Steven Karl and Hitomi Yoshio spoke to Sawako Nakayasu in Shimokitazawa (a hip neighborhood in Tokyo) and via e-mail about insects, Chika Sagawa, and her favorite films.
SK: Sawako, you actively write and publish original work and translations. Which came first?
Writing, definitely. At first I didn't even know enough Japanese to translate. I started writing poetry mostly as an undergraduate, but didn't start translating until I was in graduate school.
SK: Do you remember the first translation you worked on and/ or published?
The first work I translated was for class, and it was an excerpt of Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes. Translating was a chance to write for myself works that I thought were so great that I wish I had written them myself. And I still feel that way, about everything I've translated.
Eventually I shifted to translating from Japanese, partly because it seemed that the world had fewer translators from Japanese than from French, so it was a better use of my abilities. Also, because Japanese is really my first (though not my strongest) language, it meant that there are more slight nuances to the language that I am able to pick up on, compared to a language like French, which I learned as an adult.
As for publishing, the first few translations I published were poems by Hiromi Ito. It was published by HOW2, but turned into a whole censorship issue because the HOW2 website was sponsored by Bucknell University, who got upset about the poem called "Killing Kanoko," a poem about infanticide. They didn't want it to seem that the school was promoting infanticide, and in an attempt to keep them from pulling it altogether, my editor and I had to write a long introductory note explaining that the poem was not promoting infanticide. The poem seemed to serve an important purpose of addressing the difficult, darker aspects of motherhood that people would prefer not to acknowledge.
SK: The language, tone, and style of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut and Ayane Kawata’s Time of Sky/ Castles in the Air seem so different. Can you talk a little bit about what attracted you to translating these books? Also, it seems that most of your translations have focused on underrepresented female authors.
I didn't have too much of a political agenda when I first began translating - I was simply trying to translate what I was interested in. And even though Hiraide and Kawata seem aesthetically quite different, they do have some common ground - it turned out that Hiraide was one of Kawata's early supporters when she started out. I just got an e-mail from Forrest Gander saying he thought that Kawata's work (i.e. the work of hers I had translated) was so close to my own sensibilities that he did a search to make sure that she wasn't a fictitious author I had invented!
Regarding the translation of under-represented women - on one hand I am simply translating what I am interested in. Though of course I'm also aware of the political weight that the endorsement of translation can have. I'm not so excited about the canonization practices of Japanese literary culture, so it's nice to have a means of highlighting an outside opinion - that is, my own. And translating is such an arduous, difficult, and thankless task that it just doesn't make sense to translate anything but what I love the most.
HY: You've been translating Chika Sagawa's poems for many years now. I came to know her works through the reprint of her one-volume anthology of poetry, and now there is even a collection of her translations of Anglo-American poetry. While I know that Chika Sagawa is an obscure poet, these anthologies have made her works more accessible and readable, which must be a completely different reading experience from discovering her works first hand in obscure journals or whatnot. How did you first encounter Chika Sagawa's work? What was your process of discovery and reading experience like?
I first heard mention of her name in John Solt's book about Kitasono Katsue - a great book, by the way. In it, he mentioned Sagawa briefly - as someone who he thought might have been interesting to study instead of Kitasono. That got me curious, and when I looked her up online, I found all of her poems up on someone's website. A teenage girl who had a copy of Sagawa's Collected Poems (rare, out of print and in the public domain) had transcribed and uploaded them on her website. The poems were so striking - very modernist, and at the same time so personal, absurd, and evocative. I loved them and knew I wanted to translate them, and it didn't matter at all how "major" or "minor" a poet she was. I went to the Waseda library to take a look at an actual print copy of her book, committed some slightly illegal activity in order to copy it for myself, and started translating. I'm now happy to say I have a perfectly legitimate printed copy!
HY: Do you think your work as a translator has influenced your own work as a poet?
I have no idea! I actually have little idea of what influences my work as a poet, except for the combined sum of the life I live and the art I've seen - but even then, how can these things be measured? Just the other day I finished writing something that involved a young girl with an "escape plan" - with a survival backpack and weapons. The next day, Marina (my two-year-old) was running around the house with her gaudy pink backpack, with an inflatable sword and a bag of crackers hanging from it. How did she know?
SK: Yoko Tawada has a short story entitled “St. George and the Translator" in which the protagonist struggles with the act of translation – that is, remaining true to the original text, the agency to take creative license, and the difficulty of separating the translator’s voice from that of the original author. Instead of driving yourself to mental exhaustion dealing with these issues as a translator, you seemed to embrace these problems with your newest book, MOUTH: EATS COLOR Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa. This is such an exhilarating and brilliant book. Can you tell us how it came about and what your process was working on it?
