Chika Sagawa was a translator, too.

In 2011, a collection of Chika Sagawa’s translations—mostly her translations of poetry—was issued as a slim volume.1 Its table of contents is striking for what now reads as its idiosyncrasy. It encompasses James Joyce’s sole poetry collection, Chamber Music, in its entirety; selections from Harry Crosby’s 1929 collection, Sleeping Together; and an apparently fairly miscellaneous selection of other uncollected poetry by Charles Reznikoff, Bravig Imbs, Mina Loy, David Cornel DeJong, Howard Weeks, Ralph Cheever Dunning, and R. S. Fitzgerald, plus a prose piece by Herbert Read. Ryu Shimada, in an impressive and detailed scholarly survey of Sagawa’s translations, has recently shown that she also published an additional translated poem by Norman Macleod, as well as an array of short fiction and essays in translation by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Ferenc Mólnar, Aldous Huxley, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, John Cheever, and Frances Fletcher (for the sake of space, I will largely leave these prose translations aside in my discussion here, though this is itself an eccentric and intriguing selection, about which much can be said).2 Even or especially to those of us who think we know American or Anglophone modernism, this list seems perhaps uneven, maybe surprising, certainly not quite what we would expect. The poets Sagawa translated swerve unpredictably from the hyper-canonical (Joyce), to the well-respected (Reznikoff, Loy), to the virtually forgotten (Weeks, DeJong, Fitzgerald, even Crosby).

I am tempted, surveying this list, and focusing particularly on the poetry, to say something like, “Chika Sagawa was influenced by American modernism,” and clearly this is a true statement, something I could defend full-throatedly with the evidence from this table of contents and her own body of writing. After all, the clear majority of the poets Sagawa translated—all but the Irish Joyce—are American, and the lines between these writers and her own poetry are easily established. But what we might otherwise miss in this claim is how imprecise a term like “American modernism” can be. This list of names—some predictable to me, others completely unknown—reveals that Chika Sagawa’s American modernism touches my own understanding of the category only as a tangent touches a circle. It likewise bears only a passing resemblance to anything I would imagine appearing on a course of that title today, wherever it was taught. Chika Sagawa’s American modernism is, quite simply, askew from the canon that this term signals today. One of the things that it reveals is just how much these terms (“modernism,” “American modernism,” even something more specific like “Objectivist poetry”) that circulate as neutral descriptions of a mode or a style or even a period are in fact nothing more than canon-terms. When all is said and done, American modernism—mine or Sagawa’s—gets its shape and its texture via a set of poems, novels, stories, and authors that spring to mind when we hear the term. Out of and around these often unspoken collections of texts, we sketch out a series of other meanings for (American) modernism: a richly textured view of the period as a moment in history; a set of tendencies or formal characteristics that might sometimes approach a genre; a theoretically sophisticated account of literature’s position in relation to modernity; a set of counter-canons that shines a light on contemporaries we think have been unreasonably neglected. The texts we thought of then recede into the background—they become “examples.” But inevitably, these more robust-seeming accounts of American modernism rely implicitly on a more-or-less shared understanding of a shared object, and that object almost always forms a canon. The examples are not illustrative but constitutive. (This is why canon wars generate so much heat and light: they contest the object itself, not the examples.)

Through her translations, Sagawa was building a canon, but a canon of a specific and idiosyncratic sort—a kind of personal canon, a para-canon, something that neither her contemporaries nor ours would really recognise as a list of the “big names” of Anglophone modernism. Sagawa, I suspect, was not trying to build a list of “big names.” Even in her own time, her translations are notable for avoiding the expected exemplars. She translates, somewhat intriguingly, several of Pound’s relatively unknown protégés—Howard Weeks, Ralph Cheever Dunning—but not Pound himself; she chooses poets who appeared in a periodical championed by William Carlos Williams, and in which Williams published in every issue, but she never translates Williams.

Excepting Joyce’s works, the vast majority of the poems she translated were first published in English between 1929 and 1932. This period is the cusp of what Tyrus Miller in the 1990s would call “late modernism,” although now, as scholars continue to expand our canons, this “late” period has started to feel rather early (recently, Robin Creswell used the same term to describe the much-later modernism of 1960s Beirut).3 But Miller is signaling something important in Anglo-American modernism, a kind of generational changing of the guard, and Sagawa seems to be interested in this next generation, the “late” writers—those whose reputations and styles emerged in the wake of Anglophone literary modernism’s annus mirabilis of 1922, the year in which Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room all appeared in print—those for whom the heights of “high modernism,” as we still remember them, were already becoming old.

