Every translation is an interpretation. From the moment one chooses which poets to translate, one subtly, or sometimes not so subtly, defines the literature and culture of the source language. The popular perception of Japanese poetry in the United States has been heavily influenced by poets and their interests as can be seen in Kenneth Rexroth’s influence and the Beat Generation’s interest in Zen and the haiku. American poets during the postwar period gained many useful insights through the study of classical and shorter forms, but at the same time unwittingly contributed to a view of Japanese poetry that exoticized Japan.
What I am concerned with here is not the methodology used by a particular poet/translator, but rather the question of representation. How does the poet/translator represent a particular poetic tradition? How is the work framed? How do choices in what to translate produce a particular representation of the culture?
For all intents and purposes, Japanese and Chinese poetry as they have been known traditionally in this country were invented by Ezra Pound. Pound made his interpretation of the Asian classics as well as the nature and function of the Chinese written character central to his Modernist poetics, hence this same interpretation, along with its focus on haiku and Zen, has remained as a scriptural element in American Modernism and Modernist influenced poetries. Pound’s errors (or what some might call “creative misreadings”) are well known. What is important here is that Pound’s approach originates with 19th century European Orientalism. Pound’s sense of Asian culture comes through Orientalists such as Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles, and Arthur Waley, and also shares a background in American Transcendentalism. Some scholars insist that the Orientalism of Pound and other Modernists is different from that described by Said in that poets were finding affinities in elements of Asian culture rather than otherness. In other words poets saw themselves in the mirror of the Orient. However, Pound’s approach is still essentially imperialist in its concern with the appropriation of bits and pieces of Asian culture and bringing “the spoils” home to enhance Western culture as can be seen in the poem “Epilogue”: “I bring you the spoils, my nation, / I, who went out in exile, / Am returned to thee with gifts.”
What makes Pound’s appropriation of “exotic” elements of Japanese culture not only Orientalist, but ultimately (though no surprisingly) Fascist, is his refusal to see Japan’s culture in the context of real social and historical processes. The desire to find an ideal beauty and cultural template that is unchanging, standing outside time. The actual reality of Japan’s contemporary society during the entire time Pound was establishing his Asian formula was one of intensive modernization and industrialization, and it is within this context that Japanese poets produced work which responded to the conditions of their own time, conditions which, in actual fact, were not much different than those in European countries.
Japan was completely modernized by early in the 20th century and had an economy based on heavy industry by the WWI era. Scholars now view Japan’s modernity as having been “coeval” with that of the West, rather than less advanced or less complete and attempting to catch up. Japanese poets during the Modernist period engaged in intensive correspondence with European intellectuals such as Breton, Marinetti, and Ezra Pound, and initiated their own local versions and interpretations (not imitations) of all of the contemporary avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. In the high-paced urban environment of 1920s Japan, you could listen to Jazz at places like the Zebra club in Kobe or the Blackbird in Tokyo. A newly affluent middle class dressed in the latest fashions and engaged in “Ginbura” (strolling along the Ginza) purchasing imported luxury products. There were flourishing avant-garde art movements such as MAVO, and active revolutionary Marxist and anarchist movements. By the 