It was exhilarating for me to work on it, too! I just got tired of the whole "lost in translation" rhetoric, and wanted to make all those issues central, or to throw them out the window altogether. And also to foreground the creative act that translation really is, and show something of the in-between process. It's a shout-out to Lawrence Venuti and his writings about "the invisibility of the translator" - I decided to become a very visible translator. It's a little bit unfair to frame it as a collaboration, since Chika is long dead - but the project also takes a few pages from the appropriation/conceptualism schools floating about these days.
The other thing that was exhilarating for me with this book was the publishing aspect - I had this idea shortly after the whole BlazeVox scandal - do you remember that? And the whole conversation it sparked about the economics of small presses, what writers and publishers are entitled to or responsible for. So this book, and the small press that it launched, was partly in response to that. The press is called Rogue Factorial, and it's a roguish operation - I'll be publishing things when I feel like it, selected by whatever criteria seems appropriate to me at the moment. I was also interested in immediacy - when I make a performance, I probably go from conception to delivery in about a month or so. So I applied that to Mouth: Eats Color, too - I wrote, produced, and published the whole thing in a little over a month, and there is something very satisfying about that.
I've also always been interested in frames and framing, and how the book as a work of art is framed by the expectations of its genre. So I wanted a book that was both a "work of translation" and "an original work," and to subvert the original vs translation hierarchy (i.e. the translation is subservient to the original). I work with these issues performatively too, so last summer I made a stage piece that was an improvisation between poets and dancers. I was trying to create a space where both parties were doing two things equally: a) creating work in that moment, and b) influencing the other artists who were creating work in that moment. So myself and another poet, we sat at a desk on stage and wrote - and read from - poetry, while the dancers danced. AND there were insects! It was great.
I should also mention that I've just published Rogue Factorial's second book, Domestication Handbook by Kristen Stone. Kristen's chosen genre is "queeragripoetics," and this is her first book. I kind of love publishing someone's first book - it feels like a very special moment. I asked her a million times if she was okay with me and my strange publishing ways, but she seemed fine with it, and we're both very happy with the results.
SK: At your reading at The Poetry Project in New York City last spring, you switched between English and Japanese without translating for the audience what you read in Japanese. I’ve been thinking about your recent performances and how they play with the listener’s expectations, and how they perhaps completely shift the auditory experience so that we are almost hearing words and sounds anew. Could you talk a bit about your strategies and/or desires for these performances?
For my recent reading at the Poetry Project, there's a lot I was thinking about...it was all on the heels of the Linsanity craze, and I was in my born-again Asian-American phase. So in part, I was exploring what that meant in terms of this reading at the Poetry Project, addressing dynamics of race and culture via language, kind of a la Harryette Mullen - I love the image of her giving a reading, and looking out into a sea of white faces - imagine the thought bubbles of that one! So there are also issues of coded behavior, the trope of an American poetry reading (I'm remembering a funny Jim Behrle comic that made fun of the things people say during poetry readings) - so for example, if you take all the stuff that one says while giving a poetry reading, there is the part that is scripted (the poems you read) and the part that is not scripted (the other stuff you say, like "Hello" and Thank you for inviting me to read here" - I reversed those things, so all the banter was scripted, and a lot of the contents contained improvised matter. I also wanted to make the whole thing site- or moment-specific, so they involved the audience in various ways too (sometimes I was poking fun at the audience). I like to think of multi-lingual work as inclusive, rather than alienating, or inclusive via alienation - this is similar to my thinking behind Mouth: Eats Color.
SK: Do you work on translations and your own work simultaneously?
No. Usually one or the other.
SK: What’s the last “great” film you watched and what was so good about it?
Oasis - by Lee Chang Dong - I think the actress got a lot of credit for her role, but it's really the male lead that's amazing in that film - that perfect degree of being slightly off, but not too far off - I can only imagine how hard that is to do well. I also really liked Lily Chou-Chou no subete (All About Lily Chou-Chou) - the lighting in some of the scenes is just so gorgeous; I also liked how the use of lighting (in the dark scenes) was sometimes not realistic at all, but worked in this strange way anyway. Also watched Kitano Takeshi's Dolls again - a very very beautifully made film.
SK: What, if anything, are you working on now?
It's a secret...
SK: Sawako, you actively write and publish original work and translations. Which came first?
Writing, definitely. At first I didn't even know enough Japanese to translate. I started writing poetry mostly as an undergraduate, but didn't start translating until I was in graduate school.
SK: Do you remember the first translation you worked on and/ or published?
The first work I translated was for class, and it was an excerpt of Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes. Translating was a chance to write for myself works that I thought were so great that I wish I had written them myself. And I still feel that way, about everything I've translated.