Sagawa herself belongs to a counterpart generation of Japanese late modernists. Japanese modernism, as a project of literary and artistic experimentation, was already in full force in the 1910s and was going strong as the Taisho period came to a close in 1926; Sagawa, born in 1911 and still a teenager in 1926, didn’t even arrive in Tokyo from her native Hokkaido until 1928. Though she quickly became part of the coterie world of avant-garde poetry circles, she was entering an avant-garde whose norms and reputations, whose “big names” and major journals, were already established. The poets she selects to translate from the Anglophone avant-gardes were entering the same, almost tautological, scene of a convention-breaking, novelty-privileging literary field that was already in the process of becoming institutionalized, conventionalized. She takes her inspiration from those emerging in a world of established networks and patrons, and her selections suggest that there is a generational logic operating even across the cultural and linguistic distance that her translations seek to breach.

If Sagawa’s translations seem strikingly of their moment, this is in part because she seems to be translating primarily from little magazines that are themselves committed to capturing a snapshot of the literary production of the “now.” Leaving aside the poetry collections by Crosby and Joyce, seven of the eight remaining poems that we know Sagawa translated come from either the April–June 1931 or the January–March 1932 issue of the little magazine Pagany. The eighth, by Ralph Cheever Dunning, was published in the 1927 issue of The Dial. Even Crosby’s poems likely also came from a little magazine: selections from Sleeping Together were published in the June 1930 edition of transition, as part of a tribute to Crosby following his violent death in 1929, and Sagawa’s translations follow these selections precisely, strongly suggesting that she was working from the transition poems rather than the full collection, published in relatively expensive stand-alone editions.

Sagawa’s American modernism is a modernism of little magazines. This is true in at least two senses: she sources poems for translation from little magazines in English, and she publishes her translations in little magazines in Japanese (only the Joyce translation was published as a stand-alone book). Her translation practice might best be understood as a mode that shuttles selections from a cosmopolitan, sometimes expatriate American modernism into an equally cosmopolitan Japanese modernism, both structured in and through little magazines. Her translation functions as a bridge between little magazine cultures, but bridges are also funnels. A bridge connects the two banks of a body of water at a specific, more or less arbitrary point. It focuses and channels circulation, and ramifies out through the traffic patterns on both sides. The bridge, initially an arbitrary point of connection, quickly becomes a structuring factor in the shape of any city built across water. Taken together, the patchwork of bridges that cross a body of water shape what each side looks like from the other, how it can be accessed, what regions are visited and via what channels.

Eric Bulson has argued that the little magazine is a “world form,” a term that seems peculiarly suited to these world-traveling artifacts. But for Bulson, the world form of the magazine anticipates and enables a world shaped by a post-decolonization imaginary, a world of national cultures structured as much by their disconnection as their exchange. For Bulson, if the little magazine is a world form, it is so not because it enables “point-to-point communication,” but rather because, as a form that repeats around the world, it can establish a mode of world literature that prioritizes the local and the national, a world literature of disconnection.4 The Japanese Dada-inflected little magazines of the 1920s, especially MAVO, form one of Bulson’s primary examples, but Chika Sagawa’s slightly later, tonally different world of little magazines isn’t quite so easy to read within Bulson’s framework.

By the early 1930s, US and European Anglophone little magazines were in sufficiently widespread circulation in Japan that Sagawa, who never left her home country, translated almost exclusively from these ephemeral and occasional publications. Japanese modernism at this moment develops precisely through an exchange of “point-to-point connections” with modernist networks elsewhere, as well as through its own internal unfolding. The publications that Sagawa works from seem to arrive as part of a larger network of US-Japan avant-garde exchange. In a letter, Norman Macleod—the US editor of the Netherlands-based proletarian little magazine, Front, as well as a contributor to Pagany and himself one of the poets that Sagawa translated—wrote of Front that “our subscriptions from Japan have almost flooded us and that is one of the main reasons we can continue.”5 Pagany itself seems to have had its own presence in Japan, offering the source for other translations around this time—for instance, Erskine Caldwell’s short story, “The Empty Room,” appeared in a 1932 Japanese translation by Azuma Kondo, which could only have come from a 1931 issue of Pagany, where it first appeared.6 The little magazine’s archives likewise reveal that at least one Japanese writer in the US, Mitsugi Shibata, sought publication in the magazine’s pages, though this seems not to have come to pass.7

What is most interesting about Sagawa’s entry into these networks is not the disconnection that she cultivates, but the way she elaborates connection along paths that today feel slightly askew, at an angle to the major narratives of American modernism as we have come to inherit them, and against the grain of the narratives that were being fostered and cultivated in her own time. Set against this backdrop, Sagawa’s translations distinguish themselves from a separate but related set of Japan-US connections, which link proletarian literatures around the world, in the context of the Depression and sometimes (as in the case of Front) under the sponsorship of the USSR.8 They establish a distinctive vision for modernist cosmopolitanism, grounded in something idiosyncratic in Sagawa herself.

