woman.
She wants women to have an independent and dignified life like that of the
famous ancient poet Princess Nukada (ca. 659 - 72) who wrote an ode to autumn
in which she says: " However, when I see
Akitsu Ei has an even more sensual approach to herself and to nature as in her
tanka: #3 $4 She thinks that women should not be a sex
slave of a husband and that husband and wife should to
live on equal terms. She admits her own sexuality while at the
same time demanding changes of the relationships. #40 #62 #85 Many
of her tanka are out-spoken against the tabooed morality. #
97 She ironically criticized the modern
matrimonial system, which brings such inequality to
women. She is the first to write tanka by using
colloquial terms for sexual words which have been thought, until now, to be
unsuitable to this form of poetry. By excluding emotional and poetical beauty
from her tanka, she demands that we think about the questions; what is a
woman? what is a human being? what is tanka? Miyuki Aoyama and Leza Lowitz have made a
collection representative of tanka from Akitsu Ei's four books to
translate into English. I pray that English speaking people read
her tanka and think about the problems she presents as well as her novel
approach to the ancient form of tanka. ***
Akitsu Ei is one of Japan's leading tanka poets. Born
in Fukuoka in 1950, she studied psychology at Kyushu University and began
writing tanka in 1974. She published her first book, To Lily Magnolia,
in 1980. It received the Modern Tanka Poets Meeting Award. In
1984, she published Opium in Heaven, which won the Modern Tanka
Poet's Society Award. She has been particularly interested in the place of
women in Japanese society and has worked at the forefront of the movement
since 1984, organizing symposiums, lectures and readings.
Her third book of tanka, Faint White Light, came out
in 1987. Two years later, The Collected Tanka of Akitsu Ei was
published. Her book of critical essays, Ishta's Apple, was
published in 1993. And another book of tanka, Cosmic Dance, came out
in 1995. Her most recent book is a collection of critical essays, A
Study of Orikuchi Nobuo's Essays on Women's Tanka, 2001.
***
Miyuki Aoyama is a poet and literary critic. She
teaches American literature at Seitoku University in
Chiba Prefecture near Tokyo. She is co-editor of the popular anthologies of
contemporary Japanese women's poetry: A Long Rainy Season, which
won the
Benjamin Franklin Award for Editorial
Excellence, and Other Side River (Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA
1994/1995). She is author of a book of poetry, West Wind (Shichosha,
Tokyo 1998), and has just finished writing a book-length essay on Native
American literature. She is currently writing another poetry book. She
lives in the Japanese countryside with her family.
***
Leza Lowitz was born in San Francisco in 1962. A poet
and fiction writer, she has published two books of poems, Yoga Poems:
Lines to Unfold By (Stone Bridge Press, 2000) which received the PEN
Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Best Book of Poetry 2001, and Old Ways
To Fold New Paper (Wandering Mind Books, 1997). Her fiction has appeared
in The Broken Bridge: Expatriate Writing from Literary Japan (Stone
Bridge
Press), and An Inn Near Kyoto (New Rivers Press),
Prairie Schooner, and many others, and is forthcoming
in the anthology Expat (Beacon Press, 2002) and
The Louisiana Review (2002).
Lowitz lived in Japan from 1989-1994, where she taught
writing and
American Literature at Tokyo University, and was a freelance
writer for the "Japan Times" and many others. She was also a
columnist on contemporary Japanese art for "Art in America" and
the "Asahi Evening News" and her essays on expatriate
life were regularly broadcast on NHK Public Radio's "Japan Diary."
Lowitz edited and co-translated the popular anthologies of contemporary
Japanese women's
poetry, A Long Rainy Season (with Miyuki Aoyama and
Akemi Tomioka) and
Other Side River (Stone Bridge Press, 1994/5) with
Aoyama. She was
co-translator of the award-winning art history volume Japan:
Spirit and
Form (Charles E. Tuttle, 1994) and author of a travel
book, Beautiful
Japan (Charles E. Tuttle, 1997). She reviews
books regularly for the
Japan Times. Recently, she has covered Japanese
literature for the San
Francisco Chronicle, and done interviews for The
Bloomsbury Review, The Pacific Sun and Poetry
Flash.
For the past decade, Lowitz has been Corresponding
Editor to Japan for Manoa (University of Hawaii's literary magazine), for
whom she writes regular reviews. She has guest- edited two special features
on Japanese
literature for Manoa, most recently
"Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War" (Summer 2001). She and her husband Shogo
Oketani are currently translating the poetry of influential Japanese
modernist postwar poet/critic Ayukawa Nobuo, who was the translator of TS
Eliot
and William Burroughs.
Her honors include the Copperfield's Fiction Award (2001),
the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Award in Fiction (2000),
the Japanophile Fiction Award (1999), the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award
(1990), and the Tokyo Journal Fiction Translation Award (1995) and others.
