|
From Akitoshi Nagahata, 17 August 1997
Dear Kent Johnson:
Thank you for your email. I suspect there is some misunderstanding
between us. I thought what I was asked to write was a comment on
the Yasusada controversy, either positive or negative, like those
published in the Boston Review in response to Professor
Marjorie Perloff’s essay on the issue. I wonder if this is
correct. Or am I expected to write a praise for the book, like
those found on the back cover or inside the book? Although I should
refrain from talking about the content of the piece I wrote for the
Asahi before it is published, what I wrote for it is not a
praise but a criticism based on my doubt about the project in the
light of the Hiroshima / Nagasaki issue. I presume the author of
the Yasusada manuscript had a good intention in fabricating a
fictional "hibakusha" poet, and feel that his desire to
be identified with an anonymous victim would be a sincere one. But
I think it would be difficult, especially for the real
"hibakusha" people, to understand that circulating a
false identity as if it were a real one, or being published
as a "hibakusha" poet, is an act of sympathy with
real "hibakusha." It seems to me a little too easy and
self-complacent as a style of expression for such sympathy. After
all, publishing as a "hibakusha" does not endanger his
position at all but enhances his chance of publication. The
project, in other words, seems to me to lack the anguish and pain
commensurable to those the real "hibakusha" went through.
Besides, the sympathy with the "hibakusha" is mixed up
with the author’s other interests, most notably a desire to
write postmodern poetry. In consequence, the edge of criticism
against the dropping of the A-bombs and of the warning for the
danger of nuclear weapons seems to be lost. Prof. Perloff says that
it is necessary to write in a postmodern, disjunctive style to draw
attention of the readers. That is perhaps true, but making his
"Japanese" poet enjoy writing about "cocks and
cunts" and girls singing about "fucking" is an act
which would definitely sadden the real "hibakusha," who
are in a sense identified with that fictional vulgar
personage.
Of course, I do not mean to claim the Yasusada poems are
worthless. They include good American postmodern lyrics. And in
relation to the A-bomb issue, I think one can even say that as a
result of their being treated as a hoax, they called more attention
to Hiroshima / Nagasaki than did the features of the real
"hibakusha" poets in other journals. However, I cannot
help criticizing the way the "hibakusha" persona is used
and the Hiroshima / Nagasaki experiences are treated in those
poems. You might say I undervalue the author’s intention, but
at the moment there is too little information about him to change
my judgment.
I hope you and Mr. James Sherry will still accept my comment on
the Yasusada project, which will include the above criticism, for
the coming book. As for the other journals, I really appreciate
your kindness for mentioning the possibility of writing, but if you
think I am not the right person, please don’t hesitate to
recommend some other person. If you feel my opinion is still worth
publishing, I am most glad to write comments and appreciate your
mentioning my name.
I hope all this will not sound impolite to you. I respect your
interest in the Asian cultures and your unionist stance that I
observed in the Poetics List, and this email message does not mean
that I revoked my respect. The Yasusada project is getting
international, and more people will show interest in it in Japan
too, when my comment appears tomorrow. Many people will feel like
reading the Yasusada materials themselves, and so the publication
of the book is welcome. Those who can read them in English will
read them and think about them in their own way. Meanwhile, I am
now translating Prof. Perloff’s essay and hopefully it will be
published in a magazine later this year. Then you will hear more
responses from more people in Japan.
Sincerely yours,
Akitoshi Nagahata, Faculty of Language and Culture, Nagoya
University
From Kent Johnson, 17 August 1997
Dear Akitoshi Nagahata:
 Thank you for the honesty of your reply. Yes, of
course, I will still urge any editors who contact me in the future
to seek out your opinion. The writings of Yasusada do not seek in
any way to be immune from criticism, and the thoughtfulness of your
critique is precisely apropos to a major point of Yasusada’s
writings: to engender real discussion around the complex ethical,
emotional, and cultural issues inscribed into the "issue"
of Hiroshima. The article appearing Monday sounds like it will be
fascinating, and I hope to be able to see a translation of it
sometime.
As to the "commentary" for the book’s back-cover. I
am sorry not to have been clearer - indeed, I was asking if you
might write a brief quote of "praise", though my idea of
praise was not that it would be unqualified. Such a brief quote
might well point out some of the complications and paradoxes in the
work that you touch on below, or stress the ethical dilemmas latent
in such a gesture of empathy, etc. There will be an
"appendix" of critical essays and an interview in the
back of the book, but the corrected galleys are already back with
the publisher, and I’m afraid it is too late to add any
substantial piece at this date. However, the other book that is
apparently being planned by the Boston Review editor sounds like it
would be a great place for an essay by you, and as I said, I would
be sure to recommend your name for that book if I am contacted. As
well, I wanted to ask you: Given the future interest in Yasusada
that you say there is likely to be, do you think that publication
of the work in Japanese is at all a possibility? I would be
interested in staying in touch with you on this possibility.
Please allow me just a couple of comments regarding your remarks on
Yasusada. As to "Silk Tree Renga," which you quote below,
it is presented as "undated" and actually to be taken,
along with some other pieces in the manuscript, as a pre-war poem,
suggestively linked with the 1937 letter to Ogiwara Seisensui,
which Marjorie Perloff also quoted in her essay. Yes, there is a
good deal of bawdiness in that poem, but it is not meant to be
taken as a "hibakusha" poem (though, of course, in the
broadest sense none of the work is meant to be taken as hibakusha
poetry, since Yasusada’s imaginary status is now openly
announced). And I feel I must say, too, that the Yasusada was never
intended to have a sharp "critical edge" vis a vis the
atomic bombings, or to contain a "warning" against the
use of nuclear weapons. Perhaps one could say that Yasusada came
into existence for his creator because that person felt powerless
to respond to the "unrepresentable" acts of Hiroshima /
Nagasaki in any way but an indirect one - and here I use
"indirect" in the sense of Kierkegaard’s mode of
approaching (only approaching) truth through indirectness. This, I
think, is very important to understand about Yasusada. His writings
could never be actual documents of the horror of the bomb. But they
are documents of another kind, and still, and fully, documents of
Hiroshima, for Hiroshima is still with all of the people of the
world. Yasusada contains all those marks of the
"postmodern" that you and Marjorie Perloff point out, but
as acts of necessarily failed understanding, perhaps his writings
contain their own particular (albeit comparatively small) forms of
"anguish and pain." Doubled Flowering does not in any way
aim to substitute for hibakusha writing; and if the poems were
presented as "authentic" in the first instance, it is
because they would never have arrived at this complex and
troublesome "second instance" otherwise. I believe this
"second instance" is an important and intellectually and
emotionally meaningful one.
