Lost Hope

Chuya Nakahara (1907–1937) was a Japanese early modernist of conflicting impulses: apolitical but iconoclastic; a progressive formalist. Dismissive of institutions, he was a successful autodidact, and his mastery of waka (formal, 7/5-syllabic verse) and competency in French combined to provide for a hybrid evolution. He wrote in the wake of his Meiji-era predecessors while straining toward those symbolists and surrealists he admired and translated, and he is recognized today as one of the most scrupulous pre-war Japanese writers of poems informed by European models, especially the Petrarchan sonnet. He died of tuberculosis, having sold only a thousand books, but the 1967 edition of his collected works spans six volumes, and to date more criticism has been written on him than on any other Japanese poet. (updated 4/2013)

Christian Nagle has published or has forthcoming poetry, essays, translations, interviews, and prose fiction in The Paris Review, Esquire, Raritan, Southwest Review, AGNI, New England Review, Kyoto Journal, Quick Fiction, and many other magazines. His first book of poems, Flightbook, will be published in English and Japanese by Salmon Poetry. For more than a decade he lived in Tokyo, translating the works of Chuya Nakahara. (updated 4/2013)