Born in Japan and raised in the US, Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation. Her newest books of poetry include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, and Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020), both of which engage the intersection between writing and translation. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence, Rhode Island on Thanksgiving Day of 2017 on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects.
“Invisible Losses,” a text-based performance, was performed in 2023 as part of Translated Bodies, a translation performance event curated by Gabrielle Civil at the Velocity Dance Center in Seattle. It has also been reimagined and published as a web-based work on oral.pub. Her pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), which encourages the untethering of translated texts from conventional relationships to their source texts, has been taught, translated, or performed in the US and in Europe—including as a spoken word performance by Danielle Zawadi in Dutch translation, at the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s Annual Translation Convention in 2022.
Nakayasu’s translation of the Japanese modernist poet Sagawa Chika, The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, supported by the NEA and published by Canarium Books in 2015, received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and was a finalist for the National Translation Award in Poetry. It was subsequently acquired by Penguin/Random House for their Modern Library series and republished in 2020 in a new edition with updated introduction. Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering, currently under development with the Brown Digital Publications Initiative, is a born-digital, scholarly publication based on Sagawa’s poetry and legacy.
Nakayasu teaches in the Literary Arts department at Brown University, where she teaches poetry, translation, and interdisciplinary art.
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Sahara Sidi (SS): I’ll start off with an icebreaker-esque question—what are you reading and consuming, so to speak, these days?
Sawako Nakayasu (SN): I was just reading dg nanouk okpik, who is an Inuit poet. She has a second book that came out recently, Blood Snow, and it made me want revisit her first book, which is called Corpse Whale. I was thinking about how some writers bring their whole worldview into their poetry, and how, if I want to get to know someone, and I know that they’re a writer, their books contain a lot of that worldview. I don’t know dg personally, I recently saw her speak. But I haven’t really had a conversation one-on-one with her. Still you can learn so much about someone through their work—and it’s a very different way of learning about them—so much of their sensibility and thinking and use of language that’s all interconnected.
SS: I agree! I’m thinking a lot about your “Anti-Craft” craft lecture at the University of Michigan and how you spoke to this notion of living for art, leaving yourself open to transformation. As you’ve studied writing in and beyond the MFA space, what are some craft techniques or “rules” that you have unlearned and/or re-engineered in your writing practice?
SN: I don’t know if anyone has ever taught me craft in the common way we use that word, which is probably why I don’t teach poetry in that way either.
I don’t think I spent a lot of time unlearning. And by that I mean, I probably learned something generic in primary school or earlier education, but as soon as I landed in college I was reading Jerome Rothenberg’s [Poems for the Millennium] anthology that he was in the middle of editing. So I got a lot of very, very different kinds of poetry dumped in my lap all at once. I received it all and I learned a lot from that.
I also learned a lot from being in a very experimental music department and being around contemporary dancers. So I don’t think the unlearning process was big for me. It was more of an accumulation.
SS: This sense of accumulation definitely shows in your work. I feel like you not only read widely, but explore widely as well. You mentioned your background in music earlier. As writers, we make use of little techniques and know well the rewards of our tricks for both us and the reader(s). As we borrow the music around us and imbue our writing with it, I wondered how we begin to engage musical notions of “time” and “keeping time” in our own poetics. When I was reading Pink Waves, I noted the sonata form’s influence on sequencing as well as the use of refrain throughout. I’m wondering, given the long and entangled history of poetry & music as it spans from oral traditions to genres such as jazz poetry, what goes through your mind when engaging musical structures & techniques in creative writing? And what are you excited to see others (or yourself) try in the future?
SN: I appreciate you mentioning the musicality in our lyric poetry tradition and in so many forms that poets use. I’d guess that everyone has some degree of internal music that just feels right. Sometimes I think it’d be cool to write a sonnet, to write a book of sonnets, but it just doesn’t happen for me. And yet, I also feel like the narrative prose poems I write are sonnet-like, probably in a very, very abstract way—they feel like a sonnet to me in the sense that I imagine—I’m recalling you asking, “what goes through your head?”—and that question is so difficult to answer because it’s a feeling or a mode or a state of being or consciousness. But I think at that level of weird poet consciousness, that when I’m writing a narrative prose poem, it’s something similar to what for somebody else is what writing a sonnet might feel like. Like if you did some kind of brain scan, it might look similar, just that for some people it comes out in sonnet form, and for me it comes out in prose poetry. I don’t really associate these poems with the lyric tradition, but in the sense of how it feels to write them, and the scale, the way they’re kind of nugget-sized, like a lyric. I’ve never actually called those poems lyric poems, but why not? I mean, they’re not left-justified with line breaks, but I think they have something in common with them. And then my longer book-length poems are doing something else and working on a different scale and inhabiting time differently.
