Foreign Tongues: 日本語(Japanese)

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

You probably know things about Japan. The Ring is based off of a Japanese horror movie. Japanese people like tea. They wear funky clothing—either traditional kimonos or fun and weird outfits such as might be found in Harajuku. Tokyo is the capital of Japan. The characters the Japanese write with are a combination of characters “borrowed” from the Chinese and characters that were altered from Chinese characters, creating new Japanese characters. You might know the works of Haruki Murakami, which have been translated into more than forty languages.

Someone you might not know is Itō Hiromi, a contemporary Japanese poet who is nationally acclaimed and has won many awards in Japan. She was born in 1955 in Tokyo and became well-known as a poet in the 1980s. Much of her work focuses on women’s issues including motherhood and pregnancy. Killing Kanako: Selected Poems of Itō Hiromi, translated into English and published in 2009, deals largely with these issues.

One of interesting things about Itō Hiromi is how she uses colloquial speech in her poetry when Japanese usually has very strict forms and guidelines for writing—and speaking. It's a highly formalized and hierarchical language. I've been taking Japanese classes for a couple of years now, and I've had to learn three different forms of Japanese to date—regular, slightly formal speech (like you might use when you're talking to stranger; we'll call this the "intermediate level"); regular, plain speech (like you might use with your friends and what Hiromi uses in her poetry); and honorific speech (used in inferior/superior situations). That sounds pretty similar to English, because after all, we don't speak the same with our friends as we do with our bosses, but Japanese takes this idea and explodes into outer space with it. As not-so-quick example from Hiromi's poem "A Poem for Ueno-San" featured in HFR #41, take the line "人がおおぜい立ってそれを見ている (hito ga oozei tatte sore wo miteiru)" which is translated as "Many people stood by to watch." It's written nice and simple in the plainest form. If you were to change to the highest form I mentioned earlier, honorific, the verb "miteiru" would change to "gorannatteimasu." Both words mean the same thing. One just takes a lot longer to say. The part that really stinks for the natives who have to learn this stuff, not speaking in the proper form to your boss can get you fired.

Poetry and written word in Japanese have always been very much part of the hierarchy of the language—it has its place and its form, and you don’t deviate from that. You don’t use colloquial speech, or at least you haven’t until recently. Hiromi uses it, and she does it effectively. She’s gotten the attention and respect of her country using a form of speech that isn’t highly formalized, but it still works for Japan.

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This Week in Literary History: Quoth The Raven 'Nevermore'

Edgar Allan Poe has been making headlines again. Last week, Poe enthusiasts worldwide were saddened to hear that for the second year in a row, the infamous 'Poe Toaster' (which sounds like one of those kitchen appliances that burn images into your bread - see here and here) no showed to Poe's grave on his birthday (Jan. 19) to ceremoniously leave a bottle of cognac and roses as he had done previously since 1949. What an enabler. I propose starting a new tradition this week, the week that "The Raven" was first published back in 1845: leaving the DVD boxset of "Celebrity Rehab" seasons 1-3 on his grave site in hopes he will hit the bottle, "nevermore."

If there's one thing that a drunk Edgar Allan Poe is good for though, it's great writing and funny tweets. Like this one, about Virginia Woolf, whose birthday is this week on January 25. Poe claims she had some giant nose, but honestly, I don't really see it. She actually looks like she was kind of a babe in this picture.

Poe is often credited as one of the founding fathers of the short story genre, along with this man: Anton Chekhov, whose birthday was this week on January 29. Chekhov was famous for writing short pieces of fiction loved by writers from James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway and even Virginia Woolf, who wrote in The Common Reader about the seemingly abrupt and dissatisfying endings typical of Chekhov's work, saying "it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it" but that Chekhov provides a "very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune."

The New Ohio Review Fall 2010 issue is all kinds of awesome. The lead off batter is a poem by Dean Young (who needs a heart transplant, donate funds now) that is quite wonderful (like much of Young's work). There's also a review of Virginia Woolf's novel, Orlando, as part of NOR's "Fiction Reconsidered" section, and our very own Peter Turchi's essay on Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. My personal highlight though, was Stephen Burt's poem, "Ocean State Job Lot" which, being from The Ocean State, hit so close to home I literally sang the jingle to our managing editor out of pure excitement. A fantastic issue that you can subscribe to here.

Bad Writing, the movie!

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Story on the increased interest in David Foster Wallace's work since his suicide a couple years back.

The third poetry-only bookstore is being opened in Boulder, CO over the weekend. Other two? In Seattle and Cambridge, Mass. Stay strong, poetry lovers!

