apan’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 poetic authenticity. The poet could gain increased cache’ as well as appearing sophisticated and international, while at the same time remaining safely within the realm of the provincial.
Now we enter an era where for the first time we are able to see Japan in its modernity and in that context, Japan’s dynamic and creative Modernist tradition. This too may have its own social, economic and political background. In other words, Japanese Modernism becomes visible within the context of contemporary global capitalism, in which cultural ebbs and flows, subjectivities and national identities, become more fluid and ambiguous. In other words, we are now in an era in which we can both see and accept the reality of hybrid culture, which has in actual fact been the reality of culture throughout time.
One Hundred Poems From the Japanese, Kenneth Rexroth, New Directions, 1955
One Hundred More Poems From the Japanese, Kenneth Rexroth, New Directions, 1974
The Love Poems of Marichiko, Kenneth Rexroth, Christopher’s Books, 1978
Shiraishi Kazuko, Seasons of Sacred Lust , Editor, Kenneth Rexroth, New Directions, 1978
Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, Princeton University Press, 2005
America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy, by Naoko Shibusawa, Harvard University Press, 2006
Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, by Christina Klein, University of California Press, 2003
Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams, by Zhaoming Qian, Duke University Press, 1995
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, by Haun Saussy, Fordham University Press, 2008
The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man, by Paul Morrison, Oxford University Press, 1996
Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2002
Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde 1905-1931, by Gennifer Weisenfeld, University of California Pr