Pre-WWII non-Japanese poetry that mentions Japan

December 21, 2007 5:43 PM

I'm looking for pre-WWII non-Japanese poetry that mentions Japan.

Doesn't have to be in English. The older and further away from Japan, the better, but anything will do.

To clarify the "non-Japanese" part, what I mean is, "not written in Japanese, OR written in Japanese but by someone who did not consider themselves Japanese". So a Korean writing in Japanese = OK. A Japanese person writing in French = OK. But a Polish translation of a Japanese poet who originally wrote in Japanese = not OK.

Thanks!

posted by No-sword to writing & language (5 comments total)

Ezra Pound was doing his artistic Chinese poem "translations" before World War II. I know he also did a bunch of stuff with Noh Plays. I would be surprised if he never wrote a poem that mentioned Japan. However, nothing in particular comes to mind.

You may find something you need if you look over his bibliography and look into his contemporaries at the time he was doing those artistic translations of eastern poems.
posted by mto at 10:11 PM on December 21, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Amy Lowell's 1919 poems-on-Japan anthology Pictures of the Floating World, complete text on Google Books.

From the introduction: "It should be understood, however, that these poems, written in a quasi-Oriental idiom, are not translations except in a very few instances all of which have been duly acknowledged in the text."
posted by ormondsacker at 11:41 PM on December 21, 2007

The general term for the 19th century English/American vogue for Japanese culture that influenced Pound, Amy Lowell, and The Mikado was "japonisme", if that helps your search.
posted by ormondsacker at 11:33 AM on December 22, 2007

Edmund Blunden went out to Japan in 1924 and later published a collection of poems entitled Japanese Garland (1928). William Empson went out to Japan in 1931, and one of his best-known poems, Aubade (1937), refers to a Japanese earthquake. For these and many other examples, see the excellent online anthology Emerging from Absence: An Archive of Japan in English-Language Verse and its companion Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse.

Francis King's autobiography, Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993), has a nice anecdote of Blunden in Japan. 'Blunden', he writes, 'had one enviable gift: he could write verses, impeccable in scansion and rhyme, on any subject, at any time of the day or night, within literally minutes .. Asked by the Mayor of Kyoto, at a reception in his honour, to 'compose something about our beautiful city', Blunden at once sat down in a corner and, to my amazement, produced a Shakespearian sonnet. In it he referred to 'Kyoto, with all her tinted leaves' (it was then autumn). When the English language Japan News published this poem, the leaves had somehow become 'tainted'. Blunden was vexed, but in view of the pollution that was affecting the city, I approved of the emendation.'
posted by verstegan at 1:13 PM on December 22, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Thanks, this is great stuff!
posted by No-sword at 12:13 AM on December 23, 2007