Sawako Nakayasu Discusses the Pursuit of Translation, Chika Sagawa, & More at Asymptote

Sawako Nakayasu talks about Chika Sagawa, Japanese Modernism, and the pursuit of experimental translation with Lindsey Webb for Asymptote. "Forrest Gander called Sawako Nakayasu 'the Rosmarie Waldrop of Japan,'” says Webb, who first spoke to Nakaysau from Waldrop's home in Providence. More:

[Lindsey Webb:] How was Sagawa Chika different from the men who were writing around her?

[Sawako Nakayasu:] Well, what I want to say first is how her poems were different from those of other women poets at the time—that they were not at all defined by content specific to the lived female experience, which means that they engage a very different conversation about what exactly constitutes women’s poetry, beyond the fact that it was written by a woman.

Even among her female peers, the content of Sagawa’s poems seemed somehow less feminine. She has fewer flowers, tea parties, less of the moon and the stars, but then again, I feel like there is kind of a feminist critique she activates through her use of “flowers.” If I were to go get a Ph.D., maybe this is something I would delve deeper into.

But more importantly, I guess, her poems were unlike those of any other writer of any gender. She was writing in such an exciting moment of exploration and experimentation, and there was a lot of enthusiastic and exuberant poetic activity in many directions. Poets were writing manifestos every other month, or experimenting with graphics, or really seeing what they could do to move beyond—or abandon—poetic conventions of the past. Kitasono Katsue was among these poets. What I think is interesting about Sagawa in this context is the way she takes in so many of these varying influences, while sticking to her own sense of craft and composition, which is apparently quite painterly, and deeply connected to the visual arts. She is actually quite critical of many of her peers for being too interested or caught up in trends. I didn’t realize this until I read her prose pieces, where you can start to get a sense of her poetics, even though they are often couched in metaphor.

In a prose piece called “Had They Been the Eyes of Fish,” she wrote, “I suspect that most poems are written with whatever random thought occurs to the poet. In some cases that’s fine, although poems like that are already ruined. They are banal and have a short life span.” All the more interesting to see that her own work has had a long life span, after all!

Read on at Asymptote.