But please don’t take these fairly hasty comments as any kind
of decisive articulation of the meanings of the Yasusada writings!
They are very tentative ones, and I intuitively feel that those
meanings are still largely waiting to come into being and to be
played out. Your own comments challenge me to think further about
what I am involved with and to question in a healthy way. So I
thank you for your remarks. I hope that we’ll have the chance
to continue to stay in touch. And I will greatly look forward to
hearing from you after you see the galleys of the book, which I
will still have sent to you in case you would still like to make a
brief comment for the publisher’s consideration.
Sincerely,
Kent Johnson
From Akitoshi Nagahata, 20 August 1997
Dear Kent Johnson:
Thank you for your email messages. Sorry that I
could not write you back sooner. I was occupied by another matter
which I had to finish urgently. My comment on the Yasusada
controversy appeared in the Asahi yesterday, one day later
than previously notified. I will send you the translation of the
article when it is finished. (I need a little more time. I’ve
just started.)
As for the interview with you and Mr. Alvarez to be published in
the Denver Quarterly, someone in the Asahi’s
Tokyo Office sent me a copy before I wrote the comment. I think
they got it from you through their New York reporter. Without it, I
would have written about the incident as a mere hoax, though it
nevertheless failed to solve the questions concerning the stance
toward the Atomic bombs in the Yasusada documents. Thank you any
way for your proposal to send a copy of the interview. I also
appreciate your kindness in which you proposed to recommend me to
the publishers of the magazines in spite of my critical comment on
the incident I sent to you earlier.
As I wrote in my previous message, it is difficult for me to write
a praise for the book, even if the book is worth reading. It is
simply hard for me to write a paragraph including both
recommendation and criticism, and suppressing the criticism would
be taken as a sign of inconstancy by the readers of the
Asahi.
Regarding your comments on my previous message, I know "Silk
Tree Renga" is a pre-war poem. The fact remains, however, that
the persona identified as a "hibakusha" is shown to have
been a bawdy poet. If a fictional poet is made into a
"hibakusha," his or her earlier experiences would also be
taken as those of the "hibakusha." They cannot be severed
from the "hibakusha" identity. And the real
"hibakusha" people will find them offensive, I think.
Besides, the vocabulary denoting genitals and a sexual intercourse
in Japanese still carries a strong connotation, which I think will
be especially strong to the generation that went through the war.
One cannot but wonder what’s the point of such excessive
bawdiness in the fictional "hibakusha" personage.
Although, as you say, the experience of Hiroshima / Nagasaki is
"unrepresentable," any writing that touches on it is
never free from its weight. Such writing can never evade the
responsibility involved in the writing about it, either, I think.
Writing about it inevitably reveals the author’s stance toward
the incident. He or she would be subject to the questions over the
use of the nuclear weapons, irrespective of the intent of that
author. In this sense, any writing that touches on a
"hibakusha" is "hibakusha literature." And, sad
to say, the Yasusada manuscripts do not seem to take on that weight
even with the "indirect" approach you mentioned in one of
your previous messages. I understand there are ways of approach to
the unrepresentable historical incident. But I feel the
"indirect" approach of the Yasusada documents still lacks
something that is necessary in referring to "hibakusha"
experiences.
It may simply be that I cannot understand the "indirect"
approach (though I don’t think so), but the difficulty may have
something to do with the criticism directed to the editors of the
journals. If the Yasusada project is aimed at criticising, or
taunting, the editors’ tendency of jumping at anything related
to the victimized other, then this ciritical move might suggest
trivializing the very empathy one feels toward the
"victim," however sentimental it may be, along with the
problematical Orientalism in the editors. I am not certain about
this. So please correct me if I am wrong.
As for the possibility of publishing a book on Yasusada in Japan,
I cannot say anything yet. I’m going to send the translation of
Prof. Perloff’s essay to a poetry journal soon but I have no
idea what they will say about it. They may want to read more but
they may also decline publishing it.
Once again, thank you for your kindness to have the copies of the
galleys of the book sent to me. I will send you the translation of
the Asahi article soon, and let you know what kinds of
responses I will have received.
Sincerely,
Akitoshi Nagahata
From Kent Johnson, 21 August 1997
Dear Akitoshi Nagahata:
Thank you for the last letter. I’ve been quite
busy these past few days between preparing for the new semester and
finishing the corrections on the book galleys, and so this will be
a fairly brief response to your message, but I wanted to give you
at least a reply before too long.
I’m sorry you won’t be able to write a comment for the
book, but I fully understand. Thank you, in any case, for
considering it. You should receive the galleys of the book from
James Sherry sometime soon. I wanted to offer some brief thoughts,
then, to your most recent comments, hoping that this might keep our
exchange going. It is one I greatly value. And I greatly appreciate
your taking the time to translate the Asahi article for me.
It’s wonderfully generous of you to do so.
Now for some replies to your remarks. In your letter you write:
Regarding your comments on my previous message, I know
"Silk Tree Renga" is a pre-war poem. The fact remains,
however, that the persona identified as a "hibakusha" is
shown to have been a bawdy poet. If a fictional poet is made into a
"hibakusha," his or her earlier experiences would also be
taken as those of the "hibakusha." They cannot be severed
from the "hibakusha" identity. And the real
"hibakusha" people will find them offensive. Besides, the
vocabulary denoting genitals and a sexual intercourse in Japanese
still carries a strong connotation, which I think will be too
strong especially to people in the generation that went through the
war. One cannot but wonder what’s the point of such excessive
bawdiness in the fictional "hibakusha"
personage.
But surely there were many "bawdy" or creatively
idiosyncratic people in Hiroshima before the bomb. Isn’t this
true? Yasusada has been imagined (in an act of cross-cultural
daring, to be sure) as a highly individualistic and complex person.
But I would stress that his playful and "vulgar" side is
only one side of him, and I think the full book reveals
this. Yasusada’s poems also suggest him as a man of deep
emotion, of compassion, and of great intellectual openness. The
Yasusada author attempted to bring forward, through the fragments
of Yasusada’s notebooks, a man of emotional complexity and of
decidedly non-stereotypical comportment. It is in this sense that I
believe Yasusada’s humor and highly wrought sense of irony can
be thought of as contributing to the work’s force as an
empathic document rather than detracting from it. I think of him,
in fact, as a figure somewhat, but not completely, akin to
Nishiwaki Junzaburo, capable of incredible and moving delicacy but
also of surprising flights of iconoclasm. How many people who might
have been at least similar in spirit to Nishiwaki Junzaburo died in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Can we say? Maybe even, perhaps, there was
someone a little bit like Yasusada (or destined to be a little like
him) in Hiroshima. If you grant at least this possibility, then why
can’t Doubled Flowering be seen as a different and
original but still honest form of tribute or mourning?
