| NOTA |
(*)(trans. by Sanford Goldstein & Seishi Shinoda) (★)(1.´Poetry must be an exact report, an honest diary, of the changes in a man´s emotional life´, writes Takuboku Ishikawa. This important volume presents an intimate portrait, in diary and poetry, of a disturbed artist engaged in a fight against tuberculosis and against his very self. Ishikawa speaks his heart with almost brutal candor. His battle, as recorded here, dramatically parallels Japn´s struggle against itself during the radical cultural change of the Meiji era. 2.Poverty, illness, and tanka-the traditional thirty-one-syllable Japanese poem- permeate many of the twenty-six years of Takuboku Ishikawa´s life, and like the contradictory manifestations that moderns are bombarded with, such an unusual triumvirate represents Takuboku´s fall and greatness. Takuboku´s father, Ittei Ishikawa, was the fifth son of a peasant in Iwate Prefecture. In mid-nineteenth-century Japan a needy family living in a poor rural community hoped one of its sons would become a priest, the position being a kind of religious protection against the bleak aftermath of life, to say nothing of the immediate security and status such a career offered. Ittei was taught by Taigetsu Katsurahara, who was versed in Chinese classics and skilled in the tea ceremony and who was himself a poet whose tanka, while conventional, were nevertheless well formed. Even Ittei wrote tanka, typical and unoriginal to be sure, but like his teacher´s, excellent in structure...[from the ´Introduction´]) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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