Sakutaro Hagiwara

A four-pack of our Spring 2014 Poetry Pamphlets, featuring: The Albertine Workout, by Anne Carson Derangements of my Contemporaries, by Li Shangyin The Iceland, by Sakutaro Hagiwara The Poems of Osip Mandelstam

Modernist poet Sakutarō Hagiwara's first published book, Howling at the Moon, shattered conventional verse forms and transformed the poetic landscape of Japan. Two of its poems were removed on order of the Ministry of the Interior for "disturbing social customs." Along with the entirety of Howling, this volume includes all of Blue Cat, Hagiwara's second major collection, together with Cat Town, a prose-poem novella, and a substantial selection of verse from the rest of his books, giving readers the full breadth and depth of this pioneering poet's extraordinary work.

Hagiwara writes in the preface: “The author’s past life was that of a disconsolate iceberg that drifts and flows in the extreme regions of the northern seas. Looking at the phantom-like auroras from various spots of the iceberg, he yearned, suffered, rejoiced, sorrowed, at times getting angry with himself, as he wandered on vainly with the tides…. Above his heart were always the disconsolate clouded skies of the extreme regions, the soul-ripping winds of the Iceland howling, screaming. He wrote all that painful life and the diary of a real person in these poems.”

This work comprises the first complete English translation of Shi no Genri, one of the most important attempts at a theory of literature written in the modern period. Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886–1942) was not only an original poet but also a perceptive and lonely literary critic. This book, in his own words, "is not a collection of fragmentary writings, but a thoroughly systematic and organized discourse" on poetry and other related arts. He sees the future of Japanese poetry as being tied to the characteristics of Japanese language, and even to the destiny of Japan.

This work comprises the first complete English translation of Shi no Genri, one of the most important attempts at a theory of literature written in the modern period. Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886–1942) was not only an original poet but also a perceptive and lonely literary critic. This book, in his own words, "is not a collection of fragmentary writings, but a thoroughly systematic and organized discourse" on poetry and other related arts. He sees the future of Japanese poetry as being tied to the characteristics of Japanese language, and even to the destiny of Japan.