Have a sudden urge to read Da Vinci's notebooks or Galileo's letters, but don't have immediate access to the British Library? Calm down! There's an app for that.

Contributor Spotlight: Christina Cook

There’s a bit of Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, and perhaps that was Robert Louis Stevenson’s point in writing a book about the Strange Case of these conjoined characters. My own contradictory nature finds expression in my poetry, if not in my personality in general (but that’s a topic for another essay). When I opened the current issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review to pages 110 and 111, I saw the journal’s spine draw a distinct dividing line down the middle of myself: on one page, my poem “Blue, Orange, Red” was written by the me who can’t seem to stop mourning her mother, the me who finds inspiration from bird flight in a twilit sky, while on the opposing page, “Burlesque Acoustic” was written by the me who feels fur fill in over the smooth skin of her cheek and prowls her imagination’s strangest streets, letting any rabid dog guide her, if it will lead her to write an interesting, provocative poem.

I prefer to think that my poetry’s split personality comes out of a literary precedent set in our culture rather than personal issues best left to a therapist. As Cole Swenson notes in her introduction to American Hybrid, American poetry has long been seen as being divided into two camps, one threading from the British Romantic poets, the other from the French Symbolists. And if we look at the very founders of American poetry, Whitman and Dickinson, we see the seeds of two very different defining senses of form and content. When I was a teenager trying to find a toehold in writing, the unfettered world of Whitman’s poetry cast a spell over me. I found its unbounded, unreserved nature infinitely appealing. As an undergraduate, I planned out an independent study to focus on writing in the style of Whitman. My mind was spilling over with ideas and enthusiasm—until the professor I asked to mentor me said no: I wasn’t old enough to write like Whitman. I could have filled notebooks with (okay, probably quite bad) poetry that expressed my vision of the world I hoped for, the world I desired, in the absence of a world I had experienced long enough to grow wise from.

My professor’s denial was devastating to me at the time, but then when adulthood hit, it became truly puzzling. The more difficulties I weathered and the more wisdom I gained from simply living in the world longer, the closer my affinities actually grew to the spare style of Dickinson. By the time my mother died of breast cancer, after an eleven-year battle that ended in six slow weeks of hospice care, my poetry had whittled down to bone. I could no longer relate to Whitman’s exuberant celebration of the colorful masses of people and possibilities and the word-filled style it took to accomplish this. I don’t know how he was able to express his horrific Civil War experiences on such a large canvas, because after seeing death so close, words for me had become thin brass rails of a birdcage. And as for the small bird inside, its song was the silence of trees. My poems became spare, in order to balance the emotional weight I imposed on them.

After nearly a year of writing such Jekyll-prim poems, though, the Mr. Hyde in me became restless and hungry. I had nothing to feed him. All I was able to find for raw material was places in nature onto which I could project my grief, such as poplar trees and loons and the pastoral surroundings of the lake cottage I’d inherited from my mother. So he started to scavenge his own raw material: the “Living” and “Style” sections of the New York Times. Edgy haute-couture photos in the W magazines students would leave on tables in the coffee shop. Old avant-garde and noir films being shown at the local college. Anything for the food he needed to survive. Anything to stop my Jekylly obsession with writing poems about nature and death.

Fast-forward a few years: the veil between the Jekyll and Hyde of me is now so thin that my writing will often contain both in the span of a single stanza (but then, I contain multitudes, as I tried to convince my undergrad poetry professor). “Blue, Orange, Red” may have come from Jekyll’s nature-inspired ruminations on the death of my mother, but its form is Hyde-like: elliptical, abstract, self-consciously shaped in the form of Rothko’s painting by that title . . . and “Burlesque Acoustic” may have come from a New York Times’ article Hyde read about a burlesque dancers’ 50th reunion, but it is more traditional in form and its content is narrative-driven and accessible, per Jekyll’s refined tastes.

What I am finding the most enjoyment in, at this point in my writing, is being surprised by what, or who, comes out of my pen. Sometimes I’ll write a more spare, quiet poem than I expect to, and wonder how words bearing a Haiku-like delicacy can come from reading a W article on craft punk. I’ll wonder how poems written in long (dare I say Whitman-like) lines, full of edgy images and fast, energetic phrasing can come from sitting at the end of the dock on a quiet evening. But I try not to wonder too much. Mostly, I just try to enjoy the surprise and help Jekyll and Hyde dine together in each of my poems.
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Christina Cook’s poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals, most recently including Prairie Schooner, The Dos Passos Review, Harpur Palate, Packingtown Review, and Cave Wall. Her manuscript, Lake Effect, was a semifinalist for three poetry prizes in the past year. Christina holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a contributing editor for Inertia Magazine. She teaches writing at Colby-Sawyer College.

