Music: Selected Poems

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Taro Naka (1922-2014) is one of the most respected poets in post-war Japan, having won several major Japanese poetry prizes. His poetry reflects his life-long exploration of Buddhism, traditional and modern literature, language, art, and philosophy. He developed a poetics that paid attention to what he describes as the visual, phonetic, and historical aspects of words and how each word is a unique combination of these. The poems in this volume are selected from across his poetic output of some seventy years, ranging from his stark, uncompromising depictions of the war and its immediate aftermath to the formal experimentation of the 1965 collection often considered his magnum opus, Music - from which this book takes its title - and The First Emperor, his 2003 no play. Music, consisting of strong translations by Andrew Houwen and Chikako Nihei, and including an illuminating introduction, is the first book-length collection of Naka’s work in English.