SS: I’m really taken by this idea of inhabiting time differently. I imagine that extends to space, too. Please correct me if I am wrong, but you mentioned that the inception of Pink Waves and its creation was spawned during an in-person performance that took place over the course of three days. I’m wondering, what were the questions that you asked yourself throughout both the creative and publishing process of Pink Waves? And if there was still room for improv and that sort of double-dutch dance and performance when you put Pink Waves on the page as well? And what factored into the logic of structuring Pink Waves, particularly those nuggets, delicious nuggets, where the line kind of crosses the spine of the book? It seems almost contrapuntal-like, did you intend for it to be a sort of moment of “counterpoint” in the books?
SN: It might seem like the inception was in the performance, which sounds kind of romantic and cool, but it wasn’t exactly that. It was more that the performance was the end point, and I’d started writing it beforehand. And when you say contrapuntal, in that sense, I’d started writing the book earlier, in conversation with the books I was reading.
At that moment, it was Waveform by Amber T. Pietra and Denise Leto, and the long poem called “Black Dada” by Adam Pendleton. There were a couple of other books that I had with me in the moment of performance, but I had started the work as a conversation between texts, and I may have already arrived at the general form of it before I got to the performance space. There wasn’t that much time before the early inception and the performance moment, and so there was kind of a compressed feeling, that this book was going to get done. It probably was overall less than two months, maybe a month and a half, maybe less, I never counted.
But the idea of finishing it in performance is actually not that different from writing under deadline, which you do all the time if you are a journalist. My only experience with journalism was writing for the high school newspaper, and I remember that I loved the deadline aspect of it. Back in the day, we would paste the sheets of the newspaper by hand onto these giant spreads, you cut up the pieces of your article and they get laid out manually. It’s kind of amazing that we used to do it that way. And you had to do it all by the deadline—I loved that athletic feel of it. In terms of sports too, I like the feeling of time pressure, and I like the way time pressure elevates your sense of presence and being in the moment, bringing everything you have to that particular moment.
I didn’t really like writing in the journalistic style, that was not for me, but I liked the motion of writing for journalism. I think that’s part of what stayed with me, partly in terms of the music and dance improvisation that I had been doing, which also had a similar feeling, of the moment of performance being the only moment—one that you’ve been preparing and rehearsing for in the time leading up to it. They all feel of a piece, and that somehow suits my temperament. I like that feeling of compressed intention. So that’s what happened in Pink Waves, and it’s a little bit scary as a writer because you won’t be able to change your mind…but I think there’s a clarity in knowing and deciding that this is it, and the three days were plenty of time to do all the revising that I needed to do, so I didn’t feel like I was short on time. It was just what it was, and whatever I had was going to be the book. One thing that interests me about that is the way it changes emphasis—and maybe this goes back to your question on craft—it shifts the emphasis away from the idea that you’d make a perfectly chiseled, sculpted object that’s flawless. Because Pink Waves is not flawless in that way. It’s a little bit more messy, if you will, in terms of the way each line and each page is looking or fitting together or in other traditional ways you might read. So I think it asks something different of a reader as a way of engaging with the book, and that interests me.
SS: As a poet, we spend time agonizing over not just a suitable verb or adjective, but the perfect, the only verb or adjective that could go in that place to accurately convey a sentiment or to make sure that the feeling or image is adequately conveyed. Sometimes, we are unsuccessful in that pursuit and readers walk away with their own embellished version, or perhaps personalized take. And so I had wondered when trying to distill some sort of truth among the many truths into language or this feeling into language, where does truth come up in your pursuit of translation and/or creative writing? Is precision an objective?
SN: Well, that was really interesting because your question began with the idea of finding the perfect word, the right word for the right moment, and for that kind of intention. And then it evolved to be a question asking about truth. I think that that connection you’re making is relevant to the thing that I am opposing and questioning, in terms of the notion of a perfect poem and that of the perfect word and the notion of truth. This idea that goodness and rightness is existing in a fixable, nameable, tangible, clear place. I think there’s an aspect of museum culture tied up in that. There’s a way in which art and art products are so elevated.
And if you’re in a museum, how you’re not allowed to touch the artwork, and the fact that you’re not allowed to touch it is because that work is somehow sacred or holy or valuable and you will degrade it by touching it. I loved this moment when I was in PS1 in New York and a friend of mine had work in a show and I went to the opening and he was standing in front of his painting and he kept touching his painting. We’re so conditioned not to touch it because that’s the culture. And yet the artist is touching it all the time, all over the place with his dirty hands because that’s how he made it. That visceral feeling of making this thing by hand…and then it transforms into an object in the museum that one shall not touch…is all very interesting to me. And it’s interesting in the sense that I don’t like that thing in the museum as much as I like that thing in the hands of the artist.