Further on you write:
Although, as you say, the experience of Hiroshima /
Nagasaki is "unrepresentable," any writing that touches
on it is never free from its weight. Such writing can never evade
the responsibility involved in the writing about it, either, I
think. Writing about it inevitably reveals the author’s stance
toward the incident. He or she would be subject to the questions
over the use of the nuclear weapons, irrespective of the intent of
that author. In this sense, any writing that touches on a
"hibakusha" is "hibakusha literature." And, sad
to say, the Yasusada manuscripts do not seem to take on that weight
even with the "indirect" approach that you mentioned in
one of your email messages. I understand that there are ways of
approach to the unrepresentable historical incident. But I feel
that the "indirect" approach of the Yasusada documents
still lacks something that is necessary in referring to the
"hibakusha" experience.
I agree without reservation with most of this paragraph. But in
regards to the last three sentences, I can only hope that when you
are able to read the complete work (the book will be about 170
pages) that you will feel differently about the writing’s
overall implications. But I have to say, in response to your
feeling that there was an underlying intent to "taunt"
editors: No, there was never any desire to taunt anyone through
this work - only to present poems that imagined another life in the
most compelling way possible to their author. There is of course a
heated and growing controversy over the manner of the poems’
presentation, and many have assumed that the primary motivation of
the work was to "show people up." But here I need to ask:
Whose problem is this? Is it the problem of the author, or is it
the problem of a reading formation that has not yet come to accept
and respect that any work may hide more regarding its creative
origins than it appears to hold on its surface? Why shouldn’t
heteronymous works exist and freely circulate amidst works that can
be given an "empirical" and genetic ascription? Should
readers and editors come to take such ascriptional democracy for
granted, I think it would be a salutary development, one that would
greatly expand imaginative freedom and make reading and writing
more interesting in a variety of unpredictable ways!
This point is important: The Yasusada author did not try to hide
the work’s fictionality - it was there from the start, for
everyone to see. But why should he be faulted for doing a good job
in permitting readers to fully suspend their disbelief for just a
while - and thus help them fully imagine, along with him, the life
of a most fascinating man named Araki Yasusada? They imagined him,
and now, as you yourself point out, many people who otherwise might
not have spent any time wondering about Hiroshima are wondering a
little more about it, and about their own belated, but still very
relevant, relationship to it.
Well, I see that I’ve gone on for longer than I’d planned.
But thank you again for being willing to discuss these issues with
me. I look forward to hearing from you and to having a sense of
what the reaction to your article has been.
yours sincerely,
Kent
From Akitoshi Nagahata, 1 September 1997
Dear Kent Johnson:
Sorry that I haven’t been able to answer your
previous message. Regarding your question about the
"bawdy" or creative idiosyncratic people in Hiroshima
before the bomb, I think you are right. I presume there were poets
who wrote bawdy poems in pre-war Hiroshima. But here it is
important how one defines the word "bawdy." In my
opinion, the vulgar aspect of Yasusada is beyond the category of
"bawdiness" in the Japanese sense of the word. There must
have been of course poems that referred to genitals and sexual
intercourse in the history of Japanese poetry, but they were
usually implicit and the expressions were milder. There are
different levels of words in Japanese, as in English, for a female
genital, for example, and, as far as I know, poets rarely used the
most vulgar ones that might be translated into "cunt."
One must also consider the genre. Explicit vulgarity might be
allowed in "senryu" but not in "renga," even if
it is experimental. So, though the Yasusada author might have
"attempted to bring forward ... a man of emotional complexity
and of decidedly non-stereotypical comportment," a Japanese
poet making reference to "fucking" and "cunts"
in such an explicit way in "renga" is far too unusual. It
is extremely difficult to imagine such a Japanese poet. For the
same reason, one could hardly take Yasusada’s explicit
"bawdiness" as humor or irony. It is simply too harsh,
too contemporary and American.
Your comparison of Yasusada with Nishiwaki (one of my favorite
poets) is puzzling too. He would never mention genitals or semen in
his poems, which were of course not renga, tanka or haiku but
"gendai shi" [modern poetry]. The manner in which sexual
references are made in the Yasusada archive is so unnatural in the
Japanese context that it alone would nullify the comparison between
Yasusada and Nishiwaki. Besides, Nishiwaki is hardly an
iconoclastic poet. I cannot think of one single poem which might be
called iconoclastic in the sense applicable to Yasusada’s
explicit sexual references. I think they are totally different.
Regarding the satiric potential in the Yasusada texts, I think it
is a feature inherent in the hoax. But your question - "Why
shouldn’t heteronymous works exist and freely circulate amidst
works that can be given an ’empirical’ and genetic
ascription?" - is a difficult one to answer. The question
probably has something to do with the generic conventions. The
Yasusada archive is a writing presented in the name of a Hiroshima
witness. It does include clues to its own fictionality. But the
fact remains that the text made the readers expect a true account
of the Hiroshima survivor and it betrayed that expectation. The
Yasusada material - a fiction in the guise of a truth-claiming
writing - thus breached the generic convention in which the
authenticity of the author contributes to its truth claim. And I
still believe this generic convention is important.
One might compare the freedom of circulating heteronymous works
with that of virtual reality, as might be realized with the email
aliases. In that virtual reality, one might be able to enjoy
becoming someone else, but one cannot accept any more the veracity
of a statement which refers to the actual world. Every day can be
April Fools’ Day. Isn’t it scary? The situation can easily
be taken advantage of. Think about a text full of racist slurs, for
example, circulated in the name of one’s friend the way that
person would be in danger as a result. A text circulated in
someone’s name the way it saddens that person. The Historical
Revisionists who argue that there was no Holocaust or Nanjing
massacre. So, even if the intent of Yasusada’s author is a good
one, publishing a fictional text in the form of a witness document
is detrimental to the generic convention of witness literature and
I think we should be wary about this.
Thank you for soliciting me into publishing our correspondence. If
you think my email is meaningful in anyway, I don’t mind
publishing it along with your messages.
Best wishes.
Akitoshi Nagahata
From Kent Johnson, 22 September 1997
Dear Akitoshi Nagahata:
Finally, I am responding to your last letter. You
will see that this is a somewhat lengthy reply, in part because I
took the liberty of sharing your letter with Emory University
professor Mikhail Epstein, Russia’s most prominent critic of
contemporary poetry and postmodern culture, and I have decided to
include his thoughtful reflections herein. Doing this makes for a
somewhat unusual format, but, well, this is a somewhat unusual
exchange. Do you know his most recent book, After the Future:
The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture
(Univ. of Massachussetts Press, 1996)? I think you would find it
very interesting. Mr. Epstein also has two essays regarding Araki
Yasusada in the "Appendices" section of Doubled
Flowering, so it is appropriate, I think, that his views enter
this conversation. After his extensive quote, I will also add a few
more reflections of my own. Here is Mr. Epstein:
Thank you very much for the opportunity to read your
correspondence with Akitoshi Nagahata. I like a lot the arguments
Nagahata has presented for his "anti-hoax" stance. They
are indeed presented with eloquence, as you say, but I cannot fully
accept them for several reasons.
