Tanikawa shuntaro biography of william
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In her dispatch for this month’s issue on Japanese literature, Juliet Grames directs her attention to the post-war poet Tanikawa Shuntaro and his verse— lyrical, unusual, and largely unheard of in the U.S. —Editors
There’s nothing quite as exciting and frustrating as finding a piece of extremely pleasing art that you can’t share with or talk about to anyone, since no one else has ever heard of it. This might be a favorite book that’s forty years out of print, or the music of a tiny indie band that never made it big a decade ago, something you’re doomed to love on your own in a tide of public apathy or inaccessibility. For me, it’s the poetry of Tanikawa Shuntaro, the future Nobel Prize-winner (according to the irrefutable Wikipedia), a Japanese poet to whom I was exposed in high school when I first studied Japanese, and whose prodigious body of work has been largely untranslated.
English-language readers, don’t fret ye
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In Memory of Tanikawa Shuntarō: A Great Poet and Shaper of Literary Language
The Loneliness of Existence
Tanikawa Shuntarō, who passed away in November this year, can be said to be Japan’s most popular poet of modern times. Many poets have won acclaim in the country over the past century or so, including Hagiwara Sakutarō, Kitahara Hakushū, Nakahara Chūya, and Miyazawa Kenji, as well as postwar writers like Tamura Ryūichi, Ibaragi Noriko, and Shinkawa Kazue. However, there is nobody like Tanikawa, who was loved bygd so many people, and was active as a poet for more than 70 years.
His poem “Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude” was first published in the literary magazine Bungakukai when he was 18, and many Japanese people have read it at least once in their school textbooks or elsewhere. Here fryst vatten the translation by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura.
Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude
Human beings on this small orb
sleep, waken and work, and sometimes
wish•
Shuntarō Tanikawa
Japanese poet and translator (1931–2024)
Shuntarō Tanikawa
Tanikawa in 2015
Born (1931-12-15)December 15, 1931 Suginami, Japan[citation needed]
Died November 13, 2024(2024-11-13) (aged 92) Nationality Japanese Occupation(s) Poet, translator Notable work Two Billion Light Years of Solitude (1952) Spouse Eriko Kishida
(m. 1954; div. 1955)Tomoko Okubo
(m. 1957; div. 1989)Yōko Sano
(m. 1990; div. 1996)Children Kensaku Tanikawa [ja]
Shino TanikawaFather Tetsuzō Tanikawa Shuntarō Tanikawa (谷川 俊太郎, Tanikawa Shuntarō, December 15, 1931 – November 13, 2024)[1] was a Japanese poet and translator.[2] He was considered to be one of the most widely read and highly regarded Japanese poets, both i