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ARCHIVE: Sanford Goldstein
Tanka zealots take a deep breath in and then read on! Stylus speaks to the amazing Sanford Goldstein on life in Japan, translating and the art of tanka writing. Interview: Patricia Prime
Sanford Goldstein - The Tanka Anthology
How and why did you settle in Japan? I didn’t settle in Japan, Pat, not until 1993. Perhaps you meant by your question my reasons for coming to Japan. When I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin and about to receive my PhD in English Literature, I sent out more than a hundred individually typed letters to universities in the United States. I got not a single response even though I had a very good record. All of a sudden in the middle of my last semester just before I graduated, the head of the English Department received a letter from a former graduate student who was leaving Japan after teaching there a few years. He needed a replacement. When I was asked by the head of the department to go to Japan, I was terrified – what? Japan? The former enemy? But my wife was an anthropologist working on her master’s degree at the university and she wanted to go. Because of my wife, we went, and that started my love affair with Japan these last 51 years. It turned out that because my wife miscarried, we decided to leave Japan after two years to go to Stanford University. I was accepted as a post-doctoral student and was able to attend, free (we were poverty-stricken), the famous Stanford writing program. My wife received her MA in anthropology there. Then I got my job at Purdue. From that time on, due to our love of Japan, I was able to get a Fulbright for Nagasaki University (from 1959-61) and later return to Niigata University four more times on two-year sabbaticals. You can see quite obviously that my wife and I loved Japan. I finally came to Japan in 1993, for I had received a request in 1989 to help establish a new college in Japan. The college needed a foreigner with a long list of publications to satisfy the Ministry of Education in Japan. I gave Keiwa College my list of publications even though I could not be sure I could come to Japan as far away as four years in the future. Purdue has no retirement for its faculty – if tenured and teachers are well enough to teach and want to, they can teach until their final day on earth. But I somehow felt obligated to Japan and retired from Purdue even though there was no retirement date required. That’s how I ended up in Japan. I am now a Permanent Resident of Japan.
In America I was able to carry on a tradition I set for myself of writing at least ten poems a day. Sometimes, during a crisis, I would write even more. For example, when my wife was operated on for a brain hemorrhage in the 60s, I sometimes wrote one hundred tanka a day, sometimes more. I like to write my poems in cafeterias or coffee shops. At Purdue, I often wrote poems in the big student cafeterias on campus or at cafeterias where, after my wife’s death, I often ate supper (once my children left for college). But Japan has no real cafeterias, and coffee is expensive, though we can stay at a small coffee shop as long as we wish with our one cup of coffee. I found too that there were not as many crises in my life as I got older. I was a loner, and I reached the point when I was in Japan of writing poems on the weekend. I still write at a small hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on its second floor with a small number of tables in a small room. That’s on Saturday afternoon – then I go to a nearby restaurant and write more tanka there. On Sunday there was a small neighbourhood Chinese restaurant where I could order “chahan” (a kind of chopsuey) and write poems there. Now I am in the habit of going to my small coffee shop on Saturdays and writing about 26 tanka there. I no longer go to the Chinese restaurant on Sunday.
from Simply Haiku, Vol. 1, No. 6, December, 2003
I don’t think, Pat, that America offers tanka poets much to go on. There is now only one major tanka journal, American Tanka, which now only appears once a year. (As I am rereading answers to your interview questions, I have just become aware of a new tanka journal to be published in January 2005 – it is called Red Lights after the Mokichi collection). There are smaller outlets like Hummingbird and bottle rockets that offer possibilities for tanka poets. These are a few outlets. Of course there may be others. Blithe Spirit in England, a haiku journal, does accept tanka for each issue. Fortunately we now have The Tanka Society of America, and it is putting out anthologies of tanka and also offers in its Newsletter chances to publish poems. As you know, Pat, there are now tanka outlets in New Zealand and Australia. Jane Reichhold deserves much credit for her attempts to publish tanka, and her online journal LYNX is still an important gathering point for tanka sequences, and reviews. In contrast, Japan has many tanka societies. The Japan Tanka Poets’ Society has 5000 members, and its journal, The Tanka Journal, comes out twice a year. Members of the society can select five of their own tanka in English twice a year for The Tanka Journal and be guaranteed publication. Many of the poems are in English, and some are in English and Japanese. In Japan, there are hundreds of small tanka groups and these publish their own tanka journals – in Japanese of course. We don’t get to see the tanka of these small groups. So outlets for tanka in Japan for foreigners are quite limited. What happens in Japan is usually self-publication. This goes on in America too. But such self-publication reaches only a small group. There is a long way to go before tanka gets the kind of attention haiku has received over the years.