In this context, it is particularly striking that so many of Sagawa’s translations come from the little magazine Pagany, published out of Boston and then New York City. Pagany was edited throughout its three-year run by Richard Johns, a writer-turned-editor from a Boston legal family, and supported—in spirit if not in cash—by William Carlos Williams. Like many of the authors it published, Pagany belongs firmly and self-consciously to a second-generation of American modernism, seeing itself as a successor to The Dial, the influential modernist little magazine of the 1920s which had ceased publication in 1929, and from which Sagawa drew the text of the Ralph Cheever Dunning poem. From its inception, Pagany sought its principle of inclusion along the axis of geography, an ambition signaled by its now-uncomfortable subtitle, A Native Quarterly. It saw itself as a firmly but eclectically American publication, publishing “a diverse and ungrouped body of spokesmen, bound geographically,” as the “Announcement” in its first issue proclaimed.9 It was the question of “native thought and emotion”—regardless of formal novelty, content, or politics—that gave the publication its coherence.

The title signals this geographical preference, even as it hints at the geographical ambiguity built into Pagany’s orientation. The magazine’s announcement offers an account of the title’s etymology:

In Johns’s account, Pagany locates expression within the community or conglomeration of communities that make up America. It is a working-out of the relationship between the individual, the paganus, and the pagus within which they are embedded, in which art becomes a form of “individual expression” that is simultaneously peculiar to the inhabitant and indicative of “native thought and emotion” as a whole. These claims for Pagany’s Americanness, for the significance of the local, have led to Pagany being remembered today, if it is remembered at all, largely as part of a turn to regionalism and localism within American modernism.11 Many of the contents of the little magazine bear this reading out. Pagany often features stories and poems rich in local color. Although it is formally eclectic, social realism occupies an important place in its pages.

What Johns omits in his account of Pagany’s etymology, however, is that the more immediate derivation of the title—and the impetus for William Carlos Williams’s involvement with the project—is the latter’s 1928 novel A Voyage to Pagany. In Williams’s semi-autobiographical travel narrative, “Pagany” is not America but Europe. The term first appears at an early moment in these travels: as his ship approaches Le Havre, Williams’s narrator, Evans, imagines his modern vessel sailing alongside “the first coracles” that “put out from the bottom of the red cliffs there . . .—and the wind blew them over to England.” Out of this timeless (or transhistorical) seascape emerges Pagany: “For there is the land and here is the sea, exactly as then; and this is I, the same. Now am I come home to old Pagany.”12 Williams’s Pagany evokes a primordial Europe, a kind of prehistoric origin that his narrator reanimates by sailing the same seas as these ancient forebears. Johns’s appropriation of this term for his little magazine complicates the professed “native” qualities of his periodical, quietly invoking America’s colonial relation to Europe, as well as the networks of transatlantic exchange that linked avant-garde Americans like Williams to the European continent and especially to storied European centers of American modernism, such as Paris. Johns’s “native quarterly,” then, is American in part because it is European. It imagines the local shot through with a certain cosmopolitanism, and places regionalist American writing cheek-by-jowl with the latest publications from the American expatriate scene and sometimes even the European avant-gardes.13

This spatial ambivalence—at once regionalist and cosmopolitan, imagining a quintessentially American expression whose origin story is inextricably bound up with Europe—acquires a new twist in Sagawa’s engagement with the magazine. Sagawa’s selections from Pagany are careful to eschew the localizing gestures or indigenizing moves with which this little magazine is today often associated. The poems that she translates from these pages often seem to develop in the general ambit of Objectivism. She prefers poems rich with concrete but unlocatable details, and avoids those that seem too evocative of a particular place or too dense with allusions or religious diction. Her preference is for the simple, direct, nature-focused, crystalline, but also for poems that could be about anyone, anywhere, in spite of—or even because of—their tangible specificity. To read Pagany for its poetry is already to read against the grain. Those who remember it seem to do so overwhelmingly as a venue for adventurous and important new prose. But Sagawa’s selections shun not just the prose that dominates the little magazine,14 but even those poems that incline most strongly in its direction. While narrative and character are frequently present in the poems of Pagany, she almost never translates these kinds of poems. Instead, she prioritizes those that center on images, perspective, vision.

