Overview

This volume of essays and translations analyzes the prodigious and wide-ranging output of Suga Keijirō. Based in Japan, Suga Keijirō’s (b. 1958-) works are wide-ranging and multilingual. His volumes of poetry have been shortlisted for a range of poetry prizes, and he was awarded the 2011 Yomiuri Shinbun Prize for Travel writing. He has translated dozens of books and has authored or co-authored more than fifteen other books across various genres. He is, by his own introduction, a poet first, but is also a prolific book reviewer, an astute theorist, and an insightful critic. His presence and contributions have been profound in many countries around the globe.

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9781793607577

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Reviews

Keijiro Suga is a force of nature, a burst of energy. One minute he's a poet, the next a translator, then a travel writer, an experimental playwright, a philosopher--all of it carried out across a crazy blur of languages, not all of them human. In this delightful book, some of Japan's most creative poets, novelists, and translators join with an international group of scholars to offer harmonic counterpoints to Suga's multilingual melodies. We also get a generous sampling of Suga's own essays, appearing in English for the first time.--Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago Poet, translator, essayist, theorist, art critic, environmentalist, peripatetic teacher-- all of Keijiro Suga's varied vocations share the discovery, description, and celebration of the liminal. '[A] gateway to other planetary sites of experience, ' as one contributor puts it, here is an encounter with a cosmopolitan cultural icon from Japan whose moment has arrived. In these English renderings of his work, accompanied with essays by some of the literary and critical elite in Japan and elsewhere, what comes across is language on the verge of where it has never gone before: living geographies of islands from New Zealand to Hawai'i to the Caribbean to Japan, where peoples have collided only to creolize over time; an anthropology as concerned with the dog and the coyote as with the human. In person 'a little shaggy, a little rangy, always on the move' (like his animals), says volume editor Doug Slaymaker, Suga 'inhabits the middle space, the no-man's land, in the spaces between language, people, nations, and goods.' No one volume, nor any one language, can completely comprehend the array of Suga's lessons for us. But it is a start.--John Whittier Treat, Yale University

Author Information

Doug Slaymaker is professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky.

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