1). The first part of the argument is about how Yasusada’s
work, in particular his explicit use of sexual imagery, would not
have been typical and plausible for a Japanese poet of his
generation. Akitoshi Nagahata’s response is clearly negative.
"A Japanese poet who would make reference to
"fucking" and "cunts" in such an explicit way
in renga is far too unusual. It is extremely difficult to imagine
such a Japanese poet."
As a guest from another field, I have nothing to oppose to
Nagahata’s expertise in Japanese literature, but one simple
methodological conjecture. Let’s imagine that Marquise de
Sade’s manuscipts were found recently and sent for review to
the specialists in 18 c. French literature. The specialists would
probably deny these works’ authenticity, partly because there
was nothing so sexually explicit in the "novel of
Enlightenment" in literature of that period in general (and
even later, because explicit eroticism in 20th c. literature was
dominated by Sade’s influence and inspiration). They would
conclude something like this: "There must have been of course
narratives that referred to genitals and sexual intercourse in the
history of French literature, but they were usually implicit and
the expressions were milder."
The point is that the very inference "from typicality to
authenticity" seems methodologically suspicious, because what
makes outstanding writers outstanding is their untypicality, the
break of aesthetic paradigm, the fact that they "stood
out." Dostoevsky is far less typical for Russian literature of
the 19 c. than dozens of mediocre "critical realists."
Thus the discussion of if and how Yasusada was typical for a
Japanese poetry of a certain period, very interesting in itself,
does not provide arguments in favor of his being or non-being. None
of the great authors of the past ever "could be" if the
possibility of their existence would be deduced from the generic
laws and mainstream stylistic devices of their period. I imagine a
series of very well argued academic (parodic) articles that would
convince us that Homer, Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, de Sade,
Dostoevsky, etc. are "hoaxes" because they "could
not be" on the assumption of what we know about their time and
their contemporaries.
2) Let’s assume, nevertheless, that Yasusada
"couldn’t be" and "never did." What is
wrong about free invention of such a hyper-authorial personality?
To cite Akitoshi Nagahata: "But the fact remains that the text
made the readers expect a true account of the Hiroshima survivor
and it betrayed that expectation. The Yasusada material - a fiction
in the guise of a truth-claiming writing - thus breached the
generic convention in which the authenticity of the author
contributes to its truth claim. And I still believe that this
generic convention is important... In that virtual reality, one
might be able to enjoy becoming someone else, but one cannot accept
any more the veracity of a statement which refers to the actual
world. Every day can be April Fools’ Day. Isn’t it
scary?"
I agree, it’s as scary as all year long of unbreakable
convention. The so-called "poetry of witness" already has
its 24 hours a day, 365 days a year of comprehensive watch on the
American scene. And everywhere else in world literature. Let’s
look into literary encyclopedias: Can you find among thousands of
biographic entries even a dozen devoted to non-existent, physically
void authors? (I don’t mean pseudonyms which still refer to
real personalities under different names). Paradoxically, fiction
still lacks those fictional rights and liberties that society can
fully embrace and enjoy at least during Halloween and April
1.
According to aesthetic convention (and public consent), there is
nothing morally reprehensible about the author who writes in the
first person: "I killed a man" or "I hate human
kind." Why should we be so indignant about the alleged
"hidden" author who writes on behalf of another,
fictional author: "My wife and daughter died in
Hiroshima"? By what measure are fictional characters more
aesthetically or morally admissible than fictional authors?
Isn’t the task of critics to elucidate for the reading public
the value of new literary conventions, rather than to deny these
conventions on the ground of their novelty?
Finally, I would modestly suggest that the break of convention is
exactly what moves literature on - a statement clearly trivial at
least since the Russian Formalist school introduced the notions of
"estrangement" and "de-automatization." In this
sense, literature is not just kindly allowed to "betray the
expectation" of the readers - this is, rather, exactly what
literature is designed and destined for. In my view, the Yasusada
"hoax," if it is hoax indeed, is the same type of hoax as
any literary metaphor, trope, rhetorical figure, fictional
character. Why is Motokiyu claiming to be Yasusada more scandalous
than claiming "eyes" to be "stars"?
"Hoax" is an authorial metaphor, the search for a new
aesthetic convention, "de-automatization" of our
conventional image of an author as a biological and biographical
individual. "Hoax" is a dysphemism (the opposite of
euphemism - it is a rare, but existing term) for a most generous
creative act which reverses the intention of plagiarism: the latter
takes another’s intellectual property as one’s own; the
former gives away one’s own property as if it belonged to
another author. We need now an antidote to this plague of universal
plagiarism, this joyously banal and self-confident repetition of
somebody else’s ideas and images under the post-modernist
pretext of inter-textuality. The solution would not be a
prohibition on hidden citations, but a creative reversal of
citational mode itself, a revolution in inter-textuality that gives
one’s own intellectual property to another or to others through
a selfless placing in quotation marks of one’s own
utterances...
I hope these considerations may contribute to your discussion with
Akitoshi Nagahata, and, of course, I would be delighted to hear
from you and from him on these really important matters.
Very warmly,
Misha
Well, as you might imagine, I find myself in general sympathy
with these remarks (even if, as you will see, I am a little less
assertive about my position than Mr. Epstein is of his). And I
would add this further important point for consideration: Araki
Yasusada’s poems are fictionally brought forward as a
translation from Japanese by three Japanese-American poets for
whom English is still a second language. Thus, what the reader is
reading in English is not the "original," but an
"Englishing" rendered by three hyperauthorial translators
who are very much "contemporary" and "American"
as you put it in your letter. The "bawdiness" of certain
poems, then, certainly transgresses classical Japanese boundaries,
but those boundaries must be read as having a "doubled"
complication: A) In the sense of Yausada’s status as a Japanese
man deeply impacted by the tendencies of international - and
specifically American - avant-garde culture, and B) in the sense of
Yasusada’s three translators, who are themselves strongly
inflected by radical and post-modern literary tastes. Who is to
say, that is, whether the "original" of "Silk Tree
Renga" included the Japanese words for "cunt,"
"fucking," "sorority girls," or
"pronto"? The idea of translation (or mistranslation!)
across time and language in Yasusada is a complicating factor, and
it is one that is intrinsic to the total aesthetic of the Yasusada
work.
