Jeffey Angles
Photo by Dirk Skiba
Bio
Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. His collection of original Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line, Shichōsha, 2016), won the highly prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, an honor accorded to only a tiny handful of non-native speakers since the award began in 1949. His work as a scholar of modern Japanese literature and cultural history is visible in numerous publications in both English and Japanese, including Writing the Love of Boys (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, he has published dozens of translations of Japan’s most important modern authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation into English of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers, such as Itō Hiromi, Arai Takako, Takahashi Mutsuo, and Orikuchi Shinobu.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Japanese of the collected poems of modernist poet Nakahara Chūya. Chūya's poetry has been set to hundreds of pieces of music, ranging from classical art pieces to pop songs, and he has been the subject of biographies, studies, and creative pieces, including fiction, manga, and an opera libretto. Born in 1907, he published his first collection of poems, Songs of the Goat, when he was 27 and died at age 30 of cerebral meningitis, just before the release of his second book of poems, Songs of Days That Were. While some translations of his poems have appeared in anthologies, journals, and various books, all English translations of Chūya are long out of print.
When I was 15 years old, I went to Japan to study. As luck would have it, I went far off the beaten track to Yamaguchi, a prefecture filled with green mountains, hot springs, and long, rocky coastlines in the far southwest. As a passionate reader, it wasn’t long before I learned that Nakahara Chūya, one of the most famous poets of modern Japan, had grown up and started writing just kilometers away. Later, while developing reading skills in university, I read Chūya for the first time and quickly fell in love with his distinctively strange lyricism.
Since then, much of my scholarship and translation work as a professor has focused on prewar modernist writers and postwar contemporary poetry. I have translated dozens of authors, including poets Itō Hiromi, Takahashi Mutsuo, and Orikuchi Shinobu—all fixtures in literary history. Now, however, as I turn with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts to Nakahara Chūya, an even more popular poet than any I’ve translated before, I feel like I am experiencing a literary homecoming of sorts. Through Chūya’s writing, I am returning to the same landscapes and language, the same topography and tempo that incubated my teenage soul in Yamaguchi, where Chūya lived and worked.
While homecomings bring about feelings of nostalgia, they also allow one to look with fresh eyes at things that once seemed familiar. As I reread Chūya now, I see the traces of poètes maudites like Arthur Rimbaud—a French poet he translated extensively. I see his interest in Dadaism and surrealism. I see the appreciation of rhythm and form he learned writing verse in traditional forms. In short, this homecoming is one of constant rediscovery, and I am excited to share these discoveries with the Anglophone poetry readers through my translations.