Eventually I shifted to translating from Japanese, partly because it seemed that the world had fewer translators from Japanese than from French, so it was a better use of my abilities. Also, because Japanese is really my first (though not my strongest) language, it meant that there are more slight nuances to the language that I am able to pick up on, compared to a language like French, which I learned as an adult.
As for publishing, the first few translations I published were poems by Hiromi Ito. It was published by HOW2, but turned into a whole censorship issue because the HOW2 website was sponsored by Bucknell University, who got upset about the poem called "Killing Kanoko," a poem about infanticide. They didn't want it to seem that the school was promoting infanticide, and in an attempt to keep them from pulling it altogether, my editor and I had to write a long introductory note explaining that the poem was not promoting infanticide. The poem seemed to serve an important purpose of addressing the difficult, darker aspects of motherhood that people would prefer not to acknowledge.
SK: The language, tone, and style of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut and Ayane Kawata’s Time of Sky/ Castles in the Air seem so different. Can you talk a little bit about what attracted you to translating these books? Also, it seems that most of your translations have focused on underrepresented female authors.
I didn't have too much of a political agenda when I first began translating - I was simply trying to translate what I was interested in. And even though Hiraide and Kawata seem aesthetically quite different, they do have some common ground - it turned out that Hiraide was one of Kawata's early supporters when she started out. I just got an e-mail from Forrest Gander saying he thought that Kawata's work (i.e. the work of hers I had translated) was so close to my own sensibilities that he did a search to make sure that she wasn't a fictitious author I had invented!
Regarding the translation of under-represented women - on one hand I am simply translating what I am interested in. Though of course I'm also aware of the political weight that the endorsement of translation can have. I'm not so excited about the canonization practices of Japanese literary culture, so it's nice to have a means of highlighting an outside opinion - that is, my own. And translating is such an arduous, difficult, and thankless task that it just doesn't make sense to translate anything but what I love the most.
HY: You've been translating Chika Sagawa's poems for many years now. I came to know her works through the reprint of her one-volume anthology of poetry, and now there is even a collection of her translations of Anglo-American poetry. While I know that Chika Sagawa is an obscure poet, these anthologies have made her works more accessible and readable, which must be a completely different reading experience from discovering her works first hand in obscure journals or whatnot. How did you first encounter Chika Sagawa's work? What was your process of discovery and reading experience like?
I first heard mention of her name in John Solt's book about Kitasono Katsue - a great book, by the way. In it, he mentioned Sagawa briefly - as someone who he thought might have been interesting to study instead of Kitasono. That got me curious, and when I looked her up online, I found all of her poems up on someone's website. A teenage girl who had a copy of Sagawa's Collected Poems (rare, out of print and in the public domain) had transcribed and uploaded them on her website. The poems were so striking - very modernist, and at the same time so personal, absurd, and evocative. I loved them and knew I wanted to translate them, and it didn't matter at all how "major" or "minor" a poet she was. I went to the Waseda library to take a look at an actual print copy of her book, committed some slightly illegal activity in order to copy it for myself, and started translating. I'm now happy to say I have a perfectly legitimate printed copy!
HY: Do you think your work as a translator has influenced your own work as a poet?
I have no idea! I actually have little idea of what influences my work as a poet, except for the combined sum of the life I live and the art I've seen - but even then, how can these things be measured? Just the other day I finished writing something that involved a young girl with an "escape plan" - with a survival backpack and weapons. The next day, Marina (my two-year-old) was running around the house with her gaudy pink backpack, with an inflatable sword and a bag of crackers hanging from it. How did she know?
SK: Yoko Tawada has a short story entitled “St. George and the Translator" in which the protagonist struggles with the act of translation – that is, remaining true to the original text, the agency to take creative license, and the difficulty of separating the translator’s voice from that of the original author. Instead of driving yourself to mental exhaustion dealing with these issues as a translator, you seemed to embrace these problems with your newest book, MOUTH: EATS COLOR Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa. This is such an exhilarating and brilliant book. Can you tell us how it came about and what your process was working on it?
It was exhilarating for me to work on it, too! I just got tired of the whole "lost in translation" rhetoric, and wanted to make all those issues central, or to throw them out the window altogether. And also to foreground the creative act that translation really is, and show something of the in-between process. It's a shout-out to Lawrence Venuti and his writings about "the invisibility of the translator" - I decided to become a very visible translator. It's a little bit unfair to frame it as a collaboration, since Chika is long dead - but the project also takes a few pages from the appropriation/conceptualism schools floating about these days.
