ook a positive view of Japan, it did not leave behind its roots in European imperialism.
It is within this context that Kenneth Rexroth receives a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948-49 to produce his first anthology of Japanese classical poetry, published in 1955. Rexroth takes a special interest in the feminine aspects of the classical work and produces fluid, lyric translations which, in many cases accentuate sexual content in a much more direct or literal way than in the original poems. A direct inheritor of the Pound tradition, Rexroth’s framing of Japanese poetry continues the sense of exotic, ancient beauty existing outside time. In classic Orientalist fashion, the white European male sets himself up as the expert able to explain the mysterious orient, while retaining a distance from the actual culture, never travelling there nor even truly mastering the language (Rexroth was travelling in Europe and America during this time). An important element is added to this formula when Rexroth publishes his second edition of classical Japanese poetry in 1974. Embedded cleverly in this volume are the poems of an invented contemporary woman, Marichiko, living in Kyoto near a Buddhist temple complete with an invented goddess of sex. Here Rexroth completes the tropes of Edward Fitzgerald in his rewriting of Omar Khayyam but one ups him in providing not only the ultimate heterosexual male fantasy, but precisely the image that American capitalism’s cultural hegemony in Asia desires. Another interesting, as well as ironic point here is that, of all the Japanese translations that Rexroth produced, it was the Poems of Marichiko, Rexroth’s own work, which most impressed and influenced poets such as Robert Creeley.
What is most interesting here is the way in which larger social and political forces intersected with impressions already established by Pound in his Orientalist influenced Modernism such that American poets would continue to represent Japanese poetry as something ancient and exotic, preferring to ignore the reality of Japan’s modernity and the intensely modern or contemporary nature of intellectual production by its writers and thinkers.
Both Rexroth and the Beats may have considered themselves rebels who were questioning American neo-imperialist concerns, but they ultimately played into U.S. interests and goals in Asia by supplying the public with material that merely supported the popular image of Japan as a place of quaint, charming customs, ancient wisdom, and cultural beauty existing outside time. The preference has consistently been to see Japan in an apolitical manner, not as a modern industrial power with the same complex and paradoxical processes as found in other modern societies.
Even Gary Snyder’s work, though coming out of ten years of actually living in Japan mastering the language, rejects Japan’s modernity and makes use of poet Miyazawa Kenji as a means of representing his own ideology, while ignoring the more complex, ambiguous, and intensely modern aspects of that work.
American poets translating Japanese poetry during the 20th century were ultimately less interested in Japanese poetry and language per se as they were in the creation of a new American poetics and new possibilities for the poetic imagination. Ever since the advent of Modernism the interest in shorter forms, in forms which were more compact or condensed than older English forms, has been central to American poetic concerns. This can be seen in major movements including the Objectivists, Black Mountain, and even some of the poets associated with LANGUAGE poetry. Hence the importance of the haiku and Pound’s theories regarding the Chinese character as a poetics, despite Pound’s colossal misunderstandings on a purely linguistic level.
When we look at Japanese poetry as understood by American poets during the Modernist and Postmodernist periods, what we are really talking about is American Modernism. Even the widespread interest in Zen served more of a self-referential function for American poets. Through Zen a poet could claim an existential and po