Shuntarō Tanikawa (谷川俊太郎, 1931–2024) is among the most beloved and prolific poets in modern Japanese literature. And yet maybe one in ten avid American readers of poetry knows his work. Across his career, he wrote more than sixty volumes of poetry, has been translated into over twenty languages, and has shaped Japanese culture as a translator, lyricist, and author. Respected by Japanese critics, poets, and casual readers alike, Tanikawa is recognized as an heir to the country’s lineage of compressed, image-driven verse, and also as a poet fully conversant with the wider currents of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics. He is also, to my mind, an unacknowledged predecessor to the transnational lineage of ecopoets in his attention to the more-than-human world. If Pound, H.D., and Amy Lowell absorbed Japanese aesthetics into English-language poetry (which they did), Tanikawa returns the gaze by integrating Western forms and themes back into the Japanese tradition. Shuntarō Tanikawa died in 2024 after a remarkable life as a poet. Not only does he deserve greater readership among American poets and readers of poetry, but his work, in its simplicity and its attention to the ephemerality of the natural world, might also help us identify what is missing in American life.

4. Today

Again, Sunday    as it goes
Again, Monday
Again, cloudy    Again, clear
and after that, what?

After that we can’t know—
There is only today.
Inside me, no again exists.
Only today.

All memories merge today.
Today is death, isn’t it?
So this must be a ferocious day for life.

Today, love—
Then, the death of one small poem,
and the day is given over to mourning.

__________

It may be difficult for contemporary American readers to access Tanikawa’s work, not because the work itself is difficult, but because it relies on a different kind of awareness than we’re accustomed to. The poems themselves are quietly alive—they live and die—instead of being merely excitations or reflections on life. They are also exquisitely layered and exist inside a web of allusions, much like traditional Japanese poems; they also exist inside an ecosystem of systems—historic, spiritual, geopolitical, economic, social, animal—much like every living being. And yet they are simple, almost childlike. They contain space within them. The images act as vehicles for meditative consciousness and contemplation of permeability. The lines between self and other—even between human and nonhuman—become blurred.

As a result, though his images are grounded in everyday objects and emotions, the experience of these objects may feel abstract or intangible to American readers. Perhaps this is because we’re accustomed to work that must compete with the myriad distractions of our world, or perhaps it’s because we’re raised to celebrate self, property, and identity above community, attention, and generosity. We center our thinking on what makes us separate rather than what makes us whole. Regardless, Tanikawa’s work sits in a kind of meditative practice and awareness of the simple transience of life and the permeability of boundaries, of borders. He contemplates form and formlessness, light and shadow, being and nothingness—through observation rather than argumentation. He demonstrates for us a radical empathy that reminds us we are the same being. This is not only unfamiliar but defamiliarizing to the American reader. But then, what is translation for if not this? It allows us to access and strive to access modes of consciousness we may be lacking in our own time, place, or culture. It allows us to access or strive to access other minds.

5. Musing

So this is what life is.
In the morning sun, people fill the road.
Children look like sparrows as they pass, laughing.
In the thinking man’s head, delusions arrive like wind.

Out of eternity: today began as a song.
Out of eternity: an equally incomprehensible eternity.
Out of eternity: distance.
Out of eternity: yet another eternity.

In cities and villages, in the desert and in the ocean,
people talk endlessly: they beguile, intimidate, become depressed.
Even in petty arguments their eyes flash.

Of course this must be what living is.
Today, everything on this planet is a mystery,
and because I am overfull, I forget the gods.

__________

Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, Tanikawa emerged alongside several postwar poetic movements including the Arechi (“Wasteland”) poets, gendai-shi (modernist poetry), and a group of poets who published in the avant garde literary journal VOU (ヴー), edited by Kitasono Katsue (北園克衛). But where many modernist poets responded to wartime dislocation through fracture, surrealism, and formal experimentation (all familiar impulses to American readers of poetry), Tanikawa grounded his work in clarity, simplicity, and an attentiveness to the animacy and impermanence of ordinary objects: qualities aligned with mono no aware (物の哀れ)in Japanese aesthetics—literally “the pathos of things.” These qualities also place Tanikawa as an interesting precursor to post-humanist and ecocritical concepts like object-oriented ontology (OOO), vibrant materialism, and trans-corporeality. His ability to transcend the material world through earnest and open engagement with everyday objects and concerns, and to consider the self in the context of the cosmos, helps to explain why his work continues to resonate across languages and generations. His poems are, for lack of a better word, alive. They invite life, even as they refuse to cling to it.

