1930s Kitasono Katue was developing what he referred to as “abstract poetry” which would lead to his later “plastic poems.” Nishiwaki Junzaburo, one of the founders of the Modernist magazine Poetry and Poetics (Shi to Shiron), was developing a poetics of translation, appropriation and allusion which rejected the idea that poetry should have anything to do with “communication.” His theories still resonate with more recent experimental movements in both Japan and the United States. Japanese poets during the Modernist period, nearly all of whom were translators and theorists, formed an intensely cosmopolitan society familiar with all the latest intellectual trends in Europe, a society which included intellectual women such as Sagawa Chika, surrealist poet and translator of Gertrude Stein, who bore little resemblance to Western stereotypes.
It is somewhat ironic that amongst Pound’s correspondents of the time were major avant-gardists such as Kitasono Katue. In other words, Pound was well aware of the interests most common among Japanese poets of the time, and yet he chose to write about and popularize his sense of the classic, the ancient, and the ideal (interests shared with Fascist thinkers).
During the Cold War the U.S. government needed to change public attitudes produced by wartime propaganda and cultivate positive feelings about Japan, which had become the cornerstone of its anti-Soviet defense strategy in Asia. It was during this time that images of Japan as a place of mystery and exotic beauty began entering the middle class American consciousness in the form of movies, novels and travel articles in popular magazines. The Zen boom took off with the publication of Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen in 1957. The figure of the Geisha became a central theme in the imaging of Japan at this time. The metaphor of the passive feminine serving the dominant male was useful as a means of both explaining and rationalizing American hegemony in Japan and the rest of Asia. Although this new form of American Orientalism generally took 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 J