And this issue, I feel, relates very much to your objection over my
reference to Nishiwaki Junzaburo. I must say from the outset here
that I do not pretend to even come close to your knowledge of
Nishiwaki, so I offer these objections in a very modest spirit. In
fact, my knowledge of Nishiwaki, is relegated to Hosea Hirata’s
wonderful book, Modernism in Translation: The Poetry and Poetics
of Nishiwaki Junzaburo (Princeton Univ. Press, 1995).
Nevertheless, I ask you to consider whether my arguments on
Yasusada’s affinities with Nishwaki may have some relevance:
When I used the word "iconoclastic," I was thinking of my
reading of Hirata’s translations of Eterunitasu, or the
Le Monde Moderne section of Ambarvalia. These extended
pieces seem to me to be - particularly in their historical context
- nothing less than "idiosyncratic." In fact, these
writings are strange and original not only vis a vis the background
of traditional Japanese poetry, but also, even, in comparison to
Western avant-garde movements of the time (and, I’m sure, to
99% of gendai-shi of the first half of the century). It’s not
for nothing that Ezra Pound, whose watchword was "make it
new," stated that Nishiwaki should receive the Nobel
Prize!
And when you say that Yasusada and Nishiwaki are totally different,
I would have to defer to you in the broadest sense, but with an
important qualification. For the work of both Yasusada and
Nishiwaki is deeply impacted and mediated by the
"foreign," that is, by translation. One could say that
Nishiwaki’s work does not exist without the "other",
and clearly, as well, Yasusada does not exist without a translated
culture that is yearned for and imagined by his unknown creator.
Isn’t Nishiwaki’s art a profoundly hybrid one,
self-consciously enfolded into the foreign? And isn’t
Yasusada’s writing, though certainly in no way comparable to
Nishiwaki’s greatness, also hybrid and invaded by the
doubleness of translation - though here again, in the oddly
refracted sense of the imaginary Yasusada under the spell of
American poetry, and his "real" creator under the spell
of an imagined Japan? It is interesting to wonder what the author
of "The Extinction of Poetry" and "Esthetique
Foraine" would have thought of Yasusada.
Now on your comments in the third paragraph, referring to the
matter of anonymity and heteronimity: Here I must acknowledge that
there is a central and difficult point you raise that I cannot
categorically answer in relationship to the problematics of
atomic-bomb literature. You say: "The Yasusda material - a
fiction in the guise of a truth-claiming writing - thus breached
the generic convention in which the authenticity of the author
contributes to its truth claim. And I still believe that this
generic convention is important."
Though it might seem surprising, I, too, feel that this convention
is important, and Yasusada’s departure from it certainly raises
some unsettling questions. One could ask, for example, if
Yasusada’s convincing dissimulation might have the effect of
undercutting the authority of hibakusha writing of testimony?
Doesn’t Yasusada potentially weaken and undermine a measure of
the real that should, to some degree, be protected and
shielded from the distorting lens of the imaginary? This is an
important question, and I sense that it underlies your hesitations
about Yasusada - and it is not a question that I would pretend to
be able to answer with any high degree of confidence.
But precisely here, I think, is where Yasusada’s paradoxical
nature comes in. For it is inside this temporary breaching of
authenticity that the Yasusada author is able to write an authentic
and historical document of another kind - a record not of the
bombing itself, but of one faint but very real echo or
background-trace of that unimaginable event. Where is that trace?
In the mind of a "post-modern" man of no importance, who
chooses, in an act of somewhat hopeless solidarity with those who
vanished, to erase his name. You see, it is precisely through this
forbidden door of "inauthenticity" that Motokiyu enters
an authentic and profound yearning to join those who can never be
joined. For the Yasusada author, the "inauthentic" made
possible a degree of empathy and expressivity not available through
the "truth" of his discrete identity. Is this
"idiosyncratic" gesture sufficiently meaningful in spirit
and art to justify its transgression of the conventions of
"truth-claim" as you phrase it? I can only say that I
suppose time and future voices will have to tell.
Here is a quote I came upon by Kuroko Kazuo, whose writings on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki you surely know. I feel his words in this
instance connect suggestively with some of these ideas:
"To think about ’atomic-bomb literature’
is to be made aware that ’literature’ proceeds with the
world not as its telos but as its fundamental condition. That is to
say, insofar as ’language’ locates its basis in actuality,
however much it may be ’fictionalized’, a literary work
performs its own role in the actual world. The very existence of an
atomic-bomb fiction leaves us with no alternative but to recognize
this."
Yasusada aims to perform his own role in the actual world. He
does this through his transgressive fictionality, and,
paradoxically, through his irreducible actuality. It is this
doubled merging, it seems to me, that has everything to do with the
troubled and troubling nature of Hiroshima, and with the still open
parentheses of who has the right and duty to speak and imagine
within it.
Sincerely,
Kent Johnson
From Akitoshi Nagahata, 24 October 1997
Dear Kent Johnson:
The
following is my response to your last message. I’ve spent a
whole week for revision after all, and I still feel some of the
points need more clarification. So please ask if you find any part
of the below unclear.
(1) Regarding the typicality of Yasusada’s personality, Prof.
Epstein says, "the discussion of if and how Yasusada was
typical for a Japanese poetry of a certain period ... does not
provide arguments in favor of his being or non-being." I
agree. But I think he misunderstands my argument. I’m not
merely saying Yasusada is an untypical and unlikely character.
I’m rather arguing that it would be problematical to
"represent" hibakusha by this untypical character and in
the writing ostensibly claiming historical truth. I also feel that
Yasusada’s untypical "bawdiness" would collide with
the author’s avowed empathy toward the nuclear bomb victims.
The Hiroshima / Nagasaki survivors were identified with and
represented by the bawdy Yasusada. Why did the author of the
Yasusada documents "select" this untypically bawdy
character to represent hibakusha in a style which is ostensibly
"non-fiction"? Or rather, why did he choose to
characterize his "fictional author" as a hibakusha and
untypically bawdy as a Japanese poet? It would have been
understandable, if this untypical personage had been presented as a
fictional character from the beginning; then the puzzling bawdiness
could be attributed to the imagination of the author, whoever that
was and however inappropriate that characterization was. The
untypicality of a fictional character matters, I think, if he/she
is presented as a real person and that his/her presentation can be
taken as a commentary on a controversial historical event. If
Marquis de Sade had also turned out to be a fictional character,
the morality of the author who made that character untypically
bawdy would also be questioned. Sade, however, is real and we thus
simply accept him as a fact; it would be absurd to discuss his
untypicality because nobody created and characterized him as a
bawdy personage as in the case of Yasusada.