The peculiarity of Sagawa’s taste becomes clear when we set Sagawa’s selections from the two issues she was working from alongside the pieces that were republished in the 1969 retrospective volume, A Return to Pagany, edited by Stephen Halpert and Richard Johns. A Return to Pagany combines a complete history of the magazine with facsimile archival documents, including a sampling of literature from each issue. Strikingly, of the four texts from the April–June 1931 issue and the six from the January–March 1932 issue that Halpert and Johns choose to commemorate the magazine, not a single one overlaps with Sagawa’s selections. Instead, the retrospective emphasizes Pagany’s strengths in social realist short fiction, such as Pauline Leader’s “Hired Girl” and William Chapman’s “The Old Gentleman” (vol. 2, no. 2) or Julian Shapiro’s “An Adirondack Narrative” and Josephine Herbst’s “A Dreadful Night” (3, no. 1). Its poetry selections are often narrative-driven, or evocative of a specific and highly locatable vision of America, as in Yvor Winters’s “The Journey: Snake River Country” (2, no. 2), Jean Toomer’s “Brown River, Smile,” or John Gould Fletcher’s “Elegy on an Empty Skyscraper” (3, no. 1). The more discursive, perhaps more sentimental poems of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Bouquet for October” and Etta Blum’s “If Sleeping” (3, no. 1), as well as Joe Gould’s eccentric prose “oral history” (2, no. 2) round out the selection in A Return to Pagany. Overall the impression that develops through these pages is of a little magazine whose primary contribution was as a kind of snapshot of America, sometimes formally innovative, but always interesting above all for its invocation of a vibrant sense of place.

Sagawa’s selection might instead be said to reflect the concrete richness of a highly specified placelessness. From the April–June 1931 issue, she translates Charles Reznikoff’s “A Group of Verse,” Mina Loy’s “Widow’s Jazz,” and Howard Weeks’s “Poem”; from the January–March 1932 issue, Bravig Imbs’s “Bloomed,” David Cornel DeJong’s “Return from the Sleeper,” R. S. Fitzgerald’s “Night Images,” and Norman Macleod’s “Early Walk to the Valley” (extracted from a collection of six poems by Macleod published in this issue). Compared to both Halpert and Johns’s 1969 selections and the poetry that appears across these two issues as a whole, Sagawa’s choices tend to prefer nature scenes that are highly evocative without being located anywhere in particular (certainly, they are overwhelmingly not identifiably American).

More specifically, she seems intrigued by poems where the observer is not external to nature but implicated in it, the line between observer and observed undecidable, as in this line from Imbs’s “Bloomed”: “the stars were clouded / or was it weariness clouded my eyes.”15 Or in the opening image of Weeks’s poem:

The natural world in these poems is simultaneously vivid and somehow generic—placeless but concrete—but what arrests me are the perspectival shifts that move between an internal dreamscape and the crystalline clarity of the observed world. These poems are not quite surrealist, but they torque reality in ways that evoke the surreal; they are not quite imagist, but they depend on the vividness of the image. Shaken free of the already oblique, already internationalizing nativism of Pagany, they give us back the modernism of this little magazine with the same skewed vision that Sagawa is drawn to. They are America, but only insofar as they are anywhere; already, in translation, they are becoming somewhere else, a kind of no place.

Sagawa’s translations shape her own poetry in ways that are both direct and diffuse. Thus, for instance, Reznikoff’s seasonal “Group of Verse” ends:

Compare Sagawa’s “Spring,” which picks up the seasonal theme and the image of the queen of May:

Sagawa’s spring is more uncanny than Reznikoff’s. It relies more heavily on synesthetic transformations (flowers that “smell of melting haze”) and metaphors that seem less to add clarity to the original image than to turn it into something new entirely (the “violet wisps of smoke” that become “angry feathers”). Her queen, emerging in this destabilizing spring, seems less a consolatory image of return, promising cyclical relief from the long winter isolation, than the anticipated dawning of a strange new regime—for what strange monarch could rule over Sagawa’s writhing world?

The allusion to Reznikoff (or to any other specific poem) is not all that Sagawa is learning from the Americans through her apprenticeship in translation. As “Spring” itself suggests, she also learns—and then develops, expands, radicalizes—a way of twisting the image, wringing it free of its location and its fixity, which is anticipated in the perspectival ambiguity of Weeks’s and Imbs’s poems, and in the fascination with dream visions that runs through several of the poems she translates (notably DeJong’s “Return from the Sleeper” and Fitzgerald’s “Night Images”). Through and in translation, Sagawa is learning her characteristic way of seeing. The torsion she brings to bear on Reznikoff’s poem is itself a way of seeing his springly queen of May anew, under her own transformative gaze.