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Unusual Calls for Submissions

Jane's Stories Press "Bite Size" Contest
Your query letter-whether to agent or editor-must be concise yet compelling. It may be the most challenging writing you do. Send us your best effort, in 200 words or less. Veteran and highly respected agent Jane Gelfman of Gelfman, Schneider Literary Agents, Inc. will make the final determination.Submission Deadline is January 31, 2011. Winner will receive $25.00. Judge's decision final. No fee! Entries accepted only through submishmash.

Submission calls: FRIDGE
Sure, you're proud of your work -- but do you like it enough to put it up on the FRIDGE? The editors of FRIDGE are reading for the debut issue of their new online journal, coming soon from the makers of Mid-American Review and Prairie Margins.We favor shorter work in any genre. We want to see work that reflects what's on our own fridges -- work that we are eager to come back to again and again until something even more compelling comes along. We like humor, but gravity is not a deal-breaker. Opinion pieces that deal with any aspect of the writing world are also sought.We pay in Thanksgiving leftovers. You should probably send soon. Really soon. Submissions are accepted here. With questions, contact Karen Craigo, karenka(at)bgsu.edu.

ANTHOLOGY CALL: SEEKING ESSAYS BY WOMEN WRITERS ABOUT CRAFT AND THE WRITING PROCESS
In our own lives as writers and educators, we have felt buoyed by, and thirsty for, dialogue about the creative process. We think it is particularly essential to gather a collection of process/craft-based essays by women who span several different generations. We hope that an anthology such as this will serve as both a historical document of the times and lives of a sampling of women writers, but also as a rare look into some of the concerns of a diverse body of writers writing about craft, process, and their relationships to the literary arts in different personal/socio-political contexts.We are open to a variety of styles, from the more personal to the more academic. Based on the suggestions of a guiding group of women writers, we have drawn up a list of questions which can serve as a guide for your essays. Please feel free to use them in any way that is helpful to you (or not at all). We are also interested in re-publishing relevant essays by some of our luminaries (dead and living): Audre Lorde, Muriel Rukeyser, June Jordan, Cherrie Moraga, Adrienne Rich... In addition to contributing your own, if you have read any essays that you think should be included, please send them our way. Please submit essays by March 15th, 2011, to discuss with publishers who might be interested in April. Please send essays toelanzobell(at)gmail.com and agia(at)hampshire.edu> (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail).

call for submissions: poetry for shaving anthology
Poems, no more than 40 lines each, about the male ritual of shaving the face, even if it is secondary to the message of the poem (or especially if it is). Deadline: Jan. 17. Include a short bio. Attach as Word doc and send to: sweeper905(at)aol.com (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail).

ANIMAL FARM is seeking submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for Issue #2 of its exciting, online literary product. Please submit by January 31, 2011.
The special theme of Issue #2 is "THE ABYSS." Not James Cameron's film, THE ABYSS, although we would welcome essays and fan fiction related to that cinematic product if they achieve the level of literary distinction endemic to all things ANIMAL FARM. Please take a look at the pieces collected in Issue #1, "GREETINGS," in order to get a sense of whether the FARM is right for you. Please submit by January 31, 2011. And, as always, CONTEMPLATE THE ABYSS.

CONTEST: The Night
postmark deadline January 31, 2011. Co-sponsored by The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Judged by Susan Orlean. Creative Nonfiction and The Salt Institute are seeking essays about "The Night": It was a dark and stormy night; Strangers in the Night; the night sky; Friday Night Lights; things that go bump in the night; Take Back the Night; night owls; The Night Before Christmas; The Night Watch; The Night Kitchen; The Armies of the Night; The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; prom night; date night; Good Night, Nurse! Essays must be vivid and dramatic; they should combine a strong and compelling narrative with a significant element of research or information, and reach for some universal or deeper meaning in personal experiences. We're looking for well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice. More here.

Contributor Spotlight: Alan Stewart Carl

I’m going to start by saying that my protagonist in Hayden’s Ferry Review #47 is a white, middle-class male. And so am I.

I begin with this because I’ve been thinking a lot about Roxane Gay’s recent essay on the preponderance of white, middle-class male voices/characters that appear in the most current edition of Best American Short Stories (and throughout the world of literary journals in general). I won’t rehash Gay’s original essay or her follow-up post other than to say it’s a smart and nuanced opinion deserving of a read. But I do want to address the issues she raises. And I want to do so from the vantage point of a white, middle-class male writer who has had fiction appear (and who hopes to have much more fiction appear) in American literary journals.