Of course America is a huge country – Japan is smaller than the state of California, and Japan has half the population the US has. I am always conscious of space whether I am in the US or Japan, and that space in Japan often appears in my tanka as a rut, a crack, a narrow road, a point, a white string. But in America too, I can feel myself a dot. I have a poem written at a mall in a suburb of Cleveland in which I feel myself a dot inside that vast mall. Even though the tanka occupies only 31 syllables or less or five lines of short long short long long, a tanka itself can soar, as I tried to do in a series of tanka on Moby Dick, the whale. At the same time I like the ephemeral quality, the transient quality, of some brief moment in a narrow space – a match going out, incense smoke rising, roadside weeds. I have not taken the time to give examples of space in my tanka, but I can if you wish.
Pat, are you asking about my own tanka and the Japanese tradition? In the late 50s or early 60s I became aware of the poems of Takuboku Ishikawa (1886-1912), a selection of tanka printed on thin sheets of paper and entitled “Poems to Eat.” I felt almost at once that these tanka appealed to me. Takuboku was autobiographical, wrote about his poverty-stricken way of life, his amusements, his bitterness, his hospital stay, his feelings on New Year’s day, and his emotions about his wife and his child – tanka upon tanka of his own personal life and feelings. I think I felt the same way that Keats must have felt when he first read Chapman’s translations of Homer. Those tanka poems opened up a new world to me. It was then that I began writing Takuboku-like tanka. In 1954, I had started translating Japanese novels without knowing any of the Chinese characters, merely improving the English of my collaborators, this process done only in my first three translations. After these first translations I had to face the difficulties of studying Japanese and the Chinese characters and syllabaries and Japanese grammar. So when I returned to Japan in 1964, I wanted to translate tanka, and a professor of Japanese at Niigata University suggested I do Tangled Hair by Akiko Yosano (1878-1942). Her poems were full of Japanese culture, Japanese psychology, Japanese places, Japanese nature, a wild and varied list, and fortunately my fine collaborator, Professor Seishi Shinoda, himself a person born in the Meiji era (1868-1912), could give me tons of information about Japanese history and literature and poetry and art and customs and society and language and poetic technique. So Akiko and Takuboku were influences on me. But when I began studying and translating Mokichi Saito (1882-1953), an advance was made in my awareness of tanka by studying the tanka sequence. It is obvious from my own tanka publications that I myself labelled some series of poems sequences when they were nothing of the kind. Note for example the following titles of several series of poems I wrote: “Seidensticker’s Genji: a tanka sequence” (Bonsai, October, 1977); “zen master: a tanka sequence” (Literature East & West, February, 1978); “Sylvette: a Tanka Sequence for Elizabeth Searle Lamb” (High/Coo, February, 1979); “unfinished portraits: a tanka sequence” (Cicada, February, 1980). Reading these poems, a reader today might think of these as sequences, but now I know better. In Mokichi’s Red Lights (1913), published by Purdue University Press in 1989, Professor Shinoda and I defined sequence by translating 38 of Mokichi’s tanka sequences and showing how a sequence actually works. Furthermore, Mokichi set out to define what a tanka actually was, so much of my tanka life has been spent in trying to broaden the range of tanka the way Mokichi did. This brief summary should give you something of the tradition behind some of my tanka.
The beginning was quite accidental. The young graduate student who was leaving Niigata University and needed a replacement wrote me a letter I was reading on the train from Tokyo to Niigata on arriving in Japan in September 1953. He suggested I translate Japanese literature. I took him seriously, naïve as I was that in order to be a translator one ought to know the language of the work under translation! But since I had written a novel and short stories and poems for a number of years, I thought: why not? And after I saw a film entitled Gan (The Wild Geese), I asked the head of the English Department at Niigata University to translate the novel with me. The Japanese, especially at that time, do not think foreigners will ever know Japanese, so he readily agreed. And so it began. Before I left Japan on that first two-year trip, two younger professors asked me to translate stories with them – these young colleagues were Sadamichi Yokoo and Kazuji Ninomiya, the former’s translation with me of Yasushi Inoue’s magnificent The Hunting Gun, the latter’s a long story of a young man wanting to commit suicide in a mountain, Torahiko Tamiya’s Ashizuri Misaki (Ashizuri Promontory). Since I was lucky enough to get a contract for these three works from Charles E. Tuttle, I was suddenly thrust into the rare world of translation and publication. It has been a 51-year struggle to translate and to try to get translations published. That I have been able to give to Western readers, thanks to the help of all my collaborators, aspects of Japanese culture has given me a kind of satisfaction.
