A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi

by Shuzo Takiguchi, Mary Jo Bang (translator), Yuki Tanaka (translator)

In 1923, Shuzo Takiguchi’s first year at Tokyo’s Keio University was cut short by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which nearly destroyed the Japanese capital. When he returned to school two years later, he was hit by a second earthquake—French Surrealism. Takiguchi (1903–1979) began to write surrealist poems, translate surrealist writers, curate exhibitions of surrealist art, write art criticism, and, later, paint, helping introduce Surrealism to Japan. He eventually became a major Japanese artistic and cultural figure whose collected works number fourteen volumes. In A Kiss for the Absolute, Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator Yuki Tanaka present the first collection in English of Takiguchi’s ingenious, playful, and erotic poems, complete with an introduction and the original Japanese texts on facing pages. Takiguchi’s obvious interest in style is perfectly wed to his daredevil rhetorical antics. His poems read as if they could have been written today, yet they are so original that they couldn’t have been written by anyone else. Bang and Tanaka’s skillful, colloquial translations offer English readers a long-overdue introduction to this important poet.

Genres: Poetry, Japan

218 pages, Paperback

Published November 5, 2024

About the author

Shūzō Takiguchi (瀧口 修造, Takiguchi Shūzō; December 7, 1903 – July 1, 1979) was a Japanese poet, art critic, and artist. He was a central figure in prewar and postwar Japanese Surrealism, helping introduce the movement through his 1930 translation of André Breton's Surrealism and Painting and through direct correspondence with Breton. He also published a 1940 monograph on Joan Miró that museum sources describe as the world's earliest monograph on the artist.He was also a key figure in the history of wartime repression directed at Japanese Surrealism: in 1941, he was arrested on suspicion of violating the Peace Preservation Law, and museum accounts note that he remained under police surveillance until the end of the war.[6][7][4] Starting in the 1950s, he also supported younger postwar avant-garde artists through his work at Takemiya Gallery in Tokyo, where he was responsible for selecting artists and coordinating exhibitions from 1951 to 1957. In 1958, he served as commissioner for the Japan Pavilion at the 29th Venice Biennale and as a member of the international jury. Around 1960, he increasingly turned to his own visual practice, producing drawings, watercolors, decalcomanias, and other experimental works.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Literary surrealism runs the gamut from stellar (Breton, Apollinaire, and Aragon) to insufferable (Péret). Much of it is just a collection of beautiful words strung together in a mostly improvised manner. Surrealists themselves would agree with this take – but in a more laudatory way than I mean it. Takiguchi, inspired by all those poets and more, fits well into their movement. His odes to Western artists – Picasso, Miró, Magritte, Ernst, Dalí, et al. – are charming in their enthusiasm and clever references to their art. The remainder of the collection reads like Technicolor word vomit. Beautiful, to be sure, but word vomit nonetheless. Here’s a line, in the spirit of Tzara, taken by opening the book at random:

“In the morning, I breastfeed the lady-doves who gave birth to my seven mirrors.” (And yes, we even get the Surrealist obsession with mammaries – Takiguchi is definitely a student of the art form!) “The meadow grasses in my mirror are now higher than the doves’ breasts and are given butterfly brains; between their legs, the doves of darkness exchange hearts. It’s time for the lady-doves’ naked bodies, the time for icebergs to talk, the time for starfish to laugh. O children of the owl in my pupil, listen to the beautiful voice of the blue flounder surrounded on four sides by stone parapets.”

And so on.

The case is always made that these kinds of poems break free from the strictures of verse form (those pesky constraints such as "intelligibility," one would imagine!) and make use of chance and spontaneity. The problem with depending on chance is that, more times than not, one is just as likely to come up with nothing at all. So also with these poems.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poetry book of the year:

It’s 1923. And a student grabs a book off a shelf. Running for his life, book held tight, he is just one step ahead of a massive earthquake that would shake the world for four long minutes. Once out of the building, he joins the surging crowds on the streets of Tokyo. People are in deep shock, but the young man is calm, reading as he walks among them. The book, a novel as it happens, is News from Nowhere, by William Morris, a work of socialist utopianism.

According to Shuzo Takiguchi, who is considered to be one of Japan’s great surrealistic poets, this experience was the start of his life as a poet. Despite what he claimed, we know that he had already turned away from medicine, which his parents so desperately hoped he would study, instead spending more and more time in the university library reading literature. And so, the Great Kanto Earthquake was not so much the inciting incident, as the event that let him off the hook of studying medicine. As soon as the trains were running again, he returned to his family in the countryside, where Takiguchi first tried to become a teacher. When this didn’t work, he was persuaded to return to university in 1925, and that was when he met the poet and classics scholar Junzaburō Nishiwaki, who had studied at Oxford and was already something of a celebrity at the time. Together with a group of other poets, they founded a literary journal devoted to French surrealism, which by that time had become Japan’s most popular avant-garde movement.

In the introduction to their exciting new translation of Takiguchi’s work, A Kiss for the Absolute (published by Princeton University Press 2024), translators Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka (both serious poets in their own rights) quote Takiguchi, who wrote of selling all his literature books after the earthquake but then returning to university where surrealistic thinking “punched through the void.”

Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka, in their translators’ introduction to the new collection say as much when they state that “In the twelfth century translation referred to the moving of reliquary elements of a saint’s body from one place to another. Written language in the Middle Ages was primarily the domain of the clergy and much clerical writing was about the lives of saints. It makes sense that the word for carrying saint’s bones might in time be used for the act of carrying a work (about saints) written in one language over into another language. The transfer of language, however, is even more complicated than the delicate task of moving the remains of a body.”

(Essay coming)

[Jonathan Koven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly charming experiments of language. I slowly found myself adoring this translated collection. Takiguchi’s surrealism is unique in that it’s less interested in creating beauty and more associated with play. Meaning is deconstructed; its elusiveness becomes intention; so, as a reader, you’re asked to cooperate by doing away with traditional modes of comprehension. This becomes a delightful test of letting go, welcoming in whimsy, and it’s a brain-rewiring experience. Extraordinary once you tune in to Takiguchi’s voice and line-by-line technical flourish. Some of the later ekphrastic poems reminded me a bit of my own poems in Mystic Orchards. Great stuff—worth reading again in a few years.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary archival work of the poetry and prise of Japanese surrealist and critic Shuzo Takiguchi. Some of the longer prose pieces don't work for me but the rest are delightful and really have a melodious cadence that makes me enjoy the poems more. Absolute delight.

[josé almeida · Rating 4 out of 5]

recolha de poemas de quem introduziu o surrealismo nas letras japonesas

[charley gonzaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

my first real dive into translated surrealist poetry! i thoroughly enjoyed this– dreamlike, strange, and beautiful. felt sticky at the start but i did enjoy letting go of meaning lol i particularly enjoyed the translators' notes at the end!