Paintings on the Poetry of Hagiwara Sakutaro

(Index of Poetry and Paintings)

HAGIWARA SAKUTARO (1886-1942) is generally recognized in Japan as the best poet to have emerged since contact was re-established with the outside world. His work represents the astonishing achievement in the poetic field of the general Meiji endeavor to blend "Western learning with the Japanese spirit." He, and perhaps he alone, has successfully combined the lyric intensity characteristic of the short forms of traditional Japanese poetry with that freedom of length, form and rhythm which characterizes the poetry of the West. In him East and West, despite Kipling's dictum, have indeed met: and from him the future poets of both traditions have much to learn.

For all the startling beauty and originality of his work, Hagiwara remains a poet of the dark; a native of that extraordinary world where Dylan Thomas' question ("Isn't life a terrible thing, thank God") really needs no answer. Shiveringly sensitive to loveliness in all its million modes, he finds it not only in its familiar haunts but even in such unexpected subjects as a rotten clam or the dead body of an alcoholic. A man intensely aware that the sun, that symbol of Japan, rises as much to cast shadows as to give light, his early self-portrait establishes the tone of all his later work:

Sad in the ailing earth,
Tongue-tender with despair,
Green moves through grief's grimace;
And, sick and lonely, there
In the gloom of the under world,
At the bottom of the world, a face.

Hagiwara holds no mirror up to nature; for mirrors, after all, need light. Instead he turns a radar onto nature's hitherto unpenetrated darknesses, feeling out shapes invisible. The resulting images, shining, golden, in  a sense distorted, may seem odd to the unaccustomed eye; but they are authentic versions, visions even, of the truth. For he had the poet's one essential gift: to see first what all can see once it has been shown to them. Readers accustomed to the laconic half-statements of traditional Japanese poems in the three- and five-line forms of the haiku and the tanka will be surprised by the sheer power and the sustained lyricism of Hagiwara's uncompromising statements of the world's truth as he saw it. They may well even be shocked by the terrible nature of his vision. But few will be able to deny their recognition of the truth of that vision and of the staggering beauty of his language. For Hagiwara is a poet who can stand comparison with such giants of the world of modern poetry as Rimbaud, Rilke, Eliot and Lorca. If, in the last analysis, he fails to attain major world status, it is only because of the laser-sharpness of his penetration necessarily narrowed the breadth of his vision. The peculiarly piercing quality in his poems has been compared to that in the cry of a babe newborn into this terrible world: but Hagiwara cried for a lifetime with all the irrepressible energy of life itself, and has left for man's enlightenment poems of the dark that will last as long as light and darkness, side by side endure in the human heart.

Translations of Hagiwara by Graeme Wilson have appeared in many British and American journals including: the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, Encounter, Delos and the Yale Review.

GRAEME WILSON was born in 1919 in London. Educated in England and Germany, he was a history scholar at Oxford from 1937 to 1939 when he cut short his University studies and simultaneous legal training (he joined Gray's Inn in 1937) to enter the Air Branch of the Royal Navy. After six years of sea and flying duty, he entered the British Civil Service, and has since been concerned with such various aspects of aviation as Parliamentary legislation, the financing and the provision of ground facilities for civil aircraft, the international exchange of traffic rights, and the construction and sale of military aircraft and weapons. In the course of his work he has served as Private Secretary to a Minister, Deputy British Representative on the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization and British representative at many international negotiations and conferences. Seconded as a Counsellor to the Diplomatic Service in 1964, Wilson is currently the British Civil Aviation Representative in the Far East and, accredited as an attache at some dozen embassies, he traveled constantly. He was a member of the P.E.N. Club of Japan, and has translated and published a considerable body of modern Asian poetry in Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, India, England, Canada and the United States. He has broadcasted on Tokyo's N.H.K. program and on the B.B.C.

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