The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo: Modernism in Translation

Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894–1982) occupies a unique position in the history of modern Japanese poetry. Although attracted to the study of literature while a university student, he did not at the time attempt to compose his own poetry, largely out of distaste for the overly romantic and subjective modes that had held sway in modern Japanese poetry since the turn of the century. A three-year stint of study at Oxford University in the early 1920s brought Nishiwaki up-to-date on recent developments in Western-style modernism. When he returned to Japan to begin his career as an English professor at Keio University in Tokyo, Nishiwaki was familiar with the accomplishments of Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. He had also published, at his own expense, a volume of English poetry in London and, fascinated both by Baudelaire and by contemporary developments in French Surrealism, he had tried his hand at the composition of poetry in French as well. Even as an undergraduate Nishiwaki had demonstrated extraordinary language ability; he wrote his B.A. thesis entirely in Latin, with a fifteen-page summary in Japanese for the benefit of the economics faculty under whom he had worked.

During his long professorial career at Keio, Nishiwaki taught a range of courses in linguistics as well as in literature. He also cultivated friendships with a number of students who went on to become important figures in the modernist movement in Japanese letters. In addition to his own Japanese poetry, Nishiwaki wrote a number of seminal essays on poetics. He excelled as a translator of both French and English poetry, his most widely known translation being that of The Waste Land. Nishiwaki also knew Greek, German, and Chinese and his knowledge of botany has been called legendary.

A crucial problem facing any reader of Nishiwaki’s poetry and criticism revolves around the author’s enormous erudition. Hosea Hirata in his preface mentions his debt to the Japanese scholar Niikura Toshikazu, whose Nishiwaki Junzaburo zenshi inyu shusei (Collection of allusions in the complete poetry of Nishiwaki Junzaburo) provides many helpful clues, among them the information that Nishiwaki’s phonetic rendering “sasupeeru” constitutes a reference to the old spelling of Shakespeare as “Saxpere.” Another problem is the apparent randomness of Nishiwaki’s style of lyricism. Japanese surrealist and dadaist poems often make sense by the deliberate quality of their nonsense. Nishiwaki, however, does not yield so readily; one can complete a reading of his poetry impressed with his range of reference, but convinced at the same time that the author’s imagination is wholly playful.

However, Nishiwaki’s own poetics undercuts that response—and perhaps Hirata’s decision to translate three of the poet’s essays on aesthetics—one with the suggestive title “The Extinction of Poetry”—and to place them before the poems was made with this in mind. In any event the book, after a brief preface and introduction, begins with these meditations followed by Hirata’s accomplished translation of three Nishiwaki poetry texts: “Ambarvalia,” “No Traveller Returns,” and “Eterunitasu.” These translations make up part one of the book; part two consists of a brief sketch of the rise of modernist poetry in Japan, an examination of Nishiwaki’s view of poetry with reference to Derrida and Benjamin, and a commentary on selected passages in Nishiwaki’s poetry.

Briefly stated, Nishiwaki locates the impulse for poetry in the banal nature (tsumaranasa in the Japanese) of existence. Poetry does not react by creating an ideal world in which to take refuge; its destiny is to become extinct, a condition that will follow two earlier periods respectively labelled expressive and anti-expressive. Nishiwaki’s comments on these three states is highly selective and often abstract. The latter two states lie wholly in the future; they, along with the expressive era, are evoked principally through the poet’s learned musing.

Hirata first relates Nishiwaki’s poetics to Derrida’s notion of writing. Invoking the Derridean “arche...