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494 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 English, these mostly come out as monosyllables, which alter the weight of the verse. Conversely, a favourite Japanese flower is kiku. This comes out in English as 'chrysanthemum: much too long and gross a word -the abbreviations, 'mum' (Canada) and 'chrysanth' (England), won't do at all. Personally I think I would risk 'aster'; but of course that is not what the poet said. What of ancillary apparatus? It is helpful and for the most part sufficient, without being verbose, and for me it served its stated purpose of enabling one to construct alternative versions with some confidence. I am not certain that a reader wholly unversed in Japanese grammar would be able to construe the literal rendering well enough to disentangle the original structure; but Ueda has done all that could reasonably be expected . I have only one criticism. The apparatus does not preserve the line divisions, which cannot be inferred from the translations because the latter often depart from the original order. Perhaps line divisions have no structural significance in Japanese prosody; Ueda does not say. But, if they do, it would have been easy to record them. The introduction is a masterpiece of lucidity, elegance, and compression . The western reader is fascinated to find how many of the controversies of our own poetics have their eastern counterparts. Only two important questions are left unanswered. First, what is the place of haiku within Japanese poetry as a whole? What alternative traditions are open to the poet? The question imposes itself because some of the poets here have rejected every one of the characteristics by which haiku was traditionally defined, and still call the result haiku. Since one gathers that writing short poems in free verse is a live option, one would like to know (as indeed their traditional colleagues demanded) why the term haiku was retained. But Ueda sheds no light on this question. The other unanswered question has to do with Japanese versification. What verbal resources do Japanese poets exploit? Is the number of syllables the only relevant verbal property, or are there rhythmic and musical values as well? Again, the issue is not raised. The result is that the reader has no idea what makes a poem a good poem in Japanese eyes: whether it is entirely a matter of the image presented, or what. (F.E. SPARSHOTT) PUBLICATIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES I The difficulty in writing about literary works by Canadian authors of other than French or English origin is that the books are not easily accessible to the Canadian public. Although the authors may have lived in Canada for many years, and acquired a considerable reputation PUBLICATIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES I 495 among their compatriots in Canada and in their country of origin, little of that reputation penetrates, as a rule, to the Canada of the two founding cultures. It even happens fairly often that such a writer has had his works translated into several European languages, and yet in Canada, the country of his choice, he remains virtually unknown except to a small group of expatriates. When a translation into English or French does appear, it has usually been made in England or in France, where the public and publishers are more alert to writers of major reputation than they are in Canada. In addition, when the ethnic writer happens to come from Eastern Europe, he labours under a dual difficulty. In the majority of cases he is a political exile, and the country of his origin treats him as a non-person. To fight the indifference on the Canadian side and the enforced oblivion in the mother country is, then, the lot of many minority writers from Eastern Europe. It affects equally a writer of genius and a beginning litterateur. Forced to count primarily on the limited readership within his own ethnic group, the minority author finds it extremely hard to penetrate to the larger Canadian public. Thus he often has to publish his works himself, sell them by subscription, or have recourse to the ethnic publisher who has no resources to advertise his authors effectively. For this reason even good works by ethnic authors do not...

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