I also had a similar feeling about singing in choir, which I did a lot of when I was younger. I had a conversation with Clara about this because she sang in choir too—maybe everybody has the same sensation, where we enjoy the rehearsals and the layers of practicing and messiness and making it come together, much more than we enjoy the final product of the performance—“This is it! This is the final polished product!” And so I’m partly speaking of the pleasure of living with art and the pleasure of living while making art.
And just like you have when you’re in an MFA program, you have friends and they’re also writers. So you’re living and hanging out and writing and it’s all of a piece. That’s pleasurable! Why can’t we turn regular life into MFA program? Instead of having it be this rarefied space where you can only live like that only while you’re in the program, and then what happens afterwards?
As soon as I finished MFA, I ended up going to Japan, but I was lonely and I ended up looking for the dancers because dance, and especially contact improvisation, is inherently social. I wanted to be with other artists. So there are things we want and need, but we’ve inherited traditions and assumptions about art that are not as helpful in that respect.
SS: You got your MFA at Brown University and now teach there all these years later. I always loved creative writing courses because most seem to adopt a rather lax or non-hierarchical structure where everyone involved is learning in some fashion. What is the most valuable lesson that you have gotten from a student? Has there been any mind-blowing or unforgettable moments that you have taken away as an educator in that space from your students?
SN: That’s a nice question. I don’t think I received this skill, but I did have a poetry student once who had a very unique ability to verbally articulate every single poetic move that was being made in a poem he was writing and could kind of narrate each move, narrate how their mind worked in the moment of making a poem. It was a very craft-centric mode of writing poetry, but I was impressed by how highly developed it was in his mind. It was almost like you’re listening to a radio broadcast of a basketball game, and they’re just narrating all the moves one after another in quick succession.
But I didn’t learn that. I’ve never been able to do that. And it’s much more mysterious to me. What I see as a teacher is that there are so many different ways that people write poetry, and really some of the best poets are very idiosyncratic in how they get there. And I think that tells me something about how poetry works. It’s not about the shapes and the forms and how you can fit it all nicely together. It’s really about understanding something about yourself and about your mind and how you see the world and the ability to bring those things together. So it is an interesting thing to witness many poets who come through my life as they articulate their practice.
SS: I love that you mention factoring these logics into your own approach to writing poems. In addition to cultivating our writing practices, the way we read poems and digest other art forms go hand-in-hand in shaping these creative practices. Do you have a method for reading poems? Are there some poems that ask to be read differently? How do you experience poems? I ask because my experience with Pink Waves was a “wow” moment for my reading. I thought I could sit with this book in a noisy cafe, but ran out by page 15. This book was a much more enjoyable read when I was home and able to hear your lines in the air.
SN: I think every book asserts itself and almost tells you how to read it; I think you’re right in that sense. We are not always correct in guessing what or how or under what conditions we should read a particular book, because I’ve definitely had that experience where the book I brought along with me is not easy to read in that particular time and place. I’ve also felt that in terms of audiobooks too; I don’t do poetry in audiobooks so much. Even in terms of prose, some books I am glad to receive through my ears, and some books I struggle with a little bit more.
With poetry I think that one thing I notice is that they seem to indicate a speed and rhythm that it wants to be read in, and so I am either slowed down or I can join in the stream of things and latch on to the rhythm that the book is propelling. I actually think of reading a book as a performative act too, even though it’s very private and you’re the only person involved, unless you’re reading it out loud with a bunch of people. Even in the space of one person reading a book, there’s a performance being staged by the book and the person who is reading it—even if you don’t utter a single sound, those words are coming in at a certain order in a visual landscape and it is asserting itself.
I have always thought of a page as a stage. And I think that’s also because I was exposed to experimental music notation back when I was studying music. The notes were all over the stage of the page. And I’ve been interested in notation of music and dance and that kind of openness of translating a live act into a static piece of paper, I think is really fascinating. So yeah, reading is various. Some books really want to be read in one sitting because it’s one big movement, and some books have individual poems that you can dip in and out of. It’s a beautiful medium.
SS: This transdisciplinary approach really illuminates your work for me. I always describe your work as 4D, like when you go to the zoo (yes, zoos are bad. Don’t go) and then the whale in the movie sprays water at you in the theater. In your craft lecture, you spoke on genres the way one might instruct on regional dialects of a language. These art forms are a product of accumulation and impressions. I wondered how your approach to translation also reflects your open-minded approach to writing original work and that creative pursuit of performance on the page. When you translate language to language, or language to feeling, or form to feeling, what are challenges that come up? How does this impact the performance of poetry?
