The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame : Worlds of Memory, Discovery, and Loss in Japanese Poetry

The three "essays" in this book draw on the translator's work on love poetry—classical waka and the tanka of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942)—but also introduce the prose poems and free verse of a contemporary surrealist poet, Mizuno Ruriko, whose themes are childhood and the loss of innocence. "The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame" shows the translator of poetry experimenting with three different ways to present the results of his craft. "In the Dark of the Year" is an essay in sequencing. Cranston arranges translations of fifty love poems in the tanka form, ranging from the ancient chronicle Kojiki to the contemporary poet Tawara Machi, in an examination of desire, melancholy, and despair. The arrangement, inspired by the technique of association and progression, suggests an ongoing love story and limns the essence of the classical love tradition. "Young Akiko: The Literary Debut of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942)" adopts a biographical approach. Richly documented with the astonishing tanka of the young poet who burst on the literary scene in 1900, this essay updates the author's article originally published in 1977 in Literature East and West. Finally, the longest essay, "The Dark at the Bottom of the Dish: Fishing for Myth in the Poetry of Mizuno Ruriko," shows Cranston "working outside his usual box," on the poems of a contemporary surrealist whose deepest themes are childhood and loss of innocence. Mizuno, hitherto not well known outside Japan, is a master of the prose poem and free verse. Cranston's essay shows the translator searching for the mysterious power that draws him to a poetry quite different from any on which he has previously worked.

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garlofftraces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust.

Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.

Acknowledgments Contents Preface In the Dark of the Year: Love Poems from the Japanese translated with prose settings Young Akiko: The Literary Debut of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) The Dark at the Bottom of the Dish: Fishing for Myth in the Poetry of Mizuno Ruriko Sources Notes