James Kirkup (1918 – 2009) was an English poet, academic and translator. He spent 30 years of his working life in Japan, teaching English Literature at various universities, before retiring to Andorra in 1995. He was extremely prolific as a poet and translator of Japanese poetry and also published autobiography and travel books in prose – in all he published 45 books: his first volume of poetry was The Drowned Sailor in 1947.
His poem The Love That Dares to Speak its Name was the subject of the last successful blasphemy prosecution in England when the publishers of the poem, Gay News Ltd and Denis Lemon, were prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse and found guilty in 1977. Kirkup himself didn’t rate the poem very highly and was frustrated at the attention the trial received. Perhaps his best known volume is No More Hiroshimas from 1995 (widely available second-hand) which contains original free verse poetry as well as translations from Japanese writers.
James Kirkup did seem to have a deep instinctive sympathy with the Japanese language and culture and translated extensively including his anthology Modern Japanese Poetry (Open University Press, 1979) which includes translations of 83 poets. In 2006 he translated Mutsuo Takahashi’s volume We of Zipangu (Arc Publications). All his volumes of translated Japanese poetry, both free verse and tanka, include generous acknowledgement of help received by Japanese colleagues. He was awarded the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation in 1992.
He had an uncanny ability to translate Japanese tanka into 31 syllables of English, and he was equally adept at translating the idiom of the 8th and 9th centuries and the 20th:
I had been yearning
for my love before I slept.
He appeared beside me.
Had I known it was a dream
I would have gone on sleeping.
(Ono no Komachi - Heian period 795-1185)
Sunk to the bottom
in a glass of water, his
flesh-coloured dentures
reposing there without shame -
the old patient is sleeping.
(Takizawa Wataru - 20th century)
As an original poet writing in English James Kirkup wrote his own tanka for many years – both his major tanka books A Book of Tanka (1995) and Tanka Tales (1997) were published by Salzburg University. They are long out of print although they can be found at the National Poetry Library in London: his first volume of tanka poems, Utsusemi, is included within A Book of Tanka.
Our love was something
never expected to last -
at least on my part.
But here we are, years later.
Our garden still in flower.
James Kirkup disliked experimentation with the classic tanka format, keeping always to five lines and 31 syllables. A few of his poems are 7/5/5/7/7 rather than 5/7/5/7/7, so perhaps he felt he had earned the right to make such small changes:
I no longer recognise
myself in mirrors
but greet some passing
stranger whose persistent gaze
suggests forgotten friendships.
James Kirkup is not much read or remembered now. But he combined a profound sympathy with Japanese poetry with fluency in English, and played a key role in bringing the tanka into the English poetic tradition. Perhaps his memory has survived better in Japan.
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