Paul Klee's Table and Other Books: Poems 1955-1980 - Paperback

Yoshioka, Minoru: - 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.Selland, Eric: - Eric Selland is an American poet and translator living in Tokyo. He is the author of Brushwork (Isobar Press, 2023), Object States (Theenk Books, 2018), Beethoven's Dream (Isobar Press, 2015), Arc Tangent (Isobar Press, 2013), Still Lifes (Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press, 2012), and The Condition of Music (Sink Press, 2000). Selland began his study of Japanese while still in his teens. After college, which included exposure to San Francisco's dynamic experimental poetry scene of the late 70's and early 80's, he spent ten years living in Japan where he became intimate with the experimental poetry community there. Selland has translated a total of seven volumes of poetry by important contemporary Japanese poets. His translation of The Guest Cat, a novel by Takashi Hiraide, was on the New York Times bestseller list in early 2014, and his translation of poems by Kiwao Nomura, The Day Laid Bare, was chosen as a Recommended Translation by The Poetry Book Society, UK, for their winter 2020 season. Selland is co-editing an anthology of twentieth-century Japanese experimental poetry with poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu, which is scheduled to appear from New Directions Books in 2026. He makes his living as an independent translator of Japanese economic research reports.