(2) As to the non-existent, physically void authors, I simply
don’t understand your or Prof. Epstein’s enthusiastic
support for them. Why is it so important to have a milieu in which
anonymous or heteronymous authors can be treated equally with
authors with a biographical name? I can understand the menacing
presence of the state always watching its citizens and monitoring
if they are doing and saying right things - the image of the
Orwellian or Solzhenitsynian terror state. (The pre-war Japan must
have been a similar case, or even worse.) And I think I can
understand an argument that publishing a fictional
"hibakusha" as a real person is a symbolic gesture for
preserving a private space where one can say what he/she likes to
say without being watched or taped. It seems to me, however, that
publishing fictional texts in the guise of truthful documents does
more than just breaching the state monitoring system; it could also
mean giving up the basis on which the veracity of a given statement
is vouchsafed by the authenticity of the person who says it. (The
state’s monitoring system is scary, but so is the state’s
manipulation of information, or historical revisionists’ false
testimony.) Prof. Epstein says the "so-called ’poetry of
witness’ already has its 24 hours a day, 365 days a year of
comprehensive watch on the American scene." Perhaps he’s
right. It must be suffocating. But why should we get rid of it?
Whether we like it or not, witness literature still occupies an
important position in the writing sphere, and I have to repeat here
that it is dangerous to get rid of it. Turning the writing milieu
into an arena of purely fictitious writings - where "who
wrote" doesn’t matter any more, nor the veracity of its
historical references - means banishing "non-fiction"
writing from the arena and reducing it virtually to a fiction
contest. Ironically, in such a literary environment hoax would be
meaningless, for it presupposes some kind of veracity to be
simulated. The idea of hoax would be absurd in an environment where
everyone - the writers, the readers, the publishers - knows
it’s hoax, that it’s fiction.
Prof. Epstein says, "Why should we be so indignant about the
alleged ’hidden’ author who writes on behalf of another,
fictional author: ’My wife and daughter died in Hiroshima’?
By what measure are fictional characters more aesthetically or
morally admissible than fictional authors?" We shouldn’t
be so indignant if we knew that there is a "hidden"
author behind the fictional author, that is, if we knew that the
fictional author is after all fictional. Fictional characters are
more admissible than fictional authors because they (fictional
characters) are, by convention, exempt from responsibility for
statements they make in a fiction; it’s the author who takes
the responsibility. The phrase, "a fictional author,"
seems to be an oxymoron. If an author is fictional, there is always
someone - or some people, or even some machine - who has created
that fictional subject. A writing ostensibly claiming historical
truth by a "fictional author" - like Yasusada’s
documents - is thus no more than a fiction presented and circulated
as "non-fiction" by someone who should simply be called
an "author."
(3) Regarding the idea that Yasusada’s bawdy phrases are a
result of translation, I thought about that possibility too at
first. But, of course, we cannot forget Yasusada’s translators
are also fictional characters. So the mistranslation must be
considered as part of the scheme of the hidden author who created
these fictitious documents and presented them as real. He, the
hidden author, used expressions such as "cunt" and
"fucking," in the masks of the three translators
characterized as non-native speakers of English. These expressions
thus are the hidden author’s choices. And here again the
question is: why? Why did he "select" those expressions?
Besides, irrespective of mistranslations, we cannot deny that the
author chose to make the girls sing of love-making explicitly in
the "original" and put in a screen that reminds of male
and female genitals - these alone would be problematical enough,
whether or not translated with excessively bawdy words, to make
Motokiyu’s empathy to hibakusha suspicous.
I am insistent on the references to genitalia in the Yasusada
writing because they sound contradictory to Motokiyu’s claim
for sympathy with the hibakusha. Even with the problematical manner
of their presentation, the Yasusada documents would be more
acceptable if the author’s sincerity were expressed more
convincingly in their contents. But the references to genitalia,
along with other examples of Americanizion, seem to be jarring
against his good intention.
(4) Let me be brief on Nishiwaki this time. I haven’t read
Hosea Hirata’s book, but I read Ambarvaria again. And I must
say I still can’t feel Yasusada is close to Nishiwaki, nor the
latter is so iconoclastic. As you say, Nishiwaki has a lot of
foreign elements in this early collection of poems. He wrote his
graduation thesis in Latin. He was writing poems in English in
London and was influenced by the new trends in the poetry scence
there. And some of the poems in this collection could be read as
translations of Imagist poems. But I don’t feel Nishiwaki was
trying to incorporate the element of the Other in his poems by way
of these uses of foreign elements. For foreign elements were not
rare in other "gendai-shi" poets of his times. Even the
early poems of Takamura Kotaro were filled with translated foreign
words. The poets of the early Showa Period were going through a
variety of influences of the Western Modernism. There were
anarchist poets, Futurist poets, poets of Neue-Sachlichkeit,
Surrealists, and Dadaists in Japan too. Compared to these
avant-gardists, Nishiwaki doesn’t look so iconoclastic. His
poems are far more acceptable than, say, those of Hagiwara Kyojiro,
an anarchist. One of the characteristics of the poems included in
Ambarvaria is that they are impersonal. The "I" in these
poems feels to be a mask that Nishiwaki wears - one of the
Modernist techniques, and this aspect seems to strike a contrast
with Yasusada’s confessional mode of writing, in spite of the
masked identity of this fictional character Although Yasusada as a
fictional personality - and the assumption that his poems are
translation - contributes to the sense of "otherness" in
the whole project, his poems themselves are highly confessional. Of
course, all this is my reading of both Nishiwaki and Yasusada, and
I do not mean to impose it on anyone. I cannot see similarity
between Yasusada and Nishiwaki, but if you see otherwise, I have no
right to object to it.
In addition to the above ruminations, I’d like to add one more
observation, which I believe is not necessarily criticism. Going
through the exchange of email, I’ve come to feel the need of
new interpretation of the "indirect approach" you
mentioned in an earlier message, for I now suspect that one of the
meanings of the Yasusada writing is that it has been showing that
the author’s wish for becoming the other can never be
fulfilled. Taking the place of an anonymous hibakusha is only
realized in a fiction, and all the efforts to be the real Other
prove to be a succession of failures. However, these very failures
- including the efforts of the author’s friends to set up a new
genre in which his writing is not distinguished from that of the
real hibakusha - succeed to prove the impossible and audacious
purpose of the project, which thus reveals the irreparable and
irreplaceable nature of Hiroshima / Nagasaki
"indirectly." So the Yasusada project must continue to
fail, in order to successfully express its "indirect"
message on the incident. It must continue to be subject to
criticism and attacks, instead of eulogy or appraisal. If this is
what you meant by the "indirect approach" of the Yasusada
writing, I think it has been successful since the time when it was
published and became a scandal. I hope this remark doesn’t
sound derogatory. Easy acceptance of this impossible attempt to
really "be" a hibakusha is actually a case of
misunderstanding of this whole project. None other than the
difficulty it is going through, or the rejections it encounters, is
the sign of the success of its "indirect approach."