So too, we might say, Chika Sagawa’s American modernism is itself a seeing-anew that brings something strange and characteristic into focus—a perspective on Pagany that sees it aslant. In a short critical essay, “When Passing Between Trees,” Sagawa develops a gentle critique of the way her Japanese contemporaries import foreign influences. Surveying a wheat field, she “wonder[s] if the sun in May isn’t a little too bright for the Japanese poets of today. They speak only of dreams and illusions, failing to harmonize with this all-too-French air.” For Sagawa, the problem is not the fact of foreign influence as such, but a certain rigidity in the way it is deployed: “The negligence of having imported only the world of Leica into poetry,” she writes, “only makes us a little dizzy.” The Leica camera—the first 35mm camera, produced by a German manufacturer—was a hit in Japan, as it was elsewhere in the world. Sagawa seems to imply that the visual interest of its specific way of seeing becomes dizzying in its overuse, rendering the natural world homogenous and blinding Japan’s poets to the vibrancy of their own wheat fields in May. For Sagawa, what is valuable is not the dogmatic adherence to a particular lens, however novel and exciting, but the shimmering movement between views on the world: “There is a clear beauty in the hazy scenery when I have removed my glasses, and there is also a hazy goodness in what I see clearly when my glasses are on. . . . It is not so much about searching for boundaries, but rather the precise snapping together of the infinite allusions on either side of that single line, with the cross-sections of a leaping field of vision.” Western technologies of vision,19 Western poetics, should all be kept in play, part of a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives.

One way that Sagawa turns the kaleidoscope in her own approach to this field is precisely through her preference for American poets. If her account of her contemporaries emphasizes the “all-too-French air” that pervades Japanese poetry, her translations highlight not France directly but an American poetry scene that is itself pervaded by French influence. Perusing these little magazines, the centrality of Paris is impossible to escape. Transition, the little magazine from which she took Harry Crosby’s poems, was published in France and saw itself explicitly as a vehicle for American expatriate literary experiment, and a link between French- and English-language avant-gardes. Crosby, likewise, was an American for whom Paris offered a site for experimenting with new ways of living as well as new ways of writing.20 But even the more straightforwardly US-based little magazines take Paris as a center of American poetic and artistic production. Pagany’s April–June 1931 issue concludes with Georges Hugnet’s “Paris Letter,” published in French and detailing current avant-garde musical trends and performances in the French capital, while its January–March 1932 issue opens with Olga Rudge’s translation of Jean Cocteau’s “The Laic Mystery: An Essay in Indirect Criticism.” Similarly, the issue of The Dial from which Ralph Cheever Dunning’s “Meditation” is taken is largely devoted to fêting the French poet, Paul Valéry, for his election to the French Academy, publishing not only Valéry’s speech on this occasion but three additional pieces of criticism about his work.21 The unavoidable impression that emerges across these little magazines is that of an American modernism that, like its Japanese counterpart, is bathed in an “all-too-French air.” Reading this American modernism in Japan, then—or more, publishing translations of it in Japanese little magazines, several of which bear French titles rendered in katakana—becomes a way of dislocating and refracting the Frenchness of Japanese modernism.

Here I reach the limits of what I can plausibly say about Sagawa’s translations. At the age of 12, in 1997, as I entered high school in country Australia, I was offered the choice of studying French or Japanese, but not both. It was a choice that sought a compromise between a “traditional” Eurocentric syllabus and Australian neoliberalism’s halting attempt to reimagine itself as part of Asia and its then-booming economy.22 I chose French (I had family in France), and today I work in and translate occasionally from that language, but, faced with a page of Japanese, I am again illiterate.23

To write this essay, I worked with and around my illiteracy, reconstructing poets’ names from tables of katakana, and titles, sometimes even whole poems, via Google translations. The detective work this involves is labor-intensive but not scholarly—it is in fact an embarrassment to scholarship (I think often of Jack Gladney, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, whose founding of Hitler studies is permanently compromised by his ignorance of German).24 I mention it here, risking this embarrassment, because these modes of illiteracy, the movement between reading and not-reading, and the sort of para-reading, the process of working with texts that are not legible to us in a strict sense but that remain available as texts to work with—all of these are not just embarrassments. They are also, embarrassingly, an important mode by which literature and language circulate outside communities of native speakers. They are a form of transmission that is both illegitimate and central to what we mean when we talk about cross-cultural or world literary exchanges.

