Spring Birds and Other Poems

“Why do you not make the cherry blossoms your bed, heart of the spring bird that does not sleep among the flowers?” So Kanbara Ariake's Spring Birds (1905) opens, with an old waka and a haiku of Bashō set side by side as epigraph. What follows is thirty-five poems by the man who, with Susukida Kyūkin, made the symbolist style at home in Meiji Japan: images that arrive whole and unexplained, sentences that bend under their own weight, and a music learned as much from Rossetti and Verlaine as from the classical tradition.

This book brings together three of his early collections, complete: Spring Birds (1905), Lament on a Single String (1903), whose fifteen sonnets in an unusual 4-7-6 metre are followed by Kanbara's Japanese versions of Keats, Rossetti and Blake, and Young Grasses (1902). They show a poet finding his manner in only four years.

Three complete collections in a new translation from the Japanese, with a translator's note and endnotes that give readings, allusions and the sources of the translated poems. The English keeps the images exact and the syntax as close to Kanbara's as it can.