The other thing that was exhilarating for me with this book was the publishing aspect - I had this idea shortly after the whole BlazeVox scandal - do you remember that? And the whole conversation it sparked about the economics of small presses, what writers and publishers are entitled to or responsible for. So this book, and the small press that it launched, was partly in response to that. The press is called Rogue Factorial, and it's a roguish operation - I'll be publishing things when I feel like it, selected by whatever criteria seems appropriate to me at the moment. I was also interested in immediacy - when I make a performance, I probably go from conception to delivery in about a month or so. So I applied that to Mouth: Eats Color, too - I wrote, produced, and published the whole thing in a little over a month, and there is something very satisfying about that.
I've also always been interested in frames and framing, and how the book as a work of art is framed by the expectations of its genre. So I wanted a book that was both a "work of translation" and "an original work," and to subvert the original vs translation hierarchy (i.e. the translation is subservient to the original). I work with these issues performatively too, so last summer I made a stage piece that was an improvisation between poets and dancers. I was trying to create a space where both parties were doing two things equally: a) creating work in that moment, and b) influencing the other artists who were creating work in that moment. So myself and another poet, we sat at a desk on stage and wrote - and read from - poetry, while the dancers danced. AND there were insects! It was great.
I should also mention that I've just published Rogue Factorial's second book, Domestication Handbook by Kristen Stone. Kristen's chosen genre is "queeragripoetics," and this is her first book. I kind of love publishing someone's first book - it feels like a very special moment. I asked her a million times if she was okay with me and my strange publishing ways, but she seemed fine with it, and we're both very happy with the results.
SK: At your reading at The Poetry Project in New York City last spring, you switched between English and Japanese without translating for the audience what you read in Japanese. I’ve been thinking about your recent performances and how they play with the listener’s expectations, and how they perhaps completely shift the auditory experience so that we are almost hearing words and sounds anew. Could you talk a bit about your strategies and/or desires for these performances?
For my recent reading at the Poetry Project, there's a lot I was thinking about...it was all on the heels of the Linsanity craze, and I was in my born-again Asian-American phase. So in part, I was exploring what that meant in terms of this reading at the Poetry Project, addressing dynamics of race and culture via language, kind of a la Harryette Mullen - I love the image of her giving a reading, and looking out into a sea of white faces - imagine the thought bubbles of that one! So there are also issues of coded behavior, the trope of an American poetry reading (I'm remembering a funny Jim Behrle comic that made fun of the things people say during poetry readings) - so for example, if you take all the stuff that one says while giving a poetry reading, there is the part that is scripted (the poems you read) and the part that is not scripted (the other stuff you say, like "Hello" and Thank you for inviting me to read here" - I reversed those things, so all the banter was scripted, and a lot of the contents contained improvised matter. I also wanted to make the whole thing site- or moment-specific, so they involved the audience in various ways too (sometimes I was poking fun at the audience). I like to think of multi-lingual work as inclusive, rather than alienating, or inclusive via alienation - this is similar to my thinking behind Mouth: Eats Color.
SK: Do you work on translations and your own work simultaneously?
No. Usually one or the other.
SK: What’s the last “great” film you watched and what was so good about it?
Oasis - by Lee Chang Dong - I think the actress got a lot of credit for her role, but it's really the male lead that's amazing in that film - that perfect degree of being slightly off, but not too far off - I can only imagine how hard that is to do well. I also really liked Lily Chou-Chou no subete (All About Lily Chou-Chou) - the lighting in some of the scenes is just so gorgeous; I also liked how the use of lighting (in the dark scenes) was sometimes not realistic at all, but worked in this strange way anyway. Also watched Kitano Takeshi's Dolls again - a very very beautifully made film.
SK: What, if anything, are you working on now?
It's a secret...
Sawako Nakayasu writes and translates poetry, and also creates performances and short films. Her recent book, Mouth: Eats Color –Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals is a work of both original and translated poetry. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Two books are forthcoming in 2013: Sawako Nakayasu's Book of Ants (Les Figues Press), and a translation of Sagawa Chika’s Collected Poems (Canarium Books). More information can be found here: http://sawakonakayasu.net/
Steven Karl is an editor for Coldfront Magazine and Sink Review. His first full length collection of poems is forthcoming from Coconut Books. His most recent chapbook is a collaboration with Angela Veronica Wong titled, Don't Try This On Your Piano or am i still standing here with my hair down (Lame House Press, 2012). He lives in Miami, Florida.
Hitomi Yoshio received her Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University, and recently joined the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University. She works as a translator and interpreter in her spare time. She lives in Miami, Florida.
Steven Karl is an editor for Coldfront Magazine and Sink Review. His first full length collection of poems is forthcoming from Coconut Books. His most recent chapbook is a collaboration with Angela Veronica Wong titled, Don't Try This On Your Piano or am i still standing here with my hair down (Lame House Press, 2012). He lives in Miami, Florida.
Hitomi Yoshio received her Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University, and recently joined the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University. She works as a translator and interpreter in her spare time. She lives in Miami, Florida.
