On “Three Tanka”

For some commentators, the modernist slogan “Make It New” encapsulates “a basic premise of Western modernity,” namely that “progress in some sense entails the rejection of what came before it” (Nazry Bahrawi). 

Even when the modern is defined relationally, in a way that gives equal play to the traditional from which it derives meaning in different settings, such definitions often consign one or the other to the category of the negated (see, e.g., Susan Stanford Friedman: “Tradition comes into being only as it is rebelled against”).

This agonistic aspect of literature is not hard to document at the social level—which literary field was ever free of generational conflict? However, in reading Mikajima Yoshiko’s (1886-1927) tanka, I wonder if an alternative framing of the relationship between old and new at the textual level might not be in order: one in which the two co-operate to achieve specific aims.

While best remembered for her work in a traditional poetic form (tanka), Mikajima also wrote stories, prose poems, and even shintaishi—the “new-style poetry” that had only recently been “created as an analogue to [the] European-language verse forms” (Scott Mehl) arriving in Japan for the first time.

There is less the sense, in Mikajima’s case, of the old and new in dire conflict; in its place is a picture of a writer cultivating a wide repertoire.

The scholar Akiyama Sawako writes that Mikajima is probably the first poet to use the word “diaper” in a tanka. At a time when many were anxious about the future of Japanese poetic forms, Mikajima and others’ attention to the exigencies of daily life modeled how the old and new might support each other’s relevance.

Many strategies for translating tanka exist. I frame my translations in a context that acknowledges this multiplicity, and I present them in the spirit of fallibilism necessitated by the distances between myself and the author.