If the postmodernist ethical onslaught has led to the demise of literature by exposing its political agenda, if all literature is compromised by its entanglement with power, why does literature's subterranean voice still seduce us into reading? Why do the madness and the scandal of transgressive literature, its power to force us to begin anew, its evil, escape the gaze of contemporary literary criticism? Why do we dare not reject ethics and the ethical approach to literature? If the primary task of literary criticism is to correct others' ethical missteps, should we not begin by confronting the seductiveness of ethics, our desire for ethics, the pleasure we take in being ethical? And what is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? What would be the ethical consequences of an erasure of history from literary criticism? In a series of essays on the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, Hosea Hirata visits the primal force of the scandalous in an effort to repeat (in the Kierkegaardian sense) the originary scene that initiates the obscure yet insistent poetry that is literature and to confront the questions raised.

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valery. Exploring both his poetry and theoretical writings, Hosea Hirata describes how Nishiwaki, who wrote his first poems in English and French, shaped a highly influential poetic modernism in Japan while elevating the artistic status of translation. This volume includes Nishiwaki's highly original essays on the nature of poetry, his first two collections of Japanese poems, and a poem meditating on the annihilation of symbolism. The author maintains that in Japan the language of modernism was that of translation. When Nishiwaki finally began to write poems in Japanese, a new poetic language was born in his country: a translatory language. Hirata elaborates this birth of new poetry via translation by referring to the theories of translation and of differance articulated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.The author reconsiders the view that translated texts are secondary to the originals, where the truth supposedly resides; instead he presents translation as an essential textual movement, ecriture, toward the paradise of pure language and Poetry. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valery. Exploring both his poetry and theoretical writings, Hosea Hirata describes how Nishiwaki, who wrote his first poems in English and French, shaped a highly influential poetic modernism in Japan while elevating the artistic status of translation. This volume includes Nishiwaki's highly original essays on the nature of poetry, his first two collections of Japanese poems, and a poem meditating on the annihilation of symbolism. The author maintains that in Japan the language of modernism was that of translation. When Nishiwaki finally began to write poems in Japanese, a new poetic language was born in his country: a translatory language. Hirata elaborates this birth of new poetry via translation by referring to the theories of translation and of differance articulated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.The author reconsiders the view that translated texts are secondary to the originals, where the truth supposedly resides; instead he presents translation as an essential textual movement, ecriture, toward the paradise of pure language and Poetry. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

If the postmodernist ethical onslaught has led to the demise of literature by exposing its political agenda, if all literature is compromised by its entanglement with power, why does literature's subterranean voice still seduce us into reading? Why do the madness and the scandal of transgressive literature, its power to force us to begin anew, its evil, escape the gaze of contemporary literary criticism? Why do we dare not reject ethics and the ethical approach to literature? If the primary task of literary criticism is to correct others' ethical missteps, should we not begin by confronting the seductiveness of ethics, our desire for ethics, the pleasure we take in being ethical? And what is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? What would be the ethical consequences of an erasure of history from literary criticism? In a series of essays on the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, Hosea Hirata visits the primal force of the scandalous in an effort to repeat (in the Kierkegaardian sense) the originary scene that initiates the obscure yet insistent poetry that is literature and to confront the questions raised.

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valery. Exploring both his poetry and theoretical writings, Hosea Hirata describes how Nishiwaki, who wrote his first poems in English and French, shaped a highly influential poetic modernism in Japan while elevating the artistic status of translation. This volume includes Nishiwaki's highly original essays on the nature of poetry, his first two collections of Japanese poems, and a poem meditating on the annihilation of symbolism. The author maintains that in Japan the language of modernism was that of translation. When Nishiwaki finally began to write poems in Japanese, a new poetic language was born in his country: a translatory language. Hirata elaborates this birth of new poetry via translation by referring to the theories of translation and of differance articulated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.The author reconsiders the view that translated texts are secondary to the originals, where the truth supposedly resides; instead he presents translation as an essential textual movement, ecriture, toward the paradise of pure language and Poetry. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valery. Exploring both his poetry and theoretical writings, Hosea Hirata describes how Nishiwaki, who wrote his first poems in English and French, shaped a highly influential poetic modernism in Japan while elevating the artistic status of translation. This volume includes Nishiwaki's highly original essays on the nature of poetry, his first two collections of Japanese poems, and a poem meditating on the annihilation of symbolism. The author maintains that in Japan the language of modernism was that of translation. When Nishiwaki finally began to write poems in Japanese, a new poetic language was born in his country: a translatory language. Hirata elaborates this birth of new poetry via translation by referring to the theories of translation and of differance articulated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.The author reconsiders the view that translated texts are secondary to the originals, where the truth supposedly resides; instead he presents translation as an essential textual movement, ecriture, toward the paradise of pure language and Poetry. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.