| NOTA |
(*)(trans. by Sanford Goldstein & Seishi Shinoda) ()(1.LPoetry must be an exact report, an honest diary, of the changes in a manLs emotional lifeL, 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 JapnLs 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 IshikawaLs life, and like the contradictory manifestations that moderns are bombarded with, such an unusual triumvirate represents TakubokuLs fall and greatness. TakubokuLs 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 teacherLs, excellent in structure...[from the LIntroductionL]) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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