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Translations of Japanese Modernist and Avant-garde poetry

Originally Published: October 21, 2010

Eric Selland has been maintaining a blog where he posts his own translations of Japanese Modernist and Avant-garde poetry. Not only is it an incredible resource for poetry otherwise unavailable in English, it also features short essays about the translated authors, providing historical and aesthetic context for their work. Most recently there appears a series of prose poems by Yoshioka Minoru, about whom Selland writes:

Yoshioka presents somewhat of an enigma, not only in his choice to continue in the Modernist vein when it was no longer popular, but by the fact that he is an avant-gardist without a theory. Unlike his Modernist predecessors, Yoshioka never produced any writings on poetics, and though widely admired, never became the official “leader” of a movement or school of poetry.