• The first really big festival in Japan!
  ----Review of the Tokyo Poetry Festival 2008

Eric Selland (Poet/Translator)

This was a festival about breaking down barriers: not only barriers between different national cultures and literatures, but barriers between genres (traditional vs. modern, mainstream vs. avant-garde).

The first really big and successful international poetry festival to be held in Japan (some recent festivals had only a few foreign guests), the Tokyo Poetry Festival 2008, held Oct. 31 to Nov. 2 at Meiji University, represents an important step toward grass roots poetry networking on a global basis on the part of Japanese poets.

Twenty-one poets from as many countries were present, including many whose literatures are not well-known in Japan, such as Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Mongolia, and Turkey. This was perhaps one of the really special things for me as an American poet, since poetry from these countries gets even less exposure in the United States than does Japanese poetry. For example, a quick search on amazon.com Japan finds virtually no translations into Japanese from most of these languages. Not surprisingly, a similar result is found for translations into English. Hence, it is the poets themselves who must take things into their own hands by developing grassroots poetry relationships around the globe. This is already being done by Natsuishi Banya, one of the main organizers of this festival, with his World Haiku website, and other Japanese poets have also become more involved with the international poetry scene.

Readings were given by all, plus a short talk by each poet on their own ideas and approach to poetry. Readings by pairs of poets (Japanese/foreign) seemed to work especially well. For instance Shiraishi Kazuko and Danish poet Susanne Jorn reading each other’s work. These two poets have engaged in a friendship going back many years which has lead Ms. Jorn to spend time in Japan and translate the poetry of Tanikawa Shuntaro into Danish. Similarly, the pairing of Arai Takako and American Feminist avant-garde poet Rachel Levitsky worked well. These two poets have worked together in the past on events focusing on women’s poetry in the U.S. and Japan. There were other especially good readings done by poets like Turkish poet Ataol Behramoglu, a major voice in his country who was also deeply involved with the movement to bring democratic reforms to Turkey in the 1980s. The success of his reading and talk received great help from his interpreter/translator, Inan Oener.

There were also impressive performances by tanka poets. Tanka and haiku are usually not thought of as forms especially given to the types of readings and performances one often sees nowadays in modern free verse form, but the dramatic possibilities of these forms came through in some unique ways in the readings of Oki Nanamo, Tatsumi Yasuko, and Okano Hirohiko. I am impressed by the willingness of younger women poets such as Tatsumi to engage with difficult and often political issues in their poetry. But I was especially moved by Okano sensei’s reading and by his introduction to the reading of his recent sedoka, which deal with the pain and suffering of war. These poems come from his own experiences during WWII, which like most men of his generation, he remained silent on until his old age. The mode of expression in this traditional form is subtle, but the effect is shattering. Unfortunately the true weight and emotional effect of his statement and poems failed to come through in English due to the difficulties of translation and the vagaries of interpreting.

The problem of translation is of course a great one in organizing a festival of this scope, especially in the case of languages of smaller nations where Japanese experts in those languages may be difficult to find. But even in the case of translating Japanese to English a lack of time and persons truly qualified to handle the subtleties of poetry are problems which must cause organizers a huge amount of stress. I think we take translation between Japanese and English too much for granted here, since a successful poetic translation must by definition be much more than simply opening the dictionary and finding the standard word for word translation.

At one point during the talks, there was a good-natured competition between poets from countries where poetry still holds a very central role in the national culture. Countries such as Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Korea. These talks gave the audience the opportunity to learn some more about some of the lesser known poetic traditions of smaller nations which have spent many years under the political and cultural dominance of great empires. It was also refreshing to hear about the role that poetry can still have in places where culture has not been completely overwhelmed by modern media technology and commerce. However, the final sense I came away with after this gathering was the sense that poetry, and the true life of the poet, transcends the concept of nation.

British poet Richard Berengarten, who prefers to refer to himself as a European poet, summed up the real heart of this gathering in his “12 Propositions” for poetry in which he declares the universality of poetry: “There are no temporal or spatial centres. Everywhere/everywhen is both centre and periphery.” Berengarten went on to quote the famous Mexican poet, Octavio Paz (who introduced haiku to the Spanish speaking world in the 1960s) – “for the first time in our history, we are contemporaries of all humanity.” Berengarten goes even further in insisting that, though each is special and unique, all poetic traditions belong not only to their nation of origin but to the entire world.

What this event represents is Japanese poets coming into direct contact with poets from all over the world and developing personal relationships. In years past, Japanese poets have depended on a small number of “experts” in Japanese language and literature to translate their work into other languages and promote Japanese poetry abroad, but there is always a limited number of these experts. Japanese poets are gradually coming to understand that poetry spreads through contact with people and by making oneself a part of a larger poetry community. More translation and cultural exchange will come out of these relationships.

＊ The Japanese text: Tosho Shimbun #2904 (February 7, 2009)
＊ The photos of Tokyo Poetry Festival by Akira Takenami