She has
received a translation fellowship from the NEA
(1997), a California Arts Council grant in Poetry (1996-7), an Independent
Scholar Fellowship from
the NEH (1995), and two Pushcart Prize nominations in Poetry,
2001. She has a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in
Creative Writing from San Francisco State, where she taught creative writing
before moving to Tokyo.
Her books are available at www.stonebridgepress.com
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from
To
Lily Magnolia, 1979 #1 I came across the
time when the
persimmon trees sprouted buds - green leaves seem impure in the spring.
#2 A butterfly, rising gloomily - swallowed up into a pale mandarin orange
flower.
#3 Like Princess
Nukada* I walk to a lily
magnolia, my fringe swaying in the wind. *An
ancient Japanese Court Poet
#4 Kicking wind a woman goes, skirts flaring
out. Isn't there a
woman who's respected
and honored?
#5 Leaving an old person smelling of
urine, I crouched under the cherry
blossoms.
#6 Ah! Ah! The fighting dogs covered in blood stop fighting at man's command.
#7 Woman - sleeping
languidly on the train - the tip of her
nose shines.
#8 Embracing each
other like trees, our bodies couldn't have
become transparent on their own.
#9 I hear: "If there's
an inferno, make your way to
its depths." A cockscomb
flower on the water.
#10 Awakening from a
dream of eating fried
eggs with my father my mother, loneliness.
#11 With eyes like insects: a girl with windblown
hair on a sand hill.
#12 The sekihan* my mother cooked when I left home saddens me. *
Rice boiled with red beans cooked on happy occasions.
#13 Long-horned
beetle motionless on the
tendrils of a morning
glory, ants going down its back.
#14 Beside the eye's outer edge full of unshed
tears, a sake bottle stands pale blue.
#15 Red peppers begin to flutter just as I hear my father's piercing call.
#16 On the spur of
the moment I thought of fish without
eyelids at the bottom of the sea.
#17 To me, betraying her - the skin of the
persimmons my mother sent, still green.
#18 Taking out my very own
mother's eyeball, licking it with such a
gentle tongue.
#19 When I arrived in
a sweat, was it a parrot or something like
a devil who let out a tinny-voiced
laugh?
#20 Squatting in a
toilet, chilled at
daybreak, a spring skylark, soars up, chirping.
#21 Departing, I smashed up the
place where I could
live pleasantly enough again.
#22 Though looking at
breasts in a pin-up
calendar, I grasped a handful of
darkness and stood up.
#23 The glass door
shakes in a gust of
wind. I wonder if my
old mother, tied up in old
age, sickness and death, will come in.
#24 "Father and
mother should not offer
us spiritual
enlightenment." As things go, the flowerless
fruit is green.
#25 Poison put on his path - the poor thing - a mouse cranes
his neck to eat it.
#26 Making a smile I come closer to hold the neighborhood
infant in my arms.
#27 "Arthur
Rimbaud and aesthetics stabbed each
other." So wrote Hideo Kobayashi.
#28 Though she's no
younger than I, a woman laughs fresh and
youthful, her cheeks puffing out.
#29 English teacher at a juku* for
schoolchildren - the least painful vocation for me. *a
cram school
#30 Labor unions, Socialism - after all they're trivial unless you're a
man.
#31 Looking down at
the body: It opens its
mouth slightly, four or five front teeth
shining.
#32 Dreaming of
making love to an image of the Buddha, what was that he
saw beside me?
#33 Imaging some kind
of bean-jam bun, I try to soothe my violent hunger at noon.
#35 I almost
understand how the matter will be settled - like two dry towels.
#36 I must be hurting other people's
feelings - having the
disposition to express my
intentions clearly.
#37 "We live in
a world where our efforts
are continually being
rewarded," a junior high
school girl said innocently.
#38 Because she
lacked an uterus a woman had to
pay, I heard. That's how the world is!
#39 Being a juku
tutor, I thought of myself as a prostitute today.
#40 Oh, your eyes and your penis grow senile! I wish they would
become mine immediately now.
#41 Sweaty, I smell this
armpit of mine. Hard to get rid
of - the habit I have of being too
serious.
#42 Because of never
stopping, a grunting white
pig. Because of a hot
summer day, my anger never stops.
#43 Just me, myself
and I... being nobody - the shrill cry of
the cicada soaking through
me this afternoon.
#44 My body, carrying the load of this rambling dreaming brain: it gets down the
stairs.
#45 In light in early autumn the body of a
baby monkey doesn't even emit a bad smell.
#46 I won't suffer easily, walking on a lit street to lead my life.
#47 I shall keep on
living even eating my father's ribs! Blades of the
iris thriving, green.
#48 Just like George
Sand - Holding a radish in my arms, I came out of a
store feeling nice and
cool.
#49 Is that a Western madman? White heron
drifting in the withering
reeds of winter.
#50 Bird in a birdcage became totally still on a frosty
morning.
Go to Part II of Collected Tanka of AKITSU EI
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Translation Copyright © by
Miyuki AOYAMA & Leza LOWITZ 2002. Online Book Version Copyright © AHA Books 2002. Read another of AHA Books Online..
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