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C H A P T E R 2 N A T U R A L I Z I N G T H E A L I E N Yosano Akiko’s Revolution in Verse Of course you might say why not invent new names new languages but that cannot be done. It takes a tremendous amount of inner necessity to invent even one word, one can invent imitating movements and emotions in sounds, and in the poetical language of some languages you have that . . . but this has really nothing to do with language. Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything. —Gertrude Stein You just have to choose, making sure all the choices are wrong, and the sky then of your own privacy caves in on you, collapses, is comfortable as sleep. In that distant forest nothing can live separate, and it’s a dream. A difficulty. For one. For one exchanging one neutral memory for another. —John Ashbery I n the late nineteenth century one of the last bastions of Japanese tradition, the waka, the dominant genre of traditional Japanese poetry and a mode of writing that constituted the mainstream of Japanese literature from ancient times, was breached by the irruption of Western poetry and poetics. Western poetry was seen as alien to the spirit of traditional Japanese verse, which has been thought at various times to embody the very essence of what it means to be Japanese. It was viewed from at least the seventeenth century as having a spiritual dimension that could not be reproduced in foreign languages.1 It was brandished by conservatives, throughout Japanese history, as something 44 • Chapter 2 irreducibly Japanese that was cast in opposition to foreign modes of verse, principally Chinese, although these were also exploited by Japanese poets.2 The poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), together with her husband, Hiroshi, and other poets including Hiroshi’s teacher Ochiai Naobumi (1861–1903), made the first historic attempt at reforming or renovating waka. In Akiko’s case, she accomplished this as much by importing ideas drawn from translations of Western verse as from other sources: in other words Akiko attempted to naturalize the alien tradition of Western poetry in her efforts to remake and revitalize the native verse tradition. Conservatives could imagine nothing more shocking, and Akiko’s poetry did indeed outrage conservative poetry circles.3 So it is only appropriate to begin with an account of what constituted traditional Japanese waka in the period immediately preceding Akiko’s verse revolution. New-style Poetry versus Old-style Poetry In 1919, some eighteen years after the twenty-three-year-old Yosano Akiko had published Midaregami (Tangled hair, June 1901), the single most celebrated volume of poetry written by a Japanese woman in the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot published his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Akiko’s critical writings on poetry make no particular reference to this essay, but if she had read it, she would have found much with which to agree. Eliot’s concluding remark, about poetry being an escape from emotion and personality may or may not have struck a sympathetic chord, but the need for the poet to believe in the past would certainly have gained Akiko’s agreement. Eliot criticizes the tendency to praise a poet’s individuality, especially regarding the respects in which the poet differs from his predecessors. But approaching the poet without this prejudice, he notes, “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets . . . assert their immortality most vigorously.”4 Eliot further refines this notion by adding, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”5 Eliot then links the sense of an appreciation of the past to the development of the young writer by asserting, “What happens is a continual surrender of [the artist] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”6 It cannot necessarily be said that Eliot follows his own dictum; for many [18.216.94.152] Project MUSE...

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