Life Study

Patrick O'Reilly reflects on Japan's "standout" modernist poet Sakutarō Hagiwara:

Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” was as self-referential as anything written in the 20th century; Yeats was prone to naming the men and women he had known among Dublin’s “grey 18th century houses”; The prose works of HD are almost completely in the realm of roman à clef. Nonetheless, T.S. Eliot writes “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,” and Modernism gains a reputation for impersonality. Perhaps impersonality was an ideal, a better idea in theory than in practice; perhaps the personal lives of the Modernist poets remained too integral to their conception of the world to be completely divorced from their art; perhaps a certain amount of leeway is afforded to canonical names.

At any rate, such ideals of impersonality seem not to have reached Japan, where a simultaneous and comparable Modernist movement sought to break away from centuries of Japanese formal tradition through the use of free verse and colloquial diction. Among these Japanese Modernists, who appeared alongside several recent translations of western literature and philosophy, a standout was Sakutarō Hagiwara. No poet, east or west, used his personal life so frankly as Hagiwara did in his 1934 book The Iceland (Hyōtō), newly translated by Hiroaki Sato as part of New Directions’ Poetry Pamphlet series.

He continues:

Hagiwara’s poems are urbane, bereft of the naturalism and flora which had so typified Japanese poetry over the centuries, preferring instead to describe buildings, battleships, railways. They continue, however, to be full of human emotion. What is subtle or implied in earlier or contemporary Japanese poets, through imagery or cadence or tone, is blatant in The Iceland. Hagiwara is at times contemplative, it’s true, but he is more often screaming in frustration, and he is never afraid to say why.