Editorial: 15 January 2011

January 05, 2011 Born in 1965 in Henan Province, China, Tian Yuan went to Japan in the 1990s as an exchange student. There he discovered and fell in love with the poetry of the national poet of Japan, Shuntarô Tanikawa, and so began to write poems himself in Japanese, eventually establishing himself as one of the leading poets of Japan, though he also publishes poetry in Chinese and English, and works as a translator of contemporary Japanese poetry.

It’s very unusual for a non-native Japanese-language poet to be accepted in this way into the Japanese literary canon. PIW Japan editor Yasuhiro Yotsumoto notes that to a native Japanese speaker, the language in Tian Yuan’s poems does not always seem ‘natural’, yet this is what gives it its appeal, in the dialogue space it creates between Chinese and Japanese linguistics and poetic traditions. “The poems sometimes look and sound like the Japanese translations of poems originally written in Chinese, with their excessive use of Chinese characters (as opposed to the indigenous Hiragana characters) and the contrapuntal expression, which is one of the characteristics of the traditional Chinese poetics,” Yasuhiro Yotsumoto writes.

Why might a poet choose to write in a language other than their native one? In our last issue, we saw poetry by Dan Pagis, who began learning and writing in Hebrew only in adult life. Critic Robert Alter  notes that within a few years of Pagis’s arrival in Palestine from Romania via a Nazi concentration camp, Pagis “was publishing poetry in his newly learned language” and guesses that “this rapid determination to become a poet in Hebrew . . . was not only a young person’s willed act of adaptation but also the manifestation of a psychological need to seek expression in a medium that was itself a radical displacement of his native language”.

Katia Kapovich, who was a guest poet at the 2010 Poetry International Festival, writes in both her native Russian and English. Kapovich, who is “not a big believer in translation in poetry” decided to try writing in English to produce new versions of her work that could be readily appreciated by English-language readers. Her first poem in English ‘A Paper Plane to Nowhere’, written after she had lived in the United States for five years, came out she said, “with such amazing smoothness . . . as if I had been writing English all my life”.

A number of poets on PIW, in fact, write in languages other than their native language – and we've created a new archive tour in which a selection of these poets are represented. In part, poets seem to adopt the language of the country in which they live in order to gain an audience within that country, but other factors are at stake, perhaps the most crucial pertaining to what Yasuhiro Yotsumoto speculates about Tian Yuan’s choice of language: “[Tian Yuan] writes his poems in Japanese [ . . . ] because he wants to reach a new place, a new shore, which would not be possible by his native language alone. And come to think of it, is this not the case with any poet, regardless of his or her choice of language? Because poets always struggle with language, trying to express something beyond words, we recognise in Tian Yuan’s Japanese poems the archetypal image of a poet.”

Also beyond words is the patch of unknown, unregistered land evoked in Remco Campert’s new poem ‘Forgotten Field’, a Dutch poem with an English title (which is the brandname of a Portuguese wine). The poem, one of ten from the specially commissioned Dutch and Flemish Poetry Day pamphlet Een oud geluid (An Old Story), is accompanied by an audio recording of Campert reading the piece. On 27 January, we’ll be publishing the rest of the poems from Een oud geluid on Remco Campert’s PIW page for our special Poetry Day issue.

If you’re near Rotterdam on 27th January, come to the Paradijskerk at 17.00 hrs to see Remco Campert reading with Dutch poet laureate Ramsey Nasr. More details of this and other Poetry Day events can be found at www.poetry.nl.