I have felt over the years that translators of Japanese poets as well as other works of Japanese literature rarely gave notes. I always wanted notes. When I studied Milton in graduate school, there were notes galore, and notes there were in the books of many scholars. I myself was so ignorant about Japanese culture when I started translating Tangled Hair that I simply couldn’t merely translate the poems without knowing something about geography, nature, biography, and many many more aspects of Japanese culture. And I asked Professor Shinoda about all the various points raised by Akiko in her poems. I had never heard of the “maeko”, and I didn’t know about technique of wooing in the Heian era. I was ignorant, and I still remain ignorant about many aspects of Japanese culture. When Professor Shinoda explained the poems and the questions I asked about, I took notes. I seem to have been forever taking notes. The same thing occurred in the books on Takuboku, Mokichi, Shiki, and Ryokan. One of the things I’ve noticed about reviews of these books was that the reviewers especially appreciated the notes, some, though not all, even the long introductions. Recently I bought Makoto Ueda’s translations of modern Japanese tanka. I found, for example, that his translations of Fumiko Nakajo were better than those of Jane Reichhold and Hatsue Kawamura, but actually Jane’s and Hatsue’s poems ultimately were better, for their poems were in a meaningful context. So good translations may not be enough. We need to dig in and try to understand.
The entire process is a problem. Often I could not find the meaning of a word in my modern Kenkyusha dictionary, so the word was old, and I had to rely on Professor Shinoda for the meaning. There are of course Japanese dictionaries that explain older words, but that would have required even more knowledge of Japanese than I possessed. The nuances of words are also important. Sometimes there is “kakekotoba” in which the cleverness in the Japanese is that the word has two or more meanings at the same time. Such “kakekotoba” are almost impossible to do in the brief space of a five-line tanka, so in that case a note helps. The problem in each translation is to get at the feelings of the poet. Since I have never had TB, have never suffered the kind of tormenting illness Shiki suffered, have never been a member of a tanka group in which poems have to be defended (as in the case of Mokichi), I had to try to feel what the poet was feeling, to put myself in the poet’s place, to become the poet. As a male, I had to become Akiko, to imagine what it must be like to be a woman who is abandoning the traditional ways of Japan. My major problem is my deficiency in the Japanese language, for I always had to rely on my collaborators. I can give many examples in which colors or events or food or season are important, and these, as a beginning student of Japanese and Japanese literature, I had to hear about. The way of the tea ceremony, the way of holding a brush, the way of offering a sake cup to a Japanese at a drinking party – and on and on. And so I somehow continue to make my stumbling way through Japanese culture. I am not a Seidensticker or a Donald Keene, true translator of Japanese literature, and this is one of the saddest elements of my life. How do you believe tanka defines itself in English? Tanka poets see tanka in various ways. Some tanka poets believe that even tanka ought to have a nature connection. I don’t, but if it has a nature connection and it relates to one’s mood or thought at the moment, that’s all right. Some feel that tanka have to pivot after the third line – the third line is the pivot and the next two lines a conclusion. But I early felt that tanka can just drop straight down to a conclusion. Now I prefer the 3/2 distinction which is being emphasized these days. Most people writing in English now believe that free-form tanka is better than the traditional form – that is, we don’t have to count syllables. But there are some hardy tanka souls that feel we have to have the 5-7-5-7-7. Two of these famous counters are Father Lawrence of Tokyo and James Kirkup, both of whose poems I have never felt remotely seem to be tanka, much less poetry. But I do believe that one can write some good English tanka poems in the traditional form. It seems to me that tanka is the space of a moment or even of a lifetime. In that brief space something crucial happens. What happens has affected the poet in some profound way, and the hope is that tanka’s extension leaps into the readers to affect them as well. What I feel about most tanka writers is that they are content to deal with the traditional subjects: love, friendship, nature, age, sickness. What I want tanka to do in English is to have a breadth, a variety, sometimes a new subject matter. I rarely see tanka poems that use allusions to American or English or Japanese literature. If allusions are used, I think this is one of the ways of extending tanka’s range. And that is one of the elements of my tanka I am very happy about. At any rate, tanka in English seems to be a five-line poem focusing on a moment in time. One of the qualities of tanka is its ambiguity – that is, the reader himself/herself fills in the unspoken aspects. The reader completes the poem in his/her own mind.
