For Instance, Sweetheart: Forty Years of Love Songs

by Kawano Yuko, Nagata Kazuhiro, Amelia Fielden (Translation)

"An extraordinary love story unfolds in these pages, more than forty years of a wife and husband balancing the reality of being in relationship with the truth of each their ‘own-being’ through the exacting discipline of tanka poetry. Day by day, they observed and concentrated their ever-shifting emotions into five-line capsules. It is not a fairy tale; all sides of love find expression here, including its loneliness, uncertainty and ephemerality even after decades of marriage. This record proves there is no ‘ordinary’ in the everyday of human life, not when it is borne witness to by poets with wide-open, honest hearts." - Sonja Arntzen, Professor Emerita, University of Toronto, translator of the Kagerō Diary and Sarashina Diary

182 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 24, 2017

Reviews

[Camryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The switch between authors was extremely confusing for me. Usually you don't need to know which person is writing what, but in this one, you did. Both pronouns and names were interchangable for both authors/characters, and I did not understand that at all. I do think this was an extrememly sweet and heartwarming concept though, and I really wished I got more enjoyment out of it. I actually think a lot of my confusion came from the translation, since I know sometimes the true meaning of poetry gets lost in translations. If you know the native language this was written it, then I WOULD reccomend it. AND IF YOU DO, please re-translate it for me lol