Translator’s Note

If one goes to even the smallest bookstore in Japan, one will inevitably find in the poetry section the work of Nakahara Chūya (1907-1937).  Although Chūya was born over a century ago and died at the premature age of thirty, he is, hands down, one of Japan’s best known modern poets—the subject of countless biographies, studies, and creative works.  

In his early teens, Chūya started writing tanka, a form of traditional metered Japanese verse, but when he was sixteen, he fell in love with Dadaism, which he encountered through the poetry of the avant-garde Japanese poet Takahashi Shinkichi.  Over the next decades, Chūya devoured modernist poetry from Europe and Japan while filling numerous notebooks with poems in a variety of forms.  

Thanks to his proficiency in classical Japanese, Chūya’s style displays a subdued, even sentimental elegance that is sometimes difficult to capture in English, where the poetic vocabulary is far smaller than Japanese—a language with a staggeringly rich array of words to describe the natural world. However, Chūya’s style is not purely traditional. He often introduces fragmentary images, inventive onomatopoeias, colloquial turns of phrase, elements of dialect, and poetic repetition—all elements closely aligned with modernism.   

Previous English translations of Chūya have tended to flatten out his style, rendering it so that each poem sounds similar to the others, as if it all was written on the same day. In fact, in Japanese, his poems veer back and forth wildly between styles, sometimes even within the same poem. His poems in classical Japanese might describe things in a sentimental, romantic fashion, but then introduce quirky, modernist images or surprising turns of phrase; therefore, one should think of Chūya not as having a singular, consistent voice but as having multiple, shifting voices.   

In these poems, Chūya also sometimes plays with style in ways that are unique to Japanese. In “Dada Lyrics,” he writes some words ordinarily rendered in kanji (Sino-Japanese characters) in phonetic katakana, thus giving readers the impression he is emphasizing sound over meaning—something which seems entirely appropriate for a Dada-inspired poem.  In the lines “guns are door pockets / gourds are drawstring bags,” the Japanese equivalents of the words guns, gourds, and drawstring bags are all written phonetically to highlight the aural quality of these words, so I have purposefully chosen translations for these terms that all contain the letter G, thus creating a small reverberation that echoes across these lines.  

This granularity and specificity is one of the charms of Chūya’s writing, as well as one of the things that makes him difficult to translate. In the translations below, I have used somewhat different styles for different poems; for instance, a more overtly modernist style with minimal punctuation and capitalization with the avant-garde works, or a more sentimental, romantic style in some of the more elegant poems. 

Jeffrey Angles