Seasons change their gloves.
Seasons replace their gloves.
The saisons changent their 手袋.
Wear gloves to do the seasonal.
Please wear gloves in order to evade the seasons.
These are five renderings, or possibly antirenderings,
or possibly reworkings, of the first line of a poem
by Chika Sagawa called "Promenade".
This poem serves as a delightfully unstable anchor,
if there is such a thing, for Sawako Nakayasu's
multilingual book of translations, antitranslations,
and originals of Chika Sagawa and others titled Mouth Eats
Color.
Our guest tonight is a highly accomplished translator
and poet with diverse and wide-ranging intellectual
and aesthetic interests.
But if you'll indulge me, I want to zero in on Mouth Eats
Color for a moment, because it is
one of those critically important books that
give the rest of us permission to try something different,
permission to solve a problem in another way.
In this book, Nakayasu translates, retranslates,
reworks, and fully rewrites the poem "Promenade"
no fewer than 20 times.
In so doing, she both defangs and cheerfully celebrates
the translator's traditional agony, this glowing word
or that radiant one over there.
Translation is a problem because it is a trade off.
When we translate poetry, we are forced
to land on just one of many available choices,
each with their own peculiar beauty,
and that can be a soul-crushing business.
But Mouth Eats Color refuses that confinement.
Here, multiple translations make many choices.
They allow us to hold multiple possibilities in our minds
at once.
And to me, there is such warmth and generosity
in this approach to translation.
We are allowed to try on several different renderings.
We get to choose which versions speak to us most
evocatively and eloquently.
And that is a gift from the translator to the reader.
She offers us multiple points of access,
inviting us into the work over and over and over again.
This playful openness to multitudinous possibility
is a through line in Sawako Nakayasu's work, which
of course ranges far beyond the single book I focused on here.
She is a poet, performer, translator, filmmaker,
and an excellent conversationalist.
Her work is in dialogue with dance, film, performance,
and dreams.
When I read her poems, I also hear a dialogue
with certain of her translations and vise versa,
and that is a rich vein of material indeed.
Sawako Nakayasu is the author of five full-length collections
of poetry and five books of translations from the Japanese,
including translations of work by Takashi Hiraide, Ayana
Katawa, and the great practitioners of the Butoh
dance form, Tatsumi Hijikata and Moe Yamamoto.
She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and a PEN poetry
and translation award, among others,
and her translation of the collected poems of Chika Sagawa
was the first full-length collection of Sagawa's poetry
to appear in English, making the work
of this important Japanese modernist poet suddenly
and dazzlingly accessible to English-speaking audiences.
In her recent book, The Ants, Nakayasu writes, "Today
is a unique holiday commemorated by a parade
of black, four-legged stools going down
the closed-off street.
All the neighborhood ants come out
to take a look, most of whom take a very critical stance."
And that's cool, right?
I mean, ants gonna ant.
But I, for one, am so looking forward to being a neighborhood
ant who takes a very open-hearted stance tonight
in imitation and appreciation of our guest this evening--
her generosity, her delightedness,
her deep and abiding curiosity.
Please help me welcome Sawako Nakayasu.