June 16, 2008: Novelist Wendy Tokunaga (author of "Midori by Midnight") wrote about AMERICA on her site.
To read, please visit: http://blog.wendytokunaga.com
And here too:
http://www.redroom.com/blog/wendy-nelson-tokunaga/lost-in-translation


From Metropolis, Tokyo, June 2008
http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/recent/books.asp


From the Japan Times, Sunday, May 25, 2008.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20080525dr.html


From Poetry Kanto, Japan, May 2008:
http://poetrykanto.livejournal.com/
Please scroll down to read the review.

Read Translorial article: Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz win Literature Prize (May, 2003) Download


For Immediate Release:
“America and Other Poems: 1947-1976”
by Ayukawa Nobuo
Translated by Shogo Oketani and Leza Lowitz
New York: Kaya Press,
May 2008

“ America and Other Poems” by Japanese modernist poet Ayukawa Nobuo marks the first time this seminal work has been translated into a single volume in English. This landmark selection spans three decades from 1947-1976, ranging from Ayukawa’s early work about his war experience on the front lines to later poems in which the influence of Western culture on Japanese society can be clearly felt.

Ayukawa is considered the “pilot” of modern Japanese poetry. He was one of the founding poets of the Arechi (Wasteland) group, and translated the work of T.S. Eliot and later, William Burroughs, into Japanese. Ayukawa was drawn to Eliot after encountering "The Wasteland" when it was first translated into Japanese in the 1930s, and the Arechi poets bore witness to the disillusionment of post-war Japan in a new language inspired by Modernism. Stylistically, Ayukawa rejected traditional Japanese poetic concerns of recording the movements of nature or exploring purely emotional themes. Instead, he mined his past experiences and paid homage to his literary influences in abstract, lyrical modernist works that collaged remembered conversations among friends with literary quotations taken (and in some cases, reworked) from Mann, Eliot, Kafka, Pound and others. In addition to being a much-admired poet and translator, Ayukawa was a well-respected literary and social critic.

Ayukawa was drafted into the war in 1942 and was stationed in Sumatra. He decided to go AWOL but contracted malaria and was sent to a hospital ship to recover. He became increasingly critical of his country's war-time actions and personally haunted by the memory of his friend Morikawa Yoshinobu, who died at the Burmese front. Ayukawa sought to create a poetics of responsibility and political awareness by acting as a kind of spiritual "medium" for the voices of the war dead. In many of his poems, he elegizes Morikawa (referred to as M, or as Friend)--and by extension the country of Japan--and all that he/it lost.

While many of his friends died in the war, Ayukawa managed to survive, or rather "failed to die." He bore a deep sense of survivor's guilt and felt a responsibility to write about the war, alienating him from modern Japanese society and making him a spiritual exile. It was from this marginalized position that he spoke the conscience of a generation in his poetry.

Of the Arechi poets, Ayukawa's passionate refusal to let the war dead die, and his highly personalized poetic inquiry into the nature of race, culture, and identity--while keeping a sharp critical eye on the deadening effects of "progress" and the chameleon-like politics of the times--won him abiding influence. Major poets of coming generations such as Ooka Makoto, and many of Japan's foremost literary critics such as Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin site Ayukawa's strong influence on their work. It is no exaggeration to say that Ayukawa's poetry and literary, political, and cultural criticism has affected every important contemporary Japanese poet.

In modern and contemporary times, we have heard voices from the battlefront, but these writings are largely from the West. And, unlike the generals who wrote much of the cannon of war literature, Ayukawa Nobuo was an ordinary solider who was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army against his will. Thus, his poetry offers a rare perspective on the modern Asian war experience from an ordinary soldier’s point of view. This work is all the more resonant now.

“ America and Other Poems: 1947-1976” is the recipient of the 2003 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature from The Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University, and its translators received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to pursue this project. The translators have presented Ayukawa's work at the 2000 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference in San Francisco, and at the 1998 AWP Conference in Oregon as part of Manoa's Symposium on Pacific Rim literature. Individual translations of the poems have appeared in Manoa, Another Chicago Magazine, Five Fingers Review, Perihilion, Out of Line, Two Lines, Poetry Kanto, The Poetry of Men’s Lives, and many others.