Images of Images: Japanese Poetry during the First Gulf War By John Solt
(click on underlined title to open link and read essay)Introduction
In 1994, I submitted this paper to positions: asia critique (Duke University), then a new journal. The editor responded positively about the subject and mentioned that they wanted to publish it if I were only to add commentary on the non-Japanese poems included in Hato yo!, the special issue of the magazine under consideration.
Because all the published poems were in Japanese and I didn’t have access to the original English texts, it didn’t make sense for me to re-engineer by translation back into a false English. I was intent to gauge the Japanese poets’ attitude to the war, because they were mostly in their sixties and had been teenagers when on the losing side of World War Two, 45 years earlier. My research interest wasn’t with the foreigners, even if they were in the same issue. Not wanting to do a chore I didn’t believe in, I decided not to rewrite it and didn’t bother to contact them.
Consequently, the article has remained unpublished. Now, thirty years later, the historical perspective of the freshness of the fax machine has become quaint with subsequent leaps in digital technology. Sadam Hussein and most of the poets discussed are gone. Perhaps still worthy to consider are what the poets wanted to convey about war and how they expressed it. I would like to thank Uri Hertz for finding the article’s perspective worthwhile and publishing it, and Eiko Aoki for compiling the photo gallery of selected poets.
John Solt
October 2022
Ruigoord,
Netherlands
