In 2024, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Sawako Nakayasu discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.
Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for September, National Translation Month, Sawako Nakayasu. Sawako is the author of Pink Waves and Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From. Sawako, welcome, and thank you.
Sawako Nakayasu: Thank you, Mary. It is such a pleasure to be part of this.
Poets.org: And thank you for agreeing to be a part of it. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for September, National Translation Month?
Nakayasu: Well, it was just such a nice surprise to be invited to a curatorial project like this. And I especially enjoyed the fact that this month that I was curating was in conjunction with National Translation Month and also your partnership with Words Without Borders. That just felt very right up my alley and along with my interests. For a while now I’ve been thinking and exploring different ways that poetry and translation intersect, and this actually felt like a really great opportunity to share some of that with a wider audience. And as I was curating, it also worked out well that many of my favorite translators are poet-translators. So yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. I really enjoyed the exchange that you and I had over this process, Mary, and I was glad to be able to invite contributors to have the choice of sharing a translated poem or their own poem. I think that was what came out of our conversation, and it allowed me to let them choose, just partly because we’re all working on different things at different times. So I was really excited to be able to draw from whatever was most current and most exciting to the contributors.
And then along with that, I’m just holding in my heart the fact that we’re entangled with so many awful, difficult, challenging circumstances right now in local and global and just a multitude of ways. And I’ve been thinking that each of the poets I invited into this curation somehow works in a mode that opens up space or opens up thinking and feeling and moving toward and into the kind of world or worlds that I want to live in. So when I look back at the list of contributors, I feel like I’ve assembled a team of some kind, like a team of poets to move through the world.
Poets.org: You have lived mostly in the U.S. and Japan with some time in both China and France, is that correct?
Nakayasu: Yes, it is.
Poets.org: Can you talk a little bit about your experiences living, studying, and working in various languages and on different continents, and how those experiences have informed your views about poetry and specifically about poetry and translation?
Nakayasu: Thanks for that. I think it’s a part of my life in such a wide range of ways that I would say on one hand it’s given me many different kinds of experiences of foreignness, of being familiar and defamiliarized and moving through uncertainty, particularly in linguistic ways. I have found it interesting to be in the interstices of language, which is what happens to us when we move and live in spaces where we are not entirely familiar with the language. And that even applies to my living in Japan where I do speak the language, but because I had been away for so long, going back to Japan was linguistically fascinating. And I think all these things sort of put me in a particular kind of kinship with many other writers who work in and between and among languages. And in that, I’ll kind of want to bring poets as a whole into that group, too, that every poet is working in a language of their own making.
And so we’re all foreign to each other at the same time that we make ourselves legible, and thus at the same time, it has created a particular relationship to legibility and illegibility that is a constant interest of mine. Often when we present translations, we try to push illegibility away as far as we can, and we’re trying to make something really read and resonate and be true. But I think adjacent to that and around it is also our very human challenge of understanding each other and putting language to things that are difficult to put language to. And so it’s been just a present and ongoing aspect of my writing life.
Poets.org: If you could direct our readers and listeners to any poem on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
Nakayasu: Well, speaking of illegibility, I think one thing that’s been an interesting shift in my life recently is that I’ve been thinking a lot more than I ever have about death. And that has opened me up to thinking about different ways that poets have approached or moved through or reconciled or thought through death in their poetry. It also makes me realize that it’s just a topic that’s not discussed often in our social spaces. It’s uncomfortable, it’s painful. It’s part of what we don’t really easily share with others. And I think that what I was going to say is that one of the poems I wanted to talk about was this poem by Samuel Ace, which is called “I hear a dog who is always in my death.” And it’s a beautiful poem, but it also just really brings forward the fact that poetry has such an incredible capacity to hold the ambiguous and contradictory and often very wild and weird aspects of death in addition to straight up grief and loss. So these are things that have been of interest [to] me.
I’ve also been thinking about Keith Waldrop who passed away last year and who was quite an important mentor to me. And it got me reading and rereading his work and appreciating very differently the very, very haunted quality in his work and the way he mixes things up in a very particular, witty, wry kind of humorous way. And all of that, the combinations and juxtapositions in his work has been resonating very differently from before. So yeah, so this poem by Samuel Ace, too, really beautiful and tender and brings me into that strange logic of grief and the way that the contortions of time that accompany it, and the way the poem reaches out and kind of moves into the natural and supernatural world. And even this odd phrase in the title, “always in my death,” foregrounds for me the sensation that death is always happening. And in a way it is. So that’s a really wonderful poem I wanted to share.
Poets.org: And the poem by Ace, for the edification of our audience, was featured in Poem-a-Day in January 2019 as part of TC Tolbert’s curation. Sawako, what are you reading now?
