Three Women Poets of Modern Japan

Akiko Yosano, Akiko Yanagiwara, Takeko Kuj¿: Three Women Poets of Japan
Public Domain Poets #13 | Publicdomainpoets.com

'Three Women Poets of Modern Japan' (1927), with additional material, including over 100 tanka by Akiko Yosano (1878-1942), Akiko Yanagiwara (a.k.a. 'White Lotus', 1885-1967), and Takeko Kuj¿ (1887- 1928), selected and translated into English by Glenn Hughes and Yazan T. Iwasaki. New edition designed and edited by Dick Whyte.

The heart of a woman of thirty
Is a measure of fire,
Having neither shade, nor smoke,
Nor sound.
It is a round sacred sun
In the sky at evening;
Silently,
Penetratingly,
It burns-burns.

-'Dance Garments', Akiko Yosano

Yosano, Yanagiwara, & Kuj¿ were all leading poets in the 'new tanka' movement in Japan in the early-1900s, following Masaoka Shiki's reforms. When translating their work, Hughes and Iwasaki drew on contemporary 'free verse' poets for inspiration, which had themselves drawn on late-1800s and early-1900s translations of tanka and haikai as models; "Free verse poems, as brief as possible, not too musical nor yet too prosaic, seem best to convey to Western ears the sense and effect of the original."

With the redness of the setting sun
I flame,
Thinking of you.

Heaven and earth,
Cloud and water,
Life and death:
There is neither end nor beginning-
That is all I feel sure of.

-2 tanka, Akiko Yanagiwara

It is possible Hughes and Iwasaki were also influenced by Takuboku Ishikawa, a well-known Japanese tanka poet who adopted a 3-line approach to waka in the early-1900s, and Yone Noguchi and Jun Fujita, who pioneered 4-line English-language tanka, in the mid-1910s and early-1920s.

I am wrapped in silk
The color of flame,
But my body-my bosom-
Is cold.

Spring night.
Silence.
The rustle of my dress
Falling to the floor.
Silence.

-2 tanka, Takeko Kuj¿

Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing new editions of out-of-print poetry, particularly with regard to compressed & fragmented 'free verse' from the late-1800s & early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve original fonts - which are cleaned up, edited, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not simply "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collections, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.