8. Laughter

I was never quite so sad
that I forgot sadness.
I was never quite so joyful
that I forgot joy.

The sun spoke of daylight—and also
the night stars went on speaking of themselves.
Of me, only this exceedingly beautiful silence speaks—
of my heart, and no other.

What exists does not flow.
We’ve only this moment become aware
of the things that come, the things that go.

Even the inquisitive are forbidden
to question the moment which has just passed.
But one day, casually, someone will laugh.

9. Confusion

People exist in swarms
and we call this society.
We see one dripping-wet, small, human animal
and call this loneliness.

I am confused.
I am overcome with confusion.
I am employed by the gods, and yet
politicians, too, want to employ me.

And various other little things like this—
children, the catching of colds, philosophy.
Our fate is indiscriminate and carved with precision.

For this reason, fourteen good and modest lines
elicit confusion in whoever hears them.
For this reason, the fool calls me lonely when I am simply alone.

__________

Tanikawa’s second book, Sixty-Two Sonnets (1953), from which these translations are drawn, is both a striking poetic achievement and a record of early postwar consciousness. These are poems that live at the razor’s edge of a historic and impossible splitting: “Even the inquisitive are forbidden to question / the moment that has just passed.” Rather than approach Japan’s reconfigured place in the world through explicit argument or political speech, Tanikawa returns to the most foundational of human questions: “laughter,” “confusion,” “today,” even “now” are recontextualized through the lens of emergence and dislocation. These poems push back, not just against the discomfort of a newfound celebrity, but also against the discomfort of surviving. And they see into the future, not to read its leaves, but to acknowledge its light, that light with touches and consumes us all.

13. Now

And it is good, too, that the light illuminates all things—
that the world offers me this gift of forgetting
so I can live in the moment, like an animal.
It is time, forever—now—to love.

Inside the silent song that does not end,
a faint hint of the gods—
so that I realize I am here, now
at the center of this mundane, quiet expanse.

When I trust in the abundance of this moment,
and, on this star I recognize death,
I am free.

Whatever passion is,
it appears as the sun. It appears as the sky—
under the silently shining things. Under the light that spills over.

14. In the field

My heart has released me.
I have waited for precisely the right moment
to recollect myself;
and caught a glimpse of the arbitrariness of the gods.

Without a song; with no willpower to speak of—
today I might as well be a homesick child.
But on such a beautiful, clear day,
what is there to atone for, and who can atone anyway?

It is right that we are unable to sing:
there are no words to speak in the language of nothing.
And in the language of all things, neither are there words.

But here, where I am standing, all things exist.
A town full of people. A plain full of grass. And so:
the sky, heaven, is nothing.

__________

Although earlier Japanese poets had experimented with the form, Sixty-Two Sonnets stands as the first full-length modern sonnet collection published in Japanese. It therefore engages questions of cross-cultural exchange and transference: simultaneity, permeability, and movement across and between boundaries and borders. These themes, significant then, are still significant now. The poems gesture toward the imagistic precision of classical Japanese poetry but live also in a philosophical exploration of form and formlessness, of self and other, of containment and freedom. They are not only explorations of form and consciousness, but they inhabit and invite the form into consciousness. When approached with openness, they allow the reader to enter the form and the form to enter the reader. They are templates, of a sort, but they are also the cast shape. They contain a clarity and simplicity that is embodied, rather than explained: what in Japanese is often called meikai ( 明快 )—clarity; insight; light ( 明 ) + pleasure; delight; effortlessness ( 快).

15. Template

Roughly, the clouds were thrown;
Far away, the mountains tried to endure the sun.
The landscape darkened.
Shadows cast—played like a song across my uneven heart.

They were templates for happiness;
From the direction of the shadows, happiness waited.
But I, myself, could not be happy.
There was an appetite yet to be satisfied.

The cast shape of happiness is not sadness.
At the center of this strange, unfinished impulse,
my heart could not be named.

To be satisfied, I have made a template of satisfaction;
surely, I will forget it—
along with this evening landscape, and this unnameable heart.

