Burning Giraffes.
Burning Giraffes embodies James Kirkup's rare gift. It is a book of translations of some ninety Japanese who wrote and published poems from the late nineteenth century to the present. The translations are accompanied by two brief essays on three poets and another on translation. The book's cover is adorned by a collage of giraffes and a skull and neck bones of the giraffe, created by the author. The book also includes A. R. Davis's excellent introduction to gendaishi (Japanese free verse produced in the modern period) and his biographical notes on the poets selected in 1978 for a book. That 1978 publication was Modern Japanese Poetry, an anthology of gendaishi produced by Kirkup and Davis.The book under review is basically a new edition of Modern Japanese Poetry. However, its preface now reveals that the original edition was an outcome of "quite a stir" caused by an issue of Poetry Australia in which Kirkup published translations of Japanese poems with his introduction. Kirkup further writes that he was later approached by Davis, then at the University of Sydney, and was asked to expand his work into a book; so he gathered "more and more poets for a final selection, made by Professor Davis in consultation with myself," and "Dr. Davis also edited the book for me with his customary scrupulosity and scholarship of singular brilliance."
The preface of the original edition had indicated that Kirkup translated Japanese poems using "several methods, together or separately." However, since "I [Kirkup] do not read Japanese well enough," all those methods were to depend fundamentally on "many loyal and enthusiastic helpers" in Japan. For instance, Kirkup listened to Japanese poems read aloud by helpers and learned that they "sound[ed] flat and inexpressive; he "read" romanized Japanese transcribed by helpers and got certain feelings from the sound; he remade helpers' prose translations in English of Japanese poems into his English "poetry."
One of the brief essays in the book is Kirkup's old "introduction" to his translations for the aforementioned Poetry Australia issue, a piece titled "Two Modern Japanese Poets: Shiro Murano and Haruo Shibuya." Kirkup claims: "The essay is valuable because it describes my attempts . . . to translate Japanese poems in collaboration with a native speaker." Introduction or essay, its content is no more than the author's personal recollection of his chance meetings with two unrelated poets. Moreover, it contains, as disorganized as it is, such incomprehensible expressions as "a true Japanese poet in an international tradition" and "a writer in the traditional modern style." The second short essay is termed an "extended version" of the introduction that Kirkup wrote for a Japanese person who published a bilingual book called My Haiku of Hiroshima. The last essay, on translation, refers randomly to English translations from Russian, French, Italian, English dialects, et cetera, and displays versions of the author's Valery along with quotations from Nabokov's prose. Japanese poetry is merely touched on in passing, and neither the language nor the translated verse is discussed. It is conjectured that scholarly-looking essays were needed for the book to qualify as a number in the series Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Poetic Drama & Poetic Theory.
The new book does add some poems by a few previously included gendaishi poets and by two haiku poets and one tanka poet. The inclusion of the haiku and tanka is disruptive for the book which was Modern Japanese Poetry. Besides, one haiku writer has no poetic text: the table of contents only leads the curious reader to one of Kirkup's "essays" at the end of the book. The tanka poet whom Kirkup boasts as his "personal discovery" is someone who "took charge of the Showa Emperor's funeral ceremonies and the ceremony of accession the throne of the present Emperor" (sic) and who is a member of the Imperial Household's New Year's Day tanka contest. Kirkup characterizes him as a "modern tanka poet with traditional style and form," making one wonder if the author has a grasp of Japanese poetry.
The old edition's misalignment of the poets is now corrected, however, and they have been arranged in chronological order by their dates of birth. The original titles of the poems which were provided in parentheses are omitted entirely. The bibliography is not updated, despite the numerous very fine translations and studies that have appeared since 1978. An exception is the addition of one 1995 piece of Kirkup's own, annotated by him as "modern and contemporary haiku with essays and reviews." Page 377 is given a bombastic title, "James Kirkup: Some Works on Translation and Comparative Culture," which is in fact a scanty list, without bibliographic data, of what mostly looks like the author's translations in magazines and newspapers. The dates of many now-deceased poets are still left open in the book, although some have been properly closed. Incidentally, Bertie Davis, that respectable scholar of both Chinese and Japanese literature, died in 1983.
James R. Morita Ohio State University
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Morita, James R. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | World Literature Today |
| Date: | Dec 22, 1998 |
| Words: | 824 |
| Previous Article: | A Map of Where I Live. |
| Next Article: | Ravine and Other Stories. |
| Topics: | |