This is too broad a question to answer, but I’ll make a stab at it. A poem by an American with a Jewish or Italian emphasis will probably not be understood by the Japanese. For example, if the American tanka is about “bar mitzvah,” the Japanese would be stumped. As for a Japanese poem, for example, a poem on visiting a cemetery in August will probably not be understood by Americans. One has to know about “Obon” in order to understand what’s going on in a tanka where, say, children are carrying lanterns in the evening. An American may think this is a charming image, a Japanese one. Well, the individual lantern is supposed to guide the “dead visitors” to their relative’s home. This type of “having to know” goes on perpetually in tanka with a Japanese background. In the recent issue of the Newsletter of the Tanka Society of America, you, Pat, mention the word “hikoi marchers” and the note given is that “hikoi” is a protest march.” The note helps, though it is not clear what the twenty thousand were protesting about, so perhaps a New Zealander would get into that poem more than an American would. I think that perhaps a Zen poem with the statement “when I eat, I eat / when I sleep, I sleep” might not mean more to some Americans than merely having an appetite or being able to sleep well. It has to do with the Zen idea of concentration, of complete absorption in the moment, even in terms of sleeping and eating. Language is magnificent, however, in that somehow, beautifully, mysteriously, we are able to communicate across cultures.
If you look at my first tanka collection, you can see that I have tanka on my wife’s illness, on my children, and on my Zen master. When I wrote a poem about Anne Frank, that was because I had visited her home in Amsterdam. Right now I am writing a number of tanka about my battered right leg, hurt when I fell backwards on a bamboo stump. I know the year before last that poems on my ageing, on my balding, on my monkey-face have appeared. But I have always said I never wrote a confessional poem. By that I mean, that my own experience, I had hoped, would be something that a reader had experienced, that would make the reader say, “Yes, that’s how it is” or “That’s how I felt.”
from Simply Haiku, July-August
I think you have to define “loneliness,” for in Japanese there is a good kind of loneliness and a difficult kind. Well, I’ve had both kinds forever, so it doesn’t seem as if I will stop writing such poems. And now that I see how much I’ve aged, I doubt if I can get away from that subject. But somehow I don’t want to limit myself. I keep talking to my tanka muse, something a tanka poet I admire says I should stop writing poems about. She may be right, but I have a very personal relationship with my tanka muse, who is as varied, as whirling, as steady, as unreliable, as devoted as any muse can be. No, I want my tanka somehow to get deeper as depth comes with age, but I usually fail and fail. Who knows but tomorrow my poems may latch on to something else. Lately the hit TV series on American Idol has fascinated me. I am caught up into the lives of these singers, their joys and disappointments, their eternal optimism and inevitable fall. That program seems to be the way life is, totally competitive, unsparing in its criticism, a panorama of the American Dream and its windbag prick that sends a candidate off, often to isolation, but sometimes to stardom.
I began to keep tanka notebooks about twenty-five or so years ago. (I looked over the tanka notebooks I brought from America when I came to Japan in 1993 – I seem to have brought notebooks dated from 1991 and 1992 and my new notebook for 1993, and now I wonder what happened to the other earlier notebooks.) Before that period of keeping journals, I may have dashed off poems on napkins or yellow pads or sheets of white paper and retyped them and sent them out – only to be rejected of course. But even when I started keeping tanka notebooks, I first wrote poems on sheets of yellow paper or typing paper or even napkins, and later selected the good ones and put them into my tanka notebook. But after that I decided it was too time consuming, so I proceeded to spill my poems directly into my notebooks. In the old days at Purdue I could write my poems on campus, in the campus cafeterias or in lounges. When I say spill, I literally mean spill. At the end of a tanka notebook year, I go over my tanka notebook and asterisk the poems I think are good. Out of 3000 poems, say, I may find 300 or so that I list as good, and I type these out in single lines separated by diagonals. Then I go over these good poems, and out of these I select 25 or 30. so these are the poems I may send out to various journals. As you can see, my output of poems is not very large each year. I send only to a few journals, but sometimes I get requests, and in that case I usually look through the poems I am writing in my tanka notebook at the time. Though the poems are spilled, they may undergo revision if I decide to use the poems. Sometimes if I find that I am not using the short/long/short/long/long, I may lengthen a line or shorten a line. Sometimes I decide to make the poem into a traditional 31-syllable poem. So revision does take place, but I think that the same technique of spill as a final product may occur in a Japanese black/white drawing. Decisions are made on the spot. You won’t find copy after copy after copy trying for a particular effect, though sometimes you might. In flower-arranging decisions are almost immediate, and in tea-ceremony there is no going back to correct an error. My subject