Though I’m still not sure if this complicated approach is more
appropriate than simply writing a fiction with a hibakusha as its
main character as a way of writing on Hiroshima / Nagasaki, I now
feel it’s at least possible to see the Yasusada project in this
highly "postmodern" view-point.
Sincerely yours,
Akitoshi Nagahata
From Kent Johnson, 28 October 1997
Dear Akitoshi Nagahata:
In
Doubled Flowering, Yasusada writes a letter to the ghost of
the American poet Jack Spicer, and he enters the following quote
from Saint Augustine’s Soliloquia:
On the stage Roscius was a false Hecuba by choice, a
true man by nature; but by that choice also a true tragic actor
because he fulfilled his purpose, yet a false Priam because he
imitated Priam but was not he. And now from this comes something
amazing, which however no one doubts...that all these things are
true in some respects...and that only the fact that they are false
in one sense helps them toward their truth. Hence they cannot in
any way arrive where they would be or should be if they shrink from
being false. For how could the actor I mentioned be a true tragic
actor if he were not willing to be a false Hector, a false
Andromache, a false Hercules? Or how could a picture of a horse be
a true picture unless it were a false horse? Or an image of a man
in a mirror be a true image unless it were a false man? So if the
fact that they are false in one respect helps certain things to be
true in another respect, why do we fear falseness so much and seek
truth as such a great good? Will we not admit that these things
make up truth itself, that truth is so to speak put together from
them?
I feel this beautiful and strange quote suggests much about the
spirit of the Yasusada work and about its complex engagement with
the vexed questions of "truth" and
"responsibility" as they relate to artistic expression.
In particular, perhaps it could be seen as relating indirectly
(though I do not have a logical explication here) to artistic acts
that presume to broach a matter as profoundly charged for both of
our cultures as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I would be
interested to know what you think about St. Augustine’s
words.
I’ve found your last letter very thought-provoking and
challenging. We seem to be far apart on some questions, to be sure
(the issue of "erotic" language, for example), but
perhaps there are other issues where further dialogue might bring
us closer together. Perhaps this might be the case in regards to
the issue of "witness" literature vis a vis heteronymous
forms of authorship. To be honest, I think your position on this is
somewhat more "dogmatic" than mine or Mikhail
Epstein’s. I feel, in fact, that your argument presents this
issue as if it were an either/or problem or a ’zero sum
game" - as if literary truth and responsibility
are contingent on certain conventions of ascription or more or less
fixed relations between authors and readers.
But why can we not conceive of the general reader as having a more
complex disposition toward reading than currently prevails? What
about a reading climate, if you will, where the authorial origins
of works are placed within temporary brackets as a matter of
course, where readers assume that authors may, for a variety of
reasons, extend a work’s fictional status out beyond the
boundaries of the text or book itself? Within the more open
expectations of such a reading formation, a Yasusada would not
represent an ethical violation of truth-claim, for he would be a
figure who is potentially fictional - or metafictional, if you will
- from the moment the reader looked upon his name. The reader,
thus, would be expected, and would expect, to proceed with a
certain attitudinal difference, observing a healthy scepticism, and
ready to problem-pose the variety of motives a writer might have
for creating an author. This kind of writing and reading would in
no way threaten the future existence of "empirical" or
"marketable" authorships; it would simply expand the idea
of what authorship might mean and of what roles and
responsibilities readers might take on.
I can’t, therefore, agree with your suggestion that fictional
authorships (i.e., where the fictionality of the ascription is
unacknowledged) necessarily amount to a kind of unhealthy deceit of
the unwary reader. One might well frown upon works which present
themselves under assumed pretenses and which are intended to
completely hide their sleight-of-hand, particularly if the
author’s or artist’s intent is simple forgery for
egotistical motives. But what of works carefully designed to
temporarily alter their reception because such altering is a
crucial component of their aesthetic and critical impulse? What
about works that are written by other names because to the author
this is how they demand to be written? What about works that
present themselves as written by another, yet are intentionally and
liberally mined with the clues to their own eventual undoing? As
Marjorie Perloff has pointed out, the Yasusada writings
always/already (if you’ll pardon that term) included a sub-text
of self-exposure. And I should point out that this sub-text created
by Motokiyu is much more extensive than commentators have yet
noted.
This fact, I believe, complicates the perceived problem with the
writing being presented "in the guise of truthful
documents," as you put it. My question here is the same one I
asked in a previous letter: What are the sources of this problem of
authorial "truth-claim"? Is the problem really with the
Yasusada author (who has emphatically stated he could only produce
the poems he did because he remained hidden), or does the problem
reside in overly narrow and entrenched notions of reading and
writing - notions that cannot admit imaginative forms that extend
beyond the comforts of the given name? What do we say to those
great writers of the past for whom a "falsification" of
"true" identity was, under certain conditions, an
artistic imperative?
In this regard, allow me to quote from a letter I wrote to Mr. Jon
Silkin, the editor of the venerable British magazine Stand,
where poems by Yausada were published before his fictionality had
been publically brought forward in articles by Eliot Weinberger and
Marjorie Perloff:
Allow me to say that if Motokiyu’s works are merely
"fakes" then so are the pseudonymous works of Pessoa,
Pushkin, and Kierkegaard, to name just three authors who felt
compelled at times to enter into other identities in order to
create. These writers, as I’m sure you know, wrote and
published important portions of their works "as" others.
For them, anonymity was not a "trick" but a need,
something intrinsic to their creative drive at given times.
Likewise, for Moto, anonymity - and its efflorescence into multiple
names - was a gateway into a radically sincere (I use that word
with care) expression of empathy. Rather than being
"fakes," I would offer that the Yasusada writings
represent an original and courageous form of authenticity -
one that is perhaps difficult to appreciate because of the extent
to which individual authorial status and self-promotion dominate
our thinking about, and practice of, poetry.
It occurs to me as I write that to this list could be added
(among quite a few, of course) the name of Ki no Tsurayuki, the
male governor of Tosa province who penned the classic Tosa
Diary under the guiseof a woman. I’d like to ask: What is
the meaning of this "misrepresentation"? Is the work not
what it is precisely because the author radically absented himself
from view? I know the comparison has its limits, but Ki no
Tsurayuki’s "guise" is written into the very taste
and texture of his wonderful work, and so it is with Tosa Motokiyu
in Yasusada.