This embarrassment is, I suspect, more pervasive than we want to imagine. Modernism has long been embedded within scholarly and academic interpretive frames. The scholarly study of literature in the Anglophone world developed in tandem with the canonization of modernist literature. Today, modernism is barely imaginable outside its institutionalization in the academy, while our academic reading practices bear the unmistakable traces of practices of reading and scholarship that were developed on and for modernist literature. As a result, scholarly seriousness and modernist literature feel at times impossible to disentangle. Close reading—the signature method that links the modernist literature for which it was developed and the academic contexts in which it is institutionalized—relies on, even fetishizes, the original text. It disdains translations as it disdains cribs, summaries, and paraphrases. But modernism itself was rarely a particularly scholarly endeavor (contemporary literature, to the contrary, is far more likely to be embroiled within the academy, as Mark McGurl and others have highlighted).25 To take just one example—one that took me by surprise as a graduate student—we might think here of Samuel Beckett, whose apparent philosophical seriousness is undercut by his overwhelming reliance on textbooks, summaries, and heavily edited samplings, rather than complete or authoritative philosophical texts. Armed with this knowledge, the earnest scholarly project of hunting down his sources—so central to contemporary scholarship on Beckett—starts to feel faintly ridiculous.

Unserious and mock-serious scholarship has been one of the (highly problematic, much-contested) motors of Euro-American modernism’s relationship to East Asia. The most famous instance of this is no doubt Ezra Pound, whose fascination with Asian literature and aesthetics significantly outstripped his linguistic or literary knowledge of it for most of his career. The most exemplary and strange instance of Pound’s unscholarly engagement with the East may be Cathay, a series of poems billed as translations from the Chinese, although Pound did not in fact read Chinese when he produced them. Instead he worked from the notebooks of Ernest Fenellosa, an American Japanologist who had taken classes on classical Chinese poetry with the Japanese scholar Mori Kainan, via the interpretation of Ariga Nagao.26 Working from Fenellosa’s notebooks, Pound is in a certain sense working with the Chinese poems and even the Chinese script, though he is certainly not reading them. His Chinese poems are mediated reconstructions, produced in and through the finest traditions of Japanese philology but rendered, after so many layers of mediation, something more like original English-language poems inspired by an idea of China and Chinese.

Instances of not-reading in the European modernist imagination of East Asia can also be found among Sagawa’s own translation sources. In the issue of transition from which Sagawa drew the Crosby poems, there appears an English version of Sergei Eisenstein’s essay, “The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese Culture,” one of a series of essays in which the Soviet filmmaker develops an account of cinema through an engagement with Japanese culture and aesthetics. In this essay, which Sagawa may well have read, Eisenstein argues that the Japanese writing system (he has in mind the kanji script) and literary tradition embody the principle of montage—the cutting together and superimposition of different images to produce new meanings—which is foundational to his theory of film.27 Eisenstein, like Pound, did not read either Japanese or Chinese, though in a 1931 letter to a Japanese scholar whose book he reports not being able to read, he notes that he studied the language for four months and regrets not having progressed further.28 Like Pound, he works with—not in—Japanese. But this working-with, informed by the most introductory knowledge of the language, produces its own kind of poetry, a metaphorical reading of the Japanese language that is available only to those approaching it ignorantly and from the outside. Eisenstein’s illiteracy makes available an imagistic, and ultimately poetic or filmic way of “reading” Japanese via a form of not-reading.

This is not a defense of those branches of world literature that advocate for translation to the exclusion of language-learning, or that suggest that only speaking English is ever sufficient. Having reached here the limits of what I can say, on the threshold of where things might conceivably become interesting—where language gets its texture, where Sagawa’s translations become Sagawa’s, rich (I assume) with the quirks that might link her translation work to her own poetry—having reached this limit, I feel acutely the limitations. Pound and Eisenstein’s projects are problematic and their use of Japanese culture for their own ends has often been linked to Orientalist ways of approaching the East. As a scholar, rather than a poet or filmmaker, I have tried to stop at the threshold of what I can say with confidence, but in doing so, I can glimpse those insights that are out of my grasp.