__________

In Sixty-Two Sonnets, Tanikawa is simultaneously embracing the Western form of the sonnet while also absorbing it into his own tradition. He is confronting the light and the shadow cast by the light. This aligns with Japan’s ability to adopt and integrate foreign cultural practices: as with Kanji, ramen, and manga, Japan rarely recreates the practice or object entirely, but instead assimilates, re-engineers, and naturalizes the form until it feels inevitably and even originally Japanese. Tanikawa’s sonnets are both familiar and unfamiliar: each is 14 lines, contains an opening or hinge, and as Marilyn Hacker once said of sonnets, each is “like moving into a small room and discovering that there is space for all the furniture.” Only in Tanikawa’s sonnets, each small room fits not just the furniture, but the entire universe.

There are other departures as well. Rather than using rhyme or meter, neither of which are formal elements of Japanese poetry, Tanikawa uses repetition, juxtapositional shifts, and the invocation of silence to evoke meditative attention or to represent the turn. And while many Western sonnets are ostentatious displays of technical prowess, Tanikawa moves in the opposite direction, stripping away ornamentation almost completely to make space for mere awareness. Rather than using the form as a vehicle for rhetoric or argumentation, as in the lineage of Donne, Browning, or even Hopkins; Tanikawa uses the form as a container for mindfulness. These sonnets sit rather than argue.

21. Song

When I raised my eyes,
already the cloud’s form was gone.
Not so much inside the changing, fragile shapes, but out of them
was a spirit familiar to me.

Prayers from the old days
keep cursing those shapes, moment by moment.
When the sky is empty and there is a heart on earth,
clouds are always wanting to become something new.

Still, what could they become?
Better a heart that keeps things light than one that yearns for lightness:
the cloud destroys its own form, and then continues.

As for the earth, everything is excessively plentiful—
and in the sky, things are all too scarce.
I feel something close to singing.

__________

Across his seventy-year career, Tanikawa expanded the possibilities of poetry, influencing generations of writers, artists, and musicians. Yet here, in Sixty-Two Sonnets, we encounter the young poet at a turning point in history and in his own life as an artist. After the success of his debut, this book announces his ambition to forge a poetics that bridges languages, centuries, traditions, and worlds—perhaps even universes. Attentive to the objects and concerns of daily life, and ranging in tone from melancholy to joyful to humorous, these poems often speak from a stance of estrangement, even alienness. By inhabiting difference, Tanikawa reminds us of the value in celebrating and embracing difference. I hope these new translations from this important and historic book will inform the way we choose to live, every day, again in this moment, together.

25.

In the middle of the universe, I move freely,
so the universe, itself, stirs.
The universe looks back
and a murmuration of heavenly birds erupts in flight.

The sky empties.
The written word is too dizzying
so I raise my forearm to shield my eyes —
and only then do the distant mountains become clear.

Time is exhausted.
I don’t know how to care for it.
The sky grows like a weed.

I walk forward
and the universe stares at me.
I avert my eyes, in the direction of death.

On Merging and Emergence; a Translator’s Note

The American literacy scholar Maryanne Wolfe has said that we have forgotten the need for contemplation, and that we have forgotten the joy of deep reading. One thing I love about Sixty-Two Sonnets is that these poems act on the reader in a way that opens our attention and invites us into being. They are slow and simple. They risk abstraction and sentimentality, but the payoff is immense. They rarely tell us what something means. Instead, they invite us into relationship with the moment where the image/object experiences itself. They enable nonduality in their resistance to revealing themselves.

As a translator of this book, I’m most concerned with manifesting the simplicity and clarity of Tanikawa’s attention, rather than aiming to recreate any specific technical flourish, music, or turn of phrase. I think of each poem as both a living object and as an object that invites living. This quality of simultaneity has much to do with the flexibility of the Japanese language, which means that one challenge in translating this work is to allow English to also loosen its grip: “Not so much inside the changing, fragile shapes, but out of them/ was a spirit familiar to me.” Or: “It is time, forever—now—to love.” Or: “Time is exhausted.”

