Forrest Gander Discusses Editing Japanese Poet Yoshimasu Gozo's 'Untranslatable' Verse

At Reading in Translation, Forrest Gander discusses a new editorial project that recently came to book-length fruition, thanks, in part, to the team at New Directions. Gander invited Sawako Nakayasu, Hiroaki Sato, Eric Selland, Jeffrey Angles, Richard Arno, Derek Gromadzki, Sayuri Okamoto, Auston Stewart, Kyoko Yoshida and Jordan A. Y. Smith to translate selections from eccentric Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gozo's oeuvre. The result, Alice Iris Red Horse, is, as Reading in Translation's Kalau Almony writes, "as if these translators work like a prism, refracting all the light." We'll jump in with Gander's reply:

FG: Yeah, putting multiple translators together creates that prismatic effect.

KA: That’s a great image. What about the format of the book? I was pretty surprised when I opened up it up and saw not a parallel translation with the Japanese on one side and English on the other, but parallel translator notes. Each translator’s comments are on the left, and poems are on the right. This is something I’ve just never seen before.

FG: At first, I was working with Derek Gromadzki, and he had the beautiful idea of rewriting the translator’s notes into vertical columns that would bring the reader of the translation closer to the Asian axis of reading, up and down. And he also metamorphosed the translator’s notes to make them more poetic. New Directions’ editors, I think rightly, figured that the notes ended up competing too much with the poems themselves. The notes looked too much like his poems and acted too much like his poems, and the densities became competitive. At the same time, because Gozo’s work can’t really be read in a conventional way, it seems like the notes, which I normally avoid in translations, are really necessary to open up a fulsome reading of the work for an American reader. I wanted to put that context into play from the start. [Read Gromadzki’s “A Note on the Notes”]

KA: To have the notes right there next to the poems instead of tucked away at the back of the book is certainly one way to foreground them.

FG: Right. I think in this case it’s really necessary to explore those wormholes in Gozo’s work.

Continue at Reading in Translation.