The purpose of this study is to consider the issues regarding imagist short poems of Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in Japan from the perspective of comparative poetics.
Japanese poetry has been shaped by the influences of English Romanticism and French Symbolism. A decisive change occurred in the 1920's when Junzaburo Nishiwaki (1894-1982) went to England where he was caught up in the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound.
Thus Nishiwaki was absorbed in reading the imagist short poems in
Blast. Upon his return home, he started to publish a series of imagist short poems.
Ambarvalia, his first book of poems in Japanese, adopted the parallel structure of the ancient world and the modern world. ‘Rain’ is a imagist short poem which was strong inspired by imagist H. D.
I explore the ‘Metro senryu’ by the sixteenth Senryu, Senryu Aota (1928-2018) because Aota was strongly inspired by Pound's ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and wrote his ‘Metro senryu’ in response.
女棲む胸に地下鉄ぶらさげて
(in a heart filled with women a metro line dangles)
[trans: Andrew Houwen]
This contemporary senryu was first presented as an experimental work at Tokyo Senryu Association in April 1995. This ‘Metro senryu’ has received a lot of attention for its similarity to Ezra Pound's imagist short poems.
Together with the cows ‘mandolins’ poem, this contemporary senryu is considered one of Aota's best.
The cows‘ mandolins’ poem was presented in 1958, but in October 1956, Iwasaki Ryozo's translation of a selection of Pound's poetry was published by Arechi. One of Iwasaki's translations was one of ‘In a Station of the Metro’.
This ‘metro
hokku’ was written in two lines with Pound's technique of ‘super-position’;in Aota's ‘metro senryu’, he tries to employ this ‘super-position’ in one line.
In Aota's poem, two images are arranged next to each other, the ‘heart filled with women’ and the ‘metro line dangling’, employing an imagist ‘super-position’. The ‘metro’ in particular recalls that of Pound's ‘metro
hokku’, ‘In a Station of the Metro’. The faces of various women of the past reside in Aota's heart.
In Aota's ‘metro senryu’, both Pound's ‘super-position’ and Aota's ‘senryu vectorism’ appear. In the senryu, the horizontal vector of the metro and the vertical vector of the ‘dangling’ cross over. In the ‘heart’ where they cross over, the unforgettable ‘women’ always remain. The various faces of these ‘women’ momentarily appear, then disappear. Aota's heart is disturbed and shaken by their appearance; Aota expresses this inner state through the metaphor of the metro line ‘dangling’, thus depicting his ‘inner landscape’.
Aota was strongly inspired by Pound's ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and wrote his ‘metro senryu’ in response.
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