My demographic classification provides certain, unfair advantages in America – this I know. And I know there are a great many reasons for this and a great many ways each of us can help improve the situation. But I’m not seeking to enter such a ponderous conversation here. Instead, I’m interested in a question that’s been gnawing at me since reading Gay’s essay: what is the white, middle-class male writer’s responsibility amidst all of this?

Yes, there is plenty all writers can do to change things on the editorial front and on the promotional front and on the educational and societal front, too. But what about the writing itself? Should white, middle-class male writers feel any pressure to write about people and experiences outside of those they intimately know? Would doing so even help matters?

Obviously, any white, middle-class male writer who chooses to write about white, middle-class male characters in typical white, middle-class male scenarios is traveling well-trodden ground and is thus risking artistic irrelevance. Then again, the best fiction, no matter its topic or the life experiences of its author, takes you into the unique life of an “other,” a life that in some way broadens your own understanding of the world, that brings illumination to places previously darkened. And even when those darkened places are small – nooks, crannies – bringing light to them serves an artistic purpose, I believe. And I can’t fault any writer who can do that, even if the particular story at hand comes from an over-represented pool of life experiences.

That said: I reject the idea that a writer should write without concern for the culture. And that goes double for white, middle-class male writers. Given the realities of life, white, middle-class male writers can’t just hand over their institutionalized privilege. We can, however, be aware of our fortuitousness and use our systematically unfair opportunities not for insular, navel-gazing but toward the exterior realities and struggles of our time. This is, I believe, incumbent upon any writer, but it’s particularly incumbent upon writers whose privilege has given them a boost and whose life experiences are already well-represented within the culture.

Just because a story might be publishable or even of award-winning quality doesn’t mean the story is one of the most important stories a writer can tell. There’s a lot of turmoil out there, not just war and oppression and intolerance, but also the tumult of hyper-globalization, the way we are simultaneously becoming more connected and yet more torn apart, our communities fracturing along sharpened lines of class and religion and politics and our own selves fracturing into Facebook-selves and family-selves and work-selves and socially conscious-selves, one minute bemoaning the casualties of capitalism and the next minute earning a living or buying products from massive corporations.

All this, I believe, deserves great literary exploration as previous generations of writers explored the great troubles of their day. I don’t, of course, mean everyone should be writing Afghanistan war stories or Chinese industrialization stories. But I do mean that the artistic thrust of modern fiction should drive towards the broader issues and complications of our time. It’s fine, I think, to write about a white, middle-class male accountant in Charlotte, North Carolina. But the story shouldn’t just be about his difficult marriage. Or rather, it can be about his marriage but it shouldn’t be insularly so, without regard as to how the difficulties in this particular marriage say something about the bigger ideas/struggles/issues of our time. This, I believe, can be addressed with bold strokes or subtly in subtext, but it should be addressed. Otherwise, even if the story is expertly written, it’s not likely to be an examination of anything new, a necessary story. It’ll just be a reiteration of white, middle-class stories that have already been told.

Alone, at my computer, it’s really easy to concern myself with my commonplace ennui and the various monotonies of fatherhood and work. And God knows I’ve written my share of unnecessary stories that relate to nothing greater than my own insular world. But to what purpose? To whose gain? The insular worlds of middle-class white men are well represented in fiction. Shouldn’t I want to say something more? Shouldn’t I strive towards something larger?

Obviously, the facts of my demographics means that I can’t bring to the literary world the kind of diversity Gay sees missing in BASS and elsewhere. I’m a white, middle-class male and even if I write about Bangladeshi merchants traveling by mule into India, I’m still part of an over-represented set of writers. But if I at least make a concerted effort to write stories about the true complications of our world – rather than stories that exist in some insular version of my own life – maybe I can poke holes in the cultural fabric and maybe those holes will let in some better light and some fresher air and, ultimately, do something – however small – to allow for more opportunities for all writers, regardless of race, class or gender.

I don’t know if such hopes are well-founded or just the justifications of a white, middle-class male writer who intends to keep writing and publishing. But I do think what I write – what we all write – has a responsibility to the outside world. I know change is a slow, many-legged thing. But writing towards the outside world seems like a good way to proceed forward.
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Alan Stewart Carl is a Texan writer of fiction and miscellany. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, PANK, Monkeybicycle, Coal City Review and other cool places. He holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and is currently at work on a novel and whatever stories have recently shown up in his head. Most of the time, he can be found down in San Antonio raising two wild and beautiful children. Virtually, he can be found at AlanStewartCarl.com. His story, "Leap," appears in HFR #47.