Editor's Introduction

Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (New Directions, 1955) introduced a generation of readers to a poetry of great subtlety and sensibility and, through four decades and three subsequent collections of Japanese poetry in translation, he left an indelible imprint on American culture. Prized for their precision and transparency, Rexroth's Japanese translations have introduced many young readers to poetry in general, have been presented as gifts from lover to lover and friend to friend, and have been imitated by poets at least since Jack Kerouac's haiku and Robert Bly's Silence in the Snowy Field (Wesleyan University Press, 1962).

In his brilliant introduction to One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, Rexroth reminds his readers that the opening lines of a tanka, the traditional five-line Japanese poem, often serve only to "create a setting" for the closure, and as a kind of preface "have only an emotional or metaphoric relevance, and introduce into a poem of only thirty-one syllables an element of dissociation." Scores of American poets explored just such a structure in short lyrical poems in the sixties and seventies, from the luminous dark poems and translations of W. S. Merwin to the flat, pseudo-mystical phrases of mere imitators.

In his essay "The Influence of Classical Japanese Poetry" (The Elastic Retort, Seabury Press, 1973), Rexroth offers this warning for readers of poetry in translation: "If Japanese, or for that matter, Chinese poetry is translated into Western syntax and all the spark gaps of meaning are filled up, what results is a series of logically expressed epigrams, usually sentimental, with a vulgar little moral interpretation attached, or at the best a metaphorical epigram of a moment of sensibility like [Ezra] Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro,' which most resembles, not classical Japanese tanka or even the best haiku, but the more sentimental work of the late Yeddo [Edo] period. It is this compulsion to fill up the gaps and interpret the poem for Western readers which vitiates the work of so many translators, both Western and Japanese. They too often believe that Westerners could not possibly understand a Japanese poem in all its simplicity."

But the apparent "simplicity" of classical Japanese poetry, especially the five-line tanka, the staple of Rexroth's four hundred–odd poems translated from Japanese, is often an illusion. Like the classical Chinese poets they emulated and closely studied, Japanese poets filled their poems with slightly altered lines from "the classics" and referential metaphors and similes. Willis Hawley, one of Ezra Pound's principal informants on all things Chinese, once offered the left-handed compliment, "He knows when to dumb it down," meaning that Pound didn't try to fill in all the "spark gaps" of allusion as he translated.

Rexroth, especially in his longer philosophical poems, engages in a practice similar to that of Pound's "ideographic method" in The Cantos, a layering achieved by allusion and echo and paraphrase as well as by direct quotation. Part Three of the title poem to The Phoenix and the Tortoise (New Directions, 1944) begins:

Softly and singly an owl
Cries in my sleep. I awake and turn
My head, but there is only the moon
Sinking in the early dawn.

Substituting an owl for a Japanese cuckoo, this is a translation of a famous poem by Gotoku Daiji. This and several other instances of Rexroth's personal use of whole Japanese poems within his own have been traced by Sanehide Kodama in American Poetry and Japanese Culture (Archon Books, 1984).

Having spent much of his life absorbing Asian literary culture in general and Buddhist culture in particular, Rexroth was entirely comfortable writing poems as infused with the spirit of Buddhist dharma as any of those he translated, and this is obvious in his later work, especially in The Morning Star (New Directions, 1979), which includes a longer poem, "On Flower Wreath Hill," the name of which means cemetery in Chinese and Japanese. This meditation on his own temporality, written while Rexroth was living in Kyoto in 1974–75, makes free use of many classical Japanese poems, so that Rexroth's own sense of passing is connected directly with the poetry and poets of a thousand years ago.

His invention of "a contemporary young woman who lives near the temple of Marishi-ben in Kyoto," Marichiko, is an audacious stroke of genius replete with echoes of Buddhist sutras and of China's greatest woman poet, Li Ch'ing-chao, whom Rexroth was then translating with Ling Chung. In some way, perhaps, one might say of Rexroth that he became "feminized" in sensibility late in his life—through translating women poets of China and Japan in addition to the above.

Throughout a long and difficult life, Kenneth Rexroth believed in an idealized love in which passion, compassion, and spiritual enlightenment become inevitable. He was fond of saying, when it was still considered indecent to mention such things in mixed company, "Sexual love is one of the greatest forms of contemplation." He was one of this century's great poets of erotic love in part because he believed erotic love to be the physical manifestation of spiritual devotion, an attitude informed by Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy.

In his translations of classical Japanese love poems in particular, Rexroth brings a deep philosophical kinship into harmony with a profoundly romantic intuition and achieves an apparent simplicity not at all at odds with the original. He makes an American English equivalent that finds resonance in the most enduring, complex, and fundamental human experience.

These poems have been selected from One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (New Directions, 1955); One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese (New Directions, 1976); The Burning Heart (Seabury Press, 1977), republished as Women Poets of Japan (New Directions, 1982); and Love Poems of Marichiko (Christopher's Books, 1978). The "Notes on the Poets" have been adapted from material in these same publications.

Sam Hamill

In a gust of wind the white dew
On the autumn grass
Scatters like a broken necklace.

—Bunya No Asayasu