Now as to the question of Yasusada’s language. You write:
"I am insistent on the references to genitalia in the Yasusada
writing because they sound contradictory to Motokiyu’s claim
for sympathy with the hibakusha." But why? Would Motokiyu have
been more authentically "sympathetic" if he had created a
pure, sentimentalized hibakusha, one more faithful, perhaps, to the
sanitized and essentialized constructions of the "other"
that permeate the current American cultural scene? For Motokiyu,
the strongest ’sympathy" he could convey was through the
creation of the most real human character he was able to imagine -
one with rough edges, bad language habits, sexual desires, deep
longings for his loved ones, unresolved feelings of anger, strange
flights of humor, instincts of compassion and generosity,
embarrassing spells of confusion, stumblings into pettiness,
unusual tastes for the foreign, etc.
I must ask, again, and as directly as possible, if it is in fact
inconceivable that a Japanese poet could have used such language as
is contained in "Silk Tree Renga"? And if indeed a
Japanese poet could have used such language, why is it wrong
for an American poet to imagine him doing so? Is it only because
Yasusada is fated to become a hibakusha? It may well be that I am
not able to sense something subtle and important here, but I simply
cannot see how Yasusada’s pre-war poetic language can be
construed as diminishing the empathic force of the total work. On
this issue, I have shared our correspondence with Eliot Weinberger,
one of America’s preeminent critics and translators of poetry,
and his response included the following:
I’m very puzzled by Nagahata’s argument of the
"impossibility" of A.Y.’s explicitness in Japanese
poetry. (And Epstein is right to compare the impossibility of
Sade.) In 1917 you have very shocking poetry by Hagiwara Sakutaro -
smearing lipstick across his mouth to kiss a birch tree - which
more or less "opens" Japanese poetry for anything. In the
50’s there’s the very explicit (including "bad"
language) Shiraishi Kazuko, and in the 60’s the even more
explicit (and gay) Takahashi Mutsuo. I don’t recall when AY is
supposed to have written "fuck" in a renga, and I
don’t know enough about Japanese poets in the years between -
but it doesn’t seem to me a major leap. Moreover, AY was
writing for himself, not intending to publish, so if he felt like
writing "fuck" he could have done so without concern. And
of course Japan, as a tradition-bound society, has an equally
honorable tradition of breakers of taboos. If Yasusada didn’t
exist, he should have.
I have to be absolutely clear here regarding what I know:
Yasusada’s "bad language" was not entered into the
pre-war "Silk Tree Renga" out of disrespect to the
hibakusha. Motokiyu chose those particular words for certain lines
by Yasusada, Fusei, and Kusatao, because they gave a more
disturbing edge and power to the poem (euphemized terms simply
would not have worked), and because he imagined these rebellious
poets (who were not at all happy with the growing militarism and
official censorship) as having no compunction in their small,
obscure circle about using such genre-transgressing
language.
Finally, I’d like to comment briefly on your idea that
Yasusada’s ultimate import and meaning is that his writings
represent a kind of ethical and ontological failure, a reaching for
a state of "otherness" that unwittingly but poignantly
demonstrates the "impossible and audacious purpose of the
project...the irreparable and irreplaceable nature of Hiroshima /
Nagasaki." In fact, I think this is a brilliant insight - this
could well be seen as one of Yasusada’s possible meanings
(because I do think he could be seen as having many). But perhaps
Doubled Flowering’s most direct meaning is that it is a
record of one American writer’s desire to answer his own
culture’s act of barbarity fifty years back with a small
tribute or memorial of imagination. And I think you have the word
right: The gesture is, however paradoxically, confessional in its
spirit. I am not sure that this particular "meaning" can
be spoken of in the sense of success or failure. It is simply a
meaning, a fact that offers itself for its own sake at the end of a
number of years of imagining.
Thank you once again for taking the time to share your thoughts and
criticisms. I’ve deeply appreciated the chance to exchange
these ideas with you. I hope we will continue to be in touch. Now I
will send what exists between us on to Robert Nelsen at Common
Knowledge, in hopes that our discussion might be shared with
others.
Sincerely,
Kent Johnson
Other comments on the Yasusada
deception:
"The ’scandal’ of these poems lies not in the
problematics of authorship, identity, persona, race or history.
Rather, these are wonderful works of writing that also invoke all
of these other issues, never relying on them to prop up a text. In
a time and place where book jacket blurbs routinely claim that X or
Y poet has written a work that has "found that which is
essential" in whatever, this book makes the argument for
anti-essentialism. That it has done it so well infuriates folks
with a proprietary interest in categories. Thank you, Araki
Yasusada!" — Ron Silliman
"Having edited the volume Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the
Nuclear Age and having read a great deal of poetry on Hiroshima,
both by hibakusha and non-hibakusha, I find Yasusada’s ’Mad
Daughter and Big-Bang’ simply one of the most moving and
revealing poems ever written on the effects of the Bomb. If we
ignore the strange and wonderful writing we find in this book,
future readers may judge the real fraud not Yasusada, but us."
— John Bradley
"(It is) a mistake, I think, in having ’Kent Johnson’
stand for the author. He/She/They should be known as the Yasusada
Author, much as we refer to a Renaissance painter as the Master of
the X Altar.... (Yasusada) is both the greatest poet of Hiroshima
and its most unreliable witness." — Eliot Weinberger,
Boston Review and the Village Voice
"Yasusada’s manuscripts have attracted wide attention.
Among the readers is included a poet who confessed that he was so
moved that he "could not sleep." ... Whether
Yasusada’s fictional texts are worth appraisal as that which
expresses a desire for a union with the victims of the atomic
bombs, or whether they are a beautiful but superficial composition
which evades the issues of responsibility and guilt, one cannot
find any sort of agreement among poets and critics in American
circles.... In the wariness not unlike that of evading a taboo, one
might feel an inarticulate pressure against this issue which seems
to be lurking in the American society. Now that Yasusada’s
fictionality is admitted, the ripples of this scandal will reach
further. One could not overlook then how the discussion will
develop, particularly on the relation between the responsibility
and guilt over the atomic bombs and the way literary fiction should
pose itself in opposition to these heavy questions." -
Akitoshi Nagahata, Asahi Shimbun [the photograph above
left is of Akitoshi Nagahata.]
You can read Forrest
Gander’s review of DOUBLED FLOWERING: From the Notebooks of
Araki Yasusada, in Jacket # 4
Kent Johnson teaches English and Spanish at
Highland Community College, in Freeport, Illinois, USA. He is the
translator of A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry
Workshops of Nicaragua (West End Press, 1985), and editor of
the anthologies Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary
American Poetry (Shambhala, 1989), and Third Wave: The New
Russian Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1991).
Kent Johnson’s author notes page gives more recent information.
Jacket’s ‘author notes’ provide direct links to various pages in the magazine that feature more of an author’s work, reviews of their books, and interviews.
|
