The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library Torchbearers) - Softcover

Sagawa, Chika

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593230019 ISBN 13: 9780593230015

Publisher: Modern Library, 2020

Synopsis

Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation • The electrifying collected works of “one of the most innovative and prominent avant-garde poets in early twentieth-century Japan” (The New Yorker).

Translated by and with an introduction by Sawako Nakayasu

Dreams are severed fruit
Auburn pears have fallen in the field
Parsley blooms on the plate
Sometimes the leghorn appears to have six toes
I crack an egg and the moon comes out

An important and daringly experimental voice in Tokyo’s avant-garde poetry scene, Chika Sagawa broke with the gender-bound traditions of Japanese poetry and became Japan’s first female Modernist poet.

Sagawa’s poems and prose in this stunning collection explore death and rebirth, the ephemerality of human life and the timeless wonders of nature. Combining striking, unique imagery with Western influences, these short, sharp, surreal works paint a vibrant picture of a world just out of reach of our own.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE

About this title

About the Author

Chika Sagawa (1911–1936) was born in Hokkaido, Japan. In 1928 she moved to Tokyo and quickly integrated into the literary avant-garde community, publishing her work frequently in the influential journal Shi to Shiron. She died of stomach cancer at the age of twenty-four.

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and raised in the US, and has also lived in France and China along the way. Her most recent books are The Ants (Les Figues Press, 2014), and Texture Notes (Letter Machine, 2010), and recent translations include The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika (Canarium Books, 2015), and Tatsumi Hijikata's Costume en Face (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). Her translation of Takashi Hiraide's For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2008) received the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Sawako Nakayasu currently teaches at Brown University in the Department of Literary Arts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Black Air

In the distance, dusk cuts the tongue of the sun. 
Underwater, the cities of the sky quit their laughing. 

All shadows drop from the trees and gang up on me. Forests and windows go pale, like a woman. Night has spread completely.
The omnibus takes a flame aboard and traverses the park. 

At that point my emotions dance about the city 
Until they have driven out the grief. 


It Is Snowing

Upstairs from us, a grand ball! 

Devious angels dance in disorder, and out of their steps fall shards of deathly white snow. 

Death is among the holly leaves. Crawling quietly in the attic.
Gnawing at my finger. Anxiously. And then at midnight—it falls at the storefront of the glass shop, exposing its stark white back. 

Old love and time are buried, and the earth devours them. 


Green Flames

I first see them loudly approaching descending numerous green stairs pass by look away cram into a small space while gradually hardening into a mound their movement makes waves of light furrow through the wheat field a thick overflowing fluid makes it impossible to stir the woodlands larch with short hair snail that paints carefully a spider spins electric wires like a mist everything rotates from green to deeper green they are inside the milk bottle on the kitchen table are reflected crouching with their faces flattened sliding around an apple they seem to crumble as they block off shafts of light in the street a blind girl plays by ducking under the shadows of the sun’s rings. 

I hurry to shut the window danger has come right up to me a fire blazes outside the beautifully burning green flames spread high, circling the outskirts of the earth and in the end they dwindle, disappear as a single thin line of the horizon 

My weight takes leave of me takes me back to the depths of oblivion people are crazy here there is no point in feeling sorrow nor in speaking their eyes are dyed green believing grows uncertain and looking enrages me 

Who blindfolds me from behind? Shove me into sleep. 

Edition details

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593230019
• ISBN 13: 9780593230015
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176