On Translating Nakahara Chūya 

In every country, there are certain poets so popular that every young literature lover devours their work. In Japan, that poet is Nakahara Chūya—a brilliant, sentimental modernist who, despite dying from tuberculosis in 1937 at the age of thirty, is an essential part of the canon of modern Japanese poetry.

While writing tanka as a youngster, Chūya, as he is widely known, learned that by pressing up against poetic structure, working both within and against the bounds of meter and form, a poet could generate productive, dramatic tension. Although he turned from traditional verse to modernism in his twenties, Chūya diligently applied this lesson throughout his life’s work.

“Circus” was first written in 1929 and appears in Chūya’s second book of poems published posthumously in 1938. Now, it is among his most frequently anthologized poems. In it, one senses a young poet pushing against not only the formal constraints but also the increasingly repressive society of imperial Japan. It starts with a carefully policed metrical refrain acknowledging Japan’s military conquests, before veering into a freer description of an artist performing dangerous feats as darkness gathers outside. Chūya uses a seemingly made-up onomatopoeia, yuya yuyon, to represent the long, undulating arcs of a trapeze artist swinging dangerously over the crowd. Recent scholarship suggests that Chūya likely derived inspiration for this word from the songs Chinese children would sing when playing on swings, which takes on special resonance considering that Japan colonized Manchuria in 1931 (a couple of years after the first draft of this poem) then invaded all of eastern China in 1937 (the same year Chūya put together the manuscript for his second book, which includes this poem). In translating this work, one might be tempted to tame this odd expression into a more straightforward English substitute, but doing so would diminish the political overtones in this poem about artistic risk-taking, so relevant in our current moment.