Let me end, though, not with my embarrassment but with what surprises it might disclose. If my not-reading of Sagawa’s translation is not scholarly, it has at least been poetically interesting. Ralph Cheever Dunning—always a strange poet in modernist circles, writing a kind of late Victorian verse that had currency in these worlds largely through Pound’s promotion of his writing—becomes a better poet, I think, in Google’s rendering of Sagawa’s translation than he ever was in the original English. Take the second stanza of “Meditation,” in Google’s translation of Sagawa’s translation:

This strange poem is satisfying in the way that many modernist, perhaps even many Objectivist poems are satisfying (satisfying, in fact, in the way that Sagawa’s own torqued images are)—and surely represents a dramatic improvement on the sentimental and mannered original:

And here, with Dunning’s improvement via this strange Sagawa–Google collaboration, I might end where I truly began this project, not with Sagawa’s translations but with their retranslation into English and other languages by Sawako Nakayasu in her wonderful, playful Mouth: Eats Color. Across 80 multilingual pages, Nakayasu—Sagawa’s English translator and this project’s editor—treats translation as play and experimentation, not the production of a definitive version but the kaleidoscopic refraction of poetry across languages and versions. Here, losses become gains and illiteracy becomes part of the fabric of poetic reading. Mina Loy’s “Widow’s Jazz,” translated back into English from Sagawa’s Japanese, loses its slide into AAVE in the original lines: “White man quit his actin’ wise / colored folk hab de moon in dere eyes.”30 But in Nakayasu’s English, it gains a cryptic commentary on US race relations that is both more complex than Loy’s original and more vivid in its rendering strange of idioms: “white cleverness puts an end to this movement by colored people holding moonlight in their eyes.”31 Or consider Harry Crosby’s prose poem “White Fire”:

And as it is rendered in Nakayasu’s version from Sagawa’s translation:

Returned to its “original” English, Crosby’s poem is estranged, made strange, transformed under the kind of refracted vision that Sagawa everywhere brings to bear. In a sense, these transformations are what literary translation is, or might be: the relentlessly eccentric torquing of poetry across languages and literatures until the very concept of an original vanishes into the kaleidoscope. Here, Sagawa’s para-canon of American modernism comes back to us, returned askew to its “native” language.

佐川千佳さんも翻訳者でした。

2011年、佐川知佳の翻訳詩集（主に詩の翻訳）が薄い本として出版された。1 その目次は、今ではその特異性と言えるほど、衝撃的です。 ジェイムズ・ジョイスの唯一の詩集『室内楽』を完全に網羅しています。 ハリー・クロスビーの1929年のコレクション「Sleeping Together」からのセレクション。 チャールズ・レズニコフ、ブラヴィグ・インブス、ミナ・ロイ、デヴィッド・コーネル・デヨング、ハワード・ウィークス、ラルフ・チーバー・ダニング、R・S・フィッツジェラルドによるその他の未収集の詩の明らかにかなり雑多なセレクションと、ハーバート・リードの散文作品。 島田龍は、佐川の翻訳に関する印象的で詳細な学術調査の中で、最近、彼女がノーマン・マクラウドの追加の翻訳詩や、ヴァージニア・ウルフ、フェレンツ・モルナールなどの作家による一連の短編小説やエッセイも翻訳出版していることを示した。 、オルダス・ハクスリー、シャーウッド・アンダーソン、アーネスト・ジョーンズ、ノーマン・ベル・ゲデス、ジョン・チーバー、フランシス・フレッチャー（紙面の都合上、ここでの議論ではこれらの散文翻訳はほとんど脇に置きますが、これ自体が風変わりで興味深いセレクションですが、 それについては多くのことが言えます）。2 アメリカや英語圏のモダニズムを知っていると思っている私たちにとってさえ、特に、このリストはおそらく不均一で、おそらく驚くべきものであり、確かに私たちが期待するものとはまったく異なります。 佐川が翻訳した詩人は、超正統なもの（ジョイス）から、尊敬されるもの（レズニコフ、ロイ）、そして事実上忘れ去られたもの（ウィークス、デヨング、フィッツジェラルド、さらにはクロスビー）まで、予想外に逸脱していた。

