On Translating Shizuka Omori

Tanka, or “short song,” is an ancient Japanese poetic form consisting of thirty-one syllables, dating back to the seventh century. While haiku is more widely known outside Japan, tanka remains the country’s most popular poetic form today. Since the pandemic, it has experienced a resurgence. Younger generations, in particular, have embraced the form, especially on X (formerly Twitter), where its compact structure lends itself to sharing everyday reflections and emotions.

Shizuka Omori’s tanka stand apart from this growing body of easily digestible, autobiographical poems. Her work is often surreal and abstract, and her speaker tends to speak from a remove, as if looking back on her life posthumously. In this sense, she might be compared to Emily Dickinson, some of whose most celebrated poems are written from the perspective of a dead speaker reflecting on her life. In Omori’s case, this posthumousness partly comes from the way she takes full advantage of a crucial difference between haiku and tanka: unlike haiku, which traditionally compress a moment of perception into seventeen syllables, tanka offer fourteen more, creating space for reflective distance.

Omori’s tanka shift fluidly between the concrete (“moth,” “sunset”) and the conceptual (“Guilt,” “the second person pronoun”), and I have tried to retain this dynamism in my translations. In translating her work, I was often reminded of sonnets. Just as a sonnet’s structure—octave, sestet, volta—traces a movement of thought, so, too, the tanka’s traditional 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic structure. The first three units form the “upper phrase”; the final two, the “lower phrase.” I chose not to replicate the exact syllabic pattern, since its rhythm is nearly inaudible in English. Instead, I focused on how thoughts and feelings evolve across the poem—through each syllabic turn.

Poetry is an odd genre: out of the blue, a stranger speaks to us, and somehow we feel compelled to listen. What disarms us in Omori’s tanka is not confessional disclosure, but movement—the way the mind sways, swerves, and hesitates. I hope my translations have captured something of this intimate restlessness.