matter as I’m in the coffee shop can be something I felt yesterday, something I experienced during the week, a TV program I saw, even someone at the next table. Last week at my coffee shop I was sitting between two men who were smoking – I couldn’t get into the one small section of non-smoking. And I wrote a poem about my being in the middle of these two smokers. Sometimes childhood memories come back, and I write about them. Sometimes something simple triggers a long look back. On Sunday, my Japanese friend made me a bowl of soup, and, yes, tears came remembering that my mother had often made me chicken soup. I want to broaden the range of tanka, so often I accidentally find subjects that I don’t think have been the subject of tanka. Last year was the 100th anniversary of the famous Japanese director Ozu Yasujiro. I wrote five poems for The Tanka Journal on his films. Recently the Iraq beheadings left me totally depressed, and I submitted a poem on it to the TSA Tanka Café. I cannot separate myself from the books I’ve read, so often literary allusions come into my poems. I used to write, for about twenty-five years ten poems a day, sometimes more, sometimes less, but coming to Japan in 1993 after retiring from my American university, I couldn’t get to cafeterias or coffee shops that frequently. But on the weekend I could, so it was on Saturday and Sundays that I wrote at least twelve tanka or more in my notebook. Now I can’t get to my special restaurant on Sunday, so I try to spend time at my hole-in-the-wall coffee shop and write many tanka. Last week I wrote 28 until the smoke in the place was too much for me. Sometimes I will try to write a tanka string or a tanka sequence, but these are for special occasions – like the Ozu film series. I feel strongly about what a tanka string is (my own term) and what a tanka sequence is, but though I’ve written on the subject, I have few followers.
I do not need inspiration to write. Having been writing tanka for more than 40 years, I find tanka is part of my life. But sometimes certain events hurl themselves at me, and I know they will become a subject of my tanka. Right now I’ve finished reading a long novel by a Victorian, and it seemed to me that I ought to write a screenplay, certainly a ridiculous task for someone my age who has not even been able to get one of his own plays read. When I discovered that novel had a sequel, I wanted to incorporate both volumes into a screenplay. It is a challenge of course, but I do not think I would say I am “inspired.” When a crisis occurs in my life (for example, the brain surgery my wife had or her death or the entrance of the Zen master into my life), I always head for my tanka notebook. At the same time any interesting connection or unusual connections may trigger my desire to write a short story or a poem. I don’t think I can truthfully say that I was inspired – what brought something about was painful and it led to creativity of some sort. And it was always difficult. When a writer is rejected again and again, as I have been, I wonder if it’s inspiration that makes him keep writing. I doubt that. I imagine there’s a something out there to put down, and the writer does it without thought of reward or success.
Perhaps the main influence in writing tanka has been myself, the pain of my life. Of course, every tanka poet I translated was an influence on me. I became that tanka poet. I suffered along with Shiki and his illness. I felt Akiko’s frustration with her lover/husband. I lived through Takuboku’s tuberculosis and poverty and desire for escape. I wanted to have the freedom of Ryokan and his rich common sense. And when Yaichi Aizu lost his beloved adopted daughter, I was with him in his loneliness. An actor has to become the other person, and the tanka translator in me is the same. Of course, my co-translators have also been a major influence, especially Professor Shinoda. His vast knowledge of Japanese culture helped me enormously, but I never asked anyone about the actual value of my own tanka. Once I asked an editor about his having received my tanka, and thinking he had and not wanted it, I tried to explain it to him, something I rarely do. Tanka has been a form that has made me leap into myself.
I cannot answer this question for the Japanese. The recent and remarkable sales of Salad Anniversary will not, I think, set a trend. As for American tanka poets, I do not think they have enough backing from a particular group to make a dent. I think the Tanka Society of America can be a major force in helping writers of tanka to have a voice. Unfortunately, American Tanka is having financial problems, and since it appears only once a year now, its influence has ebbed. I can rattle off a list of fine tanka poets, including Tom Clausen and Marianne Bluger and Thelma Mariano and Michael McClintock and many others, but these are individuals who have an audience that have come to appreciate their work, but the question of having an influence is difficult since tanka is not yet well known, is still struggling to find its place as at least equal to haiku. Perhaps if Americans followed the Japanese way of having a close-knit group that criticizes, publishes, and supports the writing of its members, that group, once it becomes known, can have an influence. Tanka remains a kind of personal matter for the poet. And sometimes that poet is a slightly known and has a group that looks for the poet’s work when it appears.
Hair all tangled this morning – Tangled Hair by Akiko Yosano, translated by Sanford Goldstein.
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