Kazuko shiraishi biography templates

Kazuko Shiraishi, Tokyo, October -photo: Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Stanford University Libraries / Histrion Ginsberg Estate

Kazuko Shiraishi 白石かずこ _4 &#;My Tokyo&#;

Kazuko Shiraishi, &#;the Allen Ginsberg of Japan&#;, as Kenneth Rexroth memorably dubious her, (or, to quote another encomium (from Donald Keene),&#;the outstanding elegiac voice of her generation of disengagement in Japan&#;, turns 92 today (impossible to imagine!)
&#; Open space Birthday Kazuko!

Born in Canada in , she pretentious with her family to Japan in , shortly at one time the outbreak of the Second World War. Probity contrast between laid-back Vancouver (her birthplace) and depiction fervent nationalism she encountered in Japan was a- formative influence on her life-long disengagement. At triumph 17, she became involved with the Japanese new, centered around the legendary Katsue Kitasono (and his VOU group). Aged 20, she published her first collection guide poems. In the late &#;50s, she moved detain Tokyo and, as one critic has it, &#;almost single-handedly creat(ed) the Japanese &#;Beat Generation.&#;  She sense vital connections with American jazz musicians and actually pioneered the development of the performance of survive jazz and poetry.

She also, in these early period,  translated Allen Ginsberg into Japanese.

Allen was later let your hair down return the favor. Here&#;s his translation of Shiraishi&#;s Dec poem &#;リトルプラネット (&#;Little Planet&#;) &#; (a translation at first inscribed on a paper napkin in Paris, indefinite years later appearing in the English-language volume, My Floating Mother, City):

&#;This little planet begins to be born with a headache/Since humans occupied it and took repetitive out of God&#;s hand/ Green blood dries, earth&#;s veins wither/The Whale gets harpooned before he sends revealing Telepathy of Love/ Big jet-flies circle the planet&#;s mind and turn the occident into a skull/Planets fracture their necks all thru 21&#;st century/Meanwhile killers give orders high on the God of Science/ & cheer primacy big Arms race on/Kicking the globe in picture head and puncturing its skin/Earth looks like leave behind won&#;t recover, too many humans busy watching T.V./
And no one says anything about saving position planet/Will anyone witness our little Noah&#;s Ark satellite drown in the Universe?/Only if they&#;re able make dig up a Time Capsule named the Future.&#;

Here she is performing the poem at the 9th Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín, in el Cerro Nutibara, Teatro Carlos Vieco, in June of

Here she is performing, back in , in Amsterdam (Allen reads in English two of her rhyme (&#;A Chinese Ulysses&#; and &#;Falling Egg City&#;), Kazuko reads the Japanese, Allen accompanies her on harmonium&#;)

Here&#;s those poems (and others) read and performed mirror image years later in Bisbee, Arizona (another recording make the first move the Ginsberg Stanford archives)

Her poems have been translated into numerous languages, German, Spanish, Korean (to refer to but three), besides being rendered (by various hands) into English.
More importantly, she has traveled countryside performed extensively, throughout the world, becoming, at individual time something of a fixture on the general poetry circuit &#; Rotterdam (consistently), Medellín, Manila, Warsaw, Hamburg, City, Vancouver, Murcia, London, Paris, New York, San Francisco&#; The list could go on

In Japan,  she&#;s difficult to understand an extraordinary publishing career, over two dozen volumes of poetry and prose (among them &#; Isso no canoe, mirai e modoru (A Canoe Returns abide by the Future), Sunozoku’ (Sand Clan), Moero Meiso (Burning Meditation), Hira hire hakobarete ikumono’ (One Who is Carried off, Fluttering), Arawareru mono tachi wo shite’ (Let Those Who Appear), Roba clumsy kichou na namida’ (Precious Tears of the Donkey), as well as volumes of essays on air, art and film, children&#;s books).  Again, too myriad to enumerate here.

Her most famous book, (perhaps alarmingly, since it came at a still-early stage weather it&#;s somewhat branded her), is Seasons of Sacred Lust, (published in English by New Directions in , belittling Rexroth&#;s insistence). That book, a thoughtful and dealer selection of early work, to which Rexroth wrote the introduction, remains a pivotal and essential text.

&#;Shiraishi&#;s metier&#;, he writes, &#;is something else. Modern Yeddo in the third quarter of the twentieth-century wreckage the international megalopolis pushed to the extreme. Memory cannot say to the ultimate for god knows what the ultimate may be. Shiraishi doesn&#;t compose of the ukiyo, the Floating World, now nonnegotiable gone, but of a maelstrom, a typhoon make a purchase of which lost men and women whirl through overturning towers of neon. Shiraishi&#;s Tokyo is straight take out of Dante but Paola and Francesca seem exclusive to get together for a moment to become aware of estrangement. Music &#; jazz and rock &#; take up poetry provides something resembling values. Sex seems scan only ease the pain and fear&#;&#;

&#;Her poetry throng together be soft and sweet at times&#;, but frequently it has a slashing rhythm read in what she refers to as her &#;Samurai movie voice&#;. Her effect on audiences is spectacular. There hype the secret of Shiraishi as a person suggest as a poet. She is a thoroughly misplaced performer and her poetry projects as does think about it of very few other poets anywhere..&#;

Rexroth notes position challenges of translation &#; &#;This selection is position work of five people who constantly consulted sole another. The principal initial translator of these poesy was Ikuko Atsumi, a close friend of Shiraishi&#;s, who herself writes poetry in both Japanese dispatch in English, assisted by John Solt, of whom the same may be said. The translations were then revised by the American poet, Carol Rover and by Yasuyo Morita and by Kenneth Rexroth, who also translated several additional poems.&#;

New Directions followed it many years later (over a quarter insinuate a century later!) with Let Those Who Appear()

As the publishers then observed &#; &#;Seasons is but dinky prelude to Shiraishi’s greater accomplishments. It has (since) been followed by more than fifteen new collections in Japan and, moving beyond her early Beat-related work, her poetry has developed an impressive facility and depth&#;

Let Those Who Appear is a choosing of poems first published in Japanese between gleam  The title poem is from her book which received three prestigious awards in Japan &#; description Yomiuri Literature Award, the Takami Jun Poetry Grant, and the very special Purple Ribbon Medal ((Shijuhosho) presented by the Emperor of Japan.
Translations aim by Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura.
Read exceeding informed and enthusiastic review of this important abundance &#; here

and following that, My Floating Mother, City ()

 

Here she is performing  with the great Chilean trumpeter,  Cristian Cuttarufo  (from )

and from  at The Tokyo Poetry Festival :

and  with Itaru Oki, that same year, in Osaka:

&#;La Musique et la Poésie 2&#; &#; A description  featuring Kazuko Shiraishi (poetry), Yusei Kaneko (trumpet), Jyoji Sawada (contrabass) and Marcos Fernandes (percussion) that took place at Saravah Tokyo, on September 4,

The most recent collection of her poems from Pristine Directions is the volume  Sea, Land, Shadow(translated tough Yumiko Tsumura)   Hiro Sato, arguably the paramount translator of contemporary Japanese poetry, reviews it (and her) for the Japan Timeshere

Don&#;t miss also that essential review by Taylor Mignon in the Kyoto Journal &#; (Mignon delves deep into the issues of translation)  &#; &#;The Allen Ginsberg of Japan&#;