The Japanese language inherently permits a kind of semantic drift that is amplified in Tanikawa’s work: pronouns are seldom present, subjects go unspoken, modifiers attach themselves in more than one direction, and a sentence can hold two tonal registers at once without resolving them. Tanikawa has spoken of his interest in leaning into this ambiguity for poetic affect. In “Today,” for example, the phrase I translate as “Today is death, isn’t it?” carries a tremor of uncertainty in Japanese—not only in the verb but in the surrounding syntax. There is also potential for ambiguity of meaning here, just as there is in English. Today holds the possibility of death in that, especially in Japanese postwar consciousness, the next moment is never guaranteed. But also, death is today; living and dying are the same; this moment only exists because it is experienced; it can only be experienced because it will end. It is the death of the individual and the death of the moment, expressed as one being, expressed as one living. Similarly, the following line, which I translate as “So this must be a ferocious day for life” can also be translated as “Living ferociously is today” or even “Living is what makes the day so fierce.” The day is being experienced by the poet even as the day is doing the living. A memento mori in two lines. I’m reminded of Thomas Nagel’s suggestion that consciousness is an inherent aspect of the universe, and also of Vedic nondualism, in which Ātman (the true self) is identical with Brahman (the universe). Or, to translate a phrase I may have uttered more than once as a young man, “consciousness is just the universe experiencing itself, bruh.” Throughout this sequence, Tanikawa makes quiet use of this openness. It is never ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake; instead, it reflects the uncertainty and unknowability of our own lives. It is the sublime. It is the koan.

This is one reason the sonnet form suits Tanikawa so well. The volta offers a built-in mechanism for this kind of reorientation. Classical Japanese poetry has its own version of a turn in kakekotoba—a pivot word that briefly holds two meanings and nudges the poem into new territory. Like a pun that results in enlightenment. Although Tanikawa doesn’t employ kakekotoba directly, the conceptual relationship is there: often the poem will either change direction or even split into simultaneous layers of meaning without breaking its continuity. When he writes that “the cloud destroys its own form, and then continues,” the poem pivots gently from observation into metaphysics, and also into history, and also into meta-awareness. My translations treat these turns not as argument shifts but as perceptual hinges—moments when the poem changes its footing and everything changes almost imperceptibly. As when napping outside on a beautiful day and a cloud passes overhead.

The thrown cloud doesn’t require an acknowledged hand (not even an invisible one); to the Western reader, accustomed as we are to ownership and individuation, this can be a defamiliarizing experience. But in the hands of a masterful poet, we are invited to enter a world that is consciousness unfurling itself as everyday objects and experiences. It is the world, as Japanese critics have called the postwar era, of light and shadows. Of the self, contained within its environment; the human and the nonhuman; life and death; the eternal now; the environment contained within the self. Tanikawa deftly and repeatedly reminds us of the permeability of these partitions. He leans into ambiguity where others seek to stamp it out or constrain it. It’s an unfamiliar instinct I think will benefit us, as readers and as humans.

Finally, translating Tanikawa (as with translating any poem) into English requires attention to the music, breath, diction, syntax, and cadence of the original—awareness of what makes language feel alive. In Japanese there are more vowel sounds than in English, so I’ve favored the simpler Germanic words whose stresses fall on the vowel over more complex Latinate words with fewer full, stressed vowel sounds. Occasionally, my translations also make space for slant rhymes, end rhymes or other flourishes familiar to English language readers of poetry, even when they do not appear in the originals.

Japanese poetry works through rhythm, breath, and spacing more than rhyme or meter. Traditionally, poems are broken or measured by what is called the ku (句), a syntactic-prosodic unit that corresponds to a single phrase uttered in one breath, often unseparated by enjambment, stanza, or punctuation. Haiku, for example, are written in three “ku,” shaped by a natural breath length of 5/7/5 syllables. Though not formally writing in “ku,” Tanikawa often uses syntactic pauses to create tonal shifts, and he also uses both the dash and occasionally something like an ellipse for this effect. While there are times when I’m able to maintain the position and placement of his dashes, at other times I have chosen to use the em dash as a way to approximate the small openings that Japanese can achieve through phrasing alone. I’ve opted to avoid the ellipse entirely, and often I add a dash where in Tanikawa’s poem there is none. For example, in “After that we can’t know— / There is only today,” the dash holds the moment of hesitation the Japanese naturally contains. It signals a shift without insisting on a full stop.

I admire the steadiness of attention and clarity of voice in these poems. Tanikawa himself would likely brush aside my attempts to overtheorize his work. He wrote with simplicity that evoked immensity and he also spoke clearly and modestly about his own life and writing. His poems notice the world carefully and let thought arise from what is observed and experienced rather than from what is argued. They are simple, but profound. They are earnest without being sentimental. If these translations feel clear without being obvious, and spacious without losing shape, it is because they preserve some of the way Tanikawa’s poems work: by embodying attention, allowing for simultaneity of abstraction and concrete, and holding the world close without grasping at it too tightly.

–Martin Rock