Description:
A complete translation by Eric Selland of six major books by Minoru Yoshioka, one of Japan's most important late-twentieth-century modernist poets.
Brief description: Minoru Yoshioka (1919-1990), the great late-modernist poet, published nine major collections between 1955 and 1984. He was born in the working-class district of Tokyo known as Shitamachi and attended public school until age 15, before going to work as an apprentice at a publisher of medical books. He spent most of the war years in Manchuria as a buck private assigned to caring for the officers' horses. He was repatriated to Japan by the Americans by the end of 1945, and he began putting his life back together in the ruins of Tokyo where he took a job with a publisher. During his long career as an editor and book designer, the manuscripts of many of Japan's major literary figures passed through his hands, most notably the collected works of the major poet Junzaburō Nishiwaki, who became a close friend and mentor. When in 1959 his second collection, Monks, won a major prize for younger poets, he was embraced by the avant-garde, and in the following years would influence a broad range of younger poets. In the 1970s he began experimenting with appropriation and collage. The culmination of these experiments is his magnum opus, Kusudama (1984), Eric Selland's English translation of which was published by Isobar Press in 2021. Yoshioka died suddenly of kidney failure in 1990.
Review Quotes:
It is indeed a pleasure to celebrate the appearance of this volume of Yoshioka's singular and relentlessly exploratory work from the hand of his dedicated translator, Eric Selland. In Yoshioka's floating world, threads of modernism and vanguardism conjoin, along with echoes of Butoh, to present a unique, and uniquely post-war Japanese, poetic experience. Here darkness and light, stillness and motion, the inner and the outer, play against one another in a constantly metamorphosing, consistently astonishing, dance of words. - Michael Palmer