Music: Selected Poems

Taro Naka (1922-2014) is one of the most respected poets in post-war Japan, having won several major Japanese poetry prizes. His poetry reflects his life-long exploration of Buddhism, traditional and modern literature, language, art, and philosophy. He developed a poetics that paid attention to what he describes as the visual, phonetic, and historical aspects of words and how each word is a unique combination of these. The poems in this volume are selected from across his poetic output of some seventy years, ranging from his stark, uncompromising depictions of the war and its immediate aftermath to the formal experimentation of the 1965 collection often considered his magnum opus, Music - from which this book takes its title - and The First Emperor, his 2003 nō play. Music, consisting of strong translations by Andrew Houwen and Chikako Nihei, and including an illuminating introduction, is the first book-length collection of Naka's work in English.

About the Author
Houwen, Andrew: - Andrew Houwen is a translator of Dutch and Japanese poetry and an associate professor at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. Some of his translations of the Dutch poet Esther Jansma appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation and Shearsman.Nihei, Chikako: - Chikako Nihei has recently completed a doctoral thesis on the novels of Haruki Murakami at the University of Sydney. She is currently a lecturer at Yamaguchi University in Japan and is working on a publication concerning Murakami and literary translation.Naka, Taro: - Taro Naka(1922-2014) was born Shōjirō Fukuda in Hakata, on the island of Kyūshū in western Japan. He entered Tokyo Imperial University in 1941 to study Japanese Literature but was called up to serve in the Japanese navy in October 1943. His first collection, Etudes, was published in 1950; his first mature collection, Music (1965), received the Yomiuri and Murō Saisei prizes. He published four further poetry collections: Hakata (1975), No-Self Mountain Temple Diary and Other Poems (1985), Excerpts from Travellers of the Dark (1992), and Requiems (1995). In 2003, his nō play The First Emperor was published; it was performed at the National Noh Theatre in March 2014. He also published numerous critical works, including Hagiwara Sakutarō and Others (1975) and The Words of Poetry (1983), and prose essays such as The Music of Melancholy (1977) and The Garden of Time (1992).