このリストを眺めていて、特に詩に焦点を当てていると、「佐川ちかはアメリカのモダニズムに影響を受けている」というようなことを言いたくなる。そして明らかにこれは真実の発言であり、ここから得られる証拠を使えば全力で擁護できることだ。 目次と彼女自身の文章。 結局のところ、佐川が翻訳した詩人の明らかに大部分は（アイルランド人のジョイスを除いて）アメリカ人であり、これらの作家と佐川自身の詩との間の境界線は容易に確立されている。 しかし、そうしないと、この主張で私たちが見逃してしまう可能性があるのは、「アメリカのモダニズム」のような用語がいかに不正確であるかということです。 この名前のリストには、私にとって予想できるものもあれば、全く未知のものもありますが、佐川千佳のアメリカン・モダニズムが、円に接線が触れる場合にのみ、このカテゴリーについての私自身の理解に影響を与えることがわかります。 同様に、それがどこで教えられたとしても、今日そのタイトルのコースに登場すると私が想像するものとは、ほんの少し似ているだけです。 佐川知佳のアメリカン・モダニズムは、端的に言えば、この言葉が今日示している規範からは逸脱している。 このことから明らかになることの 1 つは、モードやスタイル、さらには時代についての中立的な説明として流通しているこれらの用語 (「モダニズム」、「アメリカのモダニズム」、さらには「客観主義の詩」のようなより具体的なもの) がどの程度存在しているかということです。 実際のところ、規範的な用語にすぎません。 結局のところ、アメリカのモダニズムは、私のモダニズムであれ、佐川のモダニズムであれ、その形と質感は、この言葉を聞いたときに思い浮かぶ一連の詩、小説、物語、作家を通じて形成されます。 これらのしばしば語られないテキストのコレクションから、そしてその周りで、私たちは（アメリカの）モダニズムの他の一連の意味を概略的に描きます。 あるジャンルに近づく可能性がある一連の傾向または形式的特徴。 近代との関係における文学の立場についての理論的に洗練された説明。 不当に無視されてきたと思われる同時代人に光を当てる一連の反正典。 私たちが考えたテキストは背景に消え、「サンプル」になります。 しかし必然的に、これらのより堅牢に見えるアメリカモダニズムの説明は、多かれ少なかれ共有対象に対する共通の理解に暗黙のうちに依存しており、その対象はほとんどの場合正典を形成します。 これらの例は例示的なものではなく、構成的なものです。 (これが、正教会戦争が非常に多くの熱と光を生成する理由です。戦争は例ではなく、対象そのものを争うのです。)

佐川は翻訳を通じて正典を構築していたが、それは特定かつ特異な種類の正典、つまり一種の個人的な正典、準正典であり、彼女の同時代人も私たちも「大物」のリストとして実際には認識しないものであった。 英語圏のモダニズム。 佐川氏は「大物」のリストを作ろうとしていたわけではないと私は思う。 彼女自身の時代においてさえ、彼女の翻訳は期待される模範を避けていることで注目に値します。 やや興味深いことに、彼女はパウンド自身の翻訳ではなく、ハワード・ウィークスやラルフ・チーバー・ダニングなど、パウンドのあまり知られていない弟子たちの翻訳を行っている。 彼女はウィリアム・カルロス・ウィリアムズが主宰し、ウィリアムズが毎号掲載した定期刊行物に掲載されている詩人を選んでいるが、ウィリアムズを翻訳することは決してない。

ジョイスの作品を除いて、彼女が翻訳した詩の大部分は、1929 年から 1932 年の間に初めて英語で出版されました。この時期は、1990 年代のタイラス・ミラーが「後期モダニズム」と呼ぶものの頂点に当たりますが、現在では学者たちが私たちの解釈を拡張し続けています。 正典に比べると、この「後期」の時代はかなり初期のものに感じられ始めています（最近、ロビン・クレスウェルは、1960年代のベイルートのかなり後のモダニズムを説明するために同じ用語を使用しました）。3 しかし、ミラーは英米モダニズムにおいて重要なこと、一種の衛兵の世代交代を示唆しており、佐川はこの次世代、つまり英語圏文学をきっかけに名声とスタイルが台頭した「後期」作家に興味を持っているようだ。 1922 年のモダニズムの奇跡の年、ジョイスの『ユリシーズ』、T.S. エリオットの『荒地』、そしてヴァージニア ウルフの『ジェイコブの部屋』がすべて印刷された年であり、私たちが今でも覚えているような「ハイ モダニズム」の高みは、すでに彼らにとっては高みにあったのです。 老いていくこと。

佐川自身も、日本の後期モダニストの対応世代に属している。 文学的および芸術的な実験プロジェクトとしての日本のモダニズムは、1910 年代にはすでに本格的に普及しており、1926 年に大正時代が終わりを迎えるまでに勢いを増していました。 佐川は 1911 年に生まれ、1926 年にはまだ 10 代で、故郷の北海道から東京に来たのは 1928 年になってからでした。彼女はすぐに前衛詩サークルの同人界の一員になりましたが、彼女は前衛的な詩サークルに入りつつありました。 規範と評判、その「有名人」と主要なジャーナルはすでに確立されていました。 彼女が英語圏の前衛文学から翻訳するために選んだ詩人たちは、すでに制度化され慣例化されつつあった、慣例を打ち破り、新奇性を特権とする文学分野の、ほぼトートロジー的で同じ場面に参入していた。 彼女は確立されたネットワークとパトロンの世界に現れた人々からインスピレーションを得ており、彼女の選択は、彼女の翻訳が突破しようとしている文化的および言語的距離を超えてさえ機能する世代の論理があることを示唆しています。