A Unique Intellect: Translator Sawako Nakayasu on Sagawa Chika

(We continue our coverage of the authors showcased in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed: Web Exclusive, with translator Sawako Nakayasu on the poetry from the major Japanese poet Sagawa Chika. We've made two of Chika's poems available in our Web Exclusive.)
These poems were selected from The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika, a 289-page collection of poems by the Japanese Modernist poet Sagawa Chika (1911-1936). Written mostly in the 1930s and collected and published posthumously, this book is the most definitive book by which Sagawa's work is known.
Poet Kitasono Katue has said of Sagawa, A unique intellect such as hers would not have been dependent on education or training, but might have been complete from birth. Likewise her poetry, from the very first, seemed to be complete. I was surprised by the deft poetic control enforced upon the beauty of her analogical reasoning, the pertinence of her metaphors, and clarity of subject. Similar to Lorine Niedecker, Sagawa's poetic sensibility was formed in the expansive yet extreme climates of her native land, Hokkaido (the northernmost island of Japan), complicating the nature-infused traditions of Japanese poetry. To this is added a sophisticated sense of imagery: a density of images are assembled, then refracted through the lens of a destabilized and shifting speaker. Metaphors unfurl in and out of each other in a fashion reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, while remaining surprisingly grounded.
This prismic architecture of images seem to foreshadow the layered montage that the great postwar poet Yoshioka Minoru later develops--and as it turns out, Yoshioka was an avid reader of Sagawa's work, allowing some of her linguistic idiosyncrasies to slip into his own poetry. Likewise, her unique and often archaic diction is one of the most challenging aspects of translating her work. Institutional and other efforts (including the development of mass production of print media) to standardize the Japanese language had been initiated during the 1920s, but poets and writers still felt free to draw from a wide range of Japanese vocabulary--which included words that were imported largely from China, but also from Portuguese, Dutch, German, French, and English, among others. Sagawa's language in particular had a penchant for using uncommon words, while in fact reflecting the fluid nature of language use in her time.
Recent years have seen an emergence of female critics in Japan who have brought to light previously little-known writing by women from prewar Japan. They, as did I, came to the same conclusion – that Sagawa was clearly an exceptional example. The reasons for Sagawa's exclusion from the Japanese literary canon, however, are more complex than the standard problems of gender, though they must have certainly played a part. Some speculate that it is because she did not espouse typically feminine topics such as love or motherhood in her poems; others suggest that her engagement with Western modernity did not serve the nationalistic agenda of literary historians. The fact that she died young, of stomach cancer, did not help either, though I am pleased to see that her work is continuing to find audiences in Japan as well as abroad.