Nakayasu: I am reading in various disciplines I guess. I’ve been reading books in Japanese that are of and about the architect, Kazuo Shinohara— Shinohara Kazuo—who is a very unique architect who’s very well known in Japan. He’s considered one of the major twentieth-century architects, but he's not very well known in the Western world yet. And he’s also interesting for having designed so many residential buildings. And obviously residential buildings are made by architects too, but those who become known as architects tend to focus on larger scale buildings, which he did also, but he really had a particular interest in that scale of a residential unit. And I’m also trying to visit some of his buildings while I’m here. I’m also reading a Japanese book by Megumi Moriyama and her sister, Marie Mariya. And that title would translate into English as Lady Murasaki’s Tea Party: On the Spiral Translation of “The Tale of Genji.”
This is a book about an incredible feat accomplished by this sister duo. They together back translated or spiral translated Arthur Waley’s English translation of The Tale of Genji from English back into Japanese. And the results are quite fascinating. And not just fascinating, but also very provocative and controversial and created many topics for conversations—so much so that they needed to write an entire book about the making of this translation. One of the delightful pieces in it is that they kind of recreate the conversations they had in making the very tricky decisions that they had to decide. So that’s a really delightful book.
And I’m also looking at a proof copy of a soon to be released anthology from MIT Press that is called Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry. And that book is also equally exciting. I think there are so many things to appreciate about it, but it’s just nice to have a chance to take a wider look at how whatever it is we call feminist and avant-garde, and poetry has been evolving over recent decades. And then, aside from that, I am reading books, nonfiction about death and death-adjacent topics. So I’m a little bit all over the place.
Poets.org: That’s great what you’re reading. I’m also all over the place in my reading and trying to do the Sealey Challenge at the [laughs] same time. You won the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for your English version of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa—the first full-length English-language version of Sagawa’s work, a figure who is important for being both one of a few Japanese women poets in the early twentieth century, but also someone who is important to the tradition of Modernist literature, or at least Modernism as it’s understood in the West. Can you tell our audience a bit more about how you discovered Sagawa’s work. I know you’ve been interviewed about this before, [laughs] but maybe there’s something new you can tell us about how you discovered Sagawa’s work and how her influence has shaped you as a poet and translator.
Nakayasu: Thank you for that question, Mary. I love talking about Sagawa Chika, and my work in translating her has been one of the things I’ve done that I’m just super proud of and excited about. And I also want to mention, too, that it happens to be that I am physically located about ten minutes away from the library where I first read her work, which was not an easy thing to do at the time I discovered her. It was completely out of print. I’ll just mention that I heard of her in a book that John Solt had written about the Modernist poet, Kitasono Katué, who John Solt had studied and written an academic monograph on. Both Kitasono and Sagawa had been relatively under acknowledged in Japan. So even when John Solt was doing his research, no one in Japan thought this was an important topic to study. And only later they came to realizing how valuable John’s research was, and they had to translate his book into Japanese because his book gave the most comprehensive overview of what he had done.
And in that introduction to that book was just a single line that John Solt had mentioned. Like, oh, there were plenty of other people. I might’ve studied for this book instead of Kitasono. And he named a couple of names. And one of them was Sagawa Chika. And I picked up on the fact that she was a woman, and there were not very many women writing or visible in this particular realm of poetry. And by that I mean there were lots of women writing haiku and waka, traditional Japanese forms, but there were not many women poets writing in contemporary free verse like Sagawa did. So just that one line sent me on a chase and I started looking for her work. And strangely it was available on the Internet, and I found that someone had typed up and posted her poems on the Internet, and they were so good just reading them off of somebody’s web page.
And then I had to find a real copy of a book because I wanted to confirm that these were the actual poems, and that was how I first read them in book form. And since then, a lot of things have happened. I’ve been involved in a number of projects around Sagawa Chika, and the Japanese poetry community has come around to see her value. And just in the last few years, there have been a great number of publications of her work and about her work. So that’s been very gratifying to me. And yeah, it’s just a special gift that translation has given me. I didn’t know this was going to happen going into it, but it has been such a beautiful, generous, exciting aspect of my writing life.
Poets.org: And what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
Nakayasu: There are a lot of things on the burner, but I think what I want to share right now is that one thing I’m excited about developing further, I’m going to be giving some reading/performances in the fall, and I am looking into ways of opening up more improvisational space within the context of a poetry reading. And by that I mean that we generally take it for granted that poets giving a poetry reading will read the words exactly as they are on the page, just adding the additional element of the poet’s voice and their body or physical presence. But I think there’s a lot more we can do with that or different things we can do with that.
And thinking of drawing more from my background in dance improvisation and music improvisation. And I’m wanting to treat my own poems like a score for a structured improvisation. So I might read them from a looser or more present stance or have some kind of plan for how I’ll work with them in person. So that’s something that I’m excited about and is also probably in different kinds of conversations with other things I’ve already been doing in writing and in poetry. So yeah, we’ll see what happens in the fall.
Poets.org: We’ll see indeed. And that’s right around the time that your curation will debut. So that’s perfect timing. Thank you so much for joining me for this interview, Sawako.
Nakayasu: Thank you, Mary. It has been such a great delight to curate this month of poets.