Fifteen Poets of Modern Japan/Foreword
Foreword
he extraordinary appreciation accorded our earlier book of translations, Three Women Poets of Modern Japan, has led us to prepare the present collection, and to issue it as a companion volume to the other. Our aim this time is broader than before. Instead of confining ourselves to the feminine point of view and the tanka (thirty-one syllable) form, we are introducing poets of both sexes and a variety of lyric forms. It has frequently been said that Japanese poets have no ability to sustain their effects—that they are limited, either by temperament or tradition, to the briefest poetic flights. In general this assertion is borne out by fact. More and more, however, the longer lyric is finding a place in Japanese literature, and while the average Western reader is not accustomed to look upon a poem of fifteen or twenty lines as long, such a poem appears quite extensive to one whose conception of poetry is based chiefly on a familiarity with minute hokku and slightly longer tanka.
The rapidly-spreading knowledge of the fundamental characteristics of Japanese poetry would seem to make unnecessary another expository essay in that field. The spontaneity, the simplicity, the mental ingenuity, the charmingly impressionistic pictorialism which we have come to expect from Japanese poets are all exemplified once again in the present collection. It is a pleasure to bring to Western shores such charmingly wrought gifts as these—even though they may have been marred somewhat in their long journey from the East.