SN: Mm-hmm. Your question makes me think about my translation of Hijikata Tatsumi’s dance book, Costume en Face. And I like the idea of 4D and maybe 5, 6D, I don’t know. That kind of expansiveness of dimension is a direction that I really want to grow for translation.
I enjoyed the fact that that book was an occasion of translating a book that had not even been published in the original language. My source text was a handwritten notebook. And the notebook itself was not the product itself because it was the notes that the dancer [Moe Yamamoto] took that Hijikata, the choreographer, dictated to him as a way of communicating the dance performance they were going to do. In the process of translating, I got to work with the Hijikata archive in Tokyo, and they sat me down and gave me a little screening of the video of the performance, which was interesting and meaningful. And yet, because I had spent so much time with the text, that notebook was much more alive to me. Video has a way of flattening a live performance. So I think it’s interesting to consider the ways in which we privilege certain media, like video, as documentary of a performance.
I’m thinking of the performance artist Gabrielle Civil, for example, and she writes books about her performances, and she describes them and narrates what happened before, during, and after.
And those books that she writes are so rich; they’re so full of the fullness of performance. And she even talks about one performance where the videographer wanted her to position things differently so that it would come out well in the video. And she ultimately decided not to do that because she wanted to privilege the live performance.
I like that you can leap over dimensions and go from live performance to something else and bypass the digital realm, because that can be in some ways more limited. And it was interesting in terms of what a book can be and might be, so we ended up using the notebooks. There was an intern who transcribed it into an Excel sheet, so that I could keep track of the components. And then we did a lot of work with the book designer who found a way to preserve its handwritten quality. The book designer, Steven Chodoriwsky, did a beautiful job of extracting all the diagrams that were part of the notebook, reconnecting them with the words. The words themselves were translated, and presented in English and Japanese. There are English pages in the book and Japanese pages in the book, [not always “en face,” ironically], and he was able to merge them with the diagrams and the lines and arrows, linking them together in a seamless way. It that created a hybrid text that was handwritten and typed, which I think was an interesting solution to something that originally looked difficult to translate and convey.
SS: I can imagine! And I had wondered as I hear you speak about translating, do you draw a distinction between that of adaptation and translation and the certain liberties that one “has the right” to take when doing so? I ask because there’s a common misconception that translation is this sterile genre in which you exchange language, word for word, in an almost-unloving manner. I love that you still emphasize your decision-making in this composition of translation.
SN: Well, it depends on what medium you’re working in, right? For example, if you’re working in music, there’s a long tradition. A score is written by a composer and then that is interpreted by the conductor and performers. There’s a whole paradigm that all of this operates in. We don’t call them adaptations, but we call them interpretations. And every field has its grammar and vocabulary for what is happening. Likewise with literature and translation, there’s an assumption that if you call it a translation, it’s acting conventionally. And if it’s not acting conventionally, then it’s an adaptation or a transcreation or an experimental translation. And there’s a messiness around that language these days. I feel like there’s more openness around those definitions now, but there isn’t really a settled feeling around the language. And I like that. I think that’s fine. I think maybe these kinds of variant and non-conventional modes will grow so that they can extend the definition of what translation is, and then we’ll go back and do the other thing and call that conventional translation, like the “conventionally grown apples” at Whole Foods. I think the nomenclature will shift and that’s a good thing.
SS: What are you most excited about to see or reappear or resurgence of poetry down the line? Are there any sort of ripples that get you excited or anything that you’re looking forward to, conversations that you’re happy that are happening now, etc.
SN: I’m very excited about the potential for new modes of collaboration. And one project that I’m starting to brew right now is with a Japanese poet and translator named Megumi Moriyama.
She did an incredibly wild thing where she co-translated with her sister The Tale of Genji into Japanese from Arthur Whaley’s English translation of it. Traditionally we would call that a back translation, but she and her sister call it a spiral translation. It’s not going back because you don’t go back: it becomes something new. And they’re kind of spiraling out of that English version and bringing a more global version of The Tale of Genji back to Japanese readers. It’s been wildly successful and wildly confusing—it sparked a lot of conversation in Japan.
And since then, she found me through my book, Mouth Eats Color. It’s a book where, I think part of me was thinking as I was writing—let’s see if I can write an untranslatable book. And somehow it makes sense that Megumi Moriyama is the one who wants to translate my untranslatable book, because we’re thinking along similar lines of translating expansively. So it seemed inevitable that we would collaborate, though we haven’t yet figured out in exactly what ways. I like this for multiple reasons. One, for the expansive translation aspect and two, for the foregrounding of collaboration and moving away from the notion of the genius of the single author, and the ways in which we collect cultural capital in individual ways. Our project is coming out of that logic, that we would do well to scoot away from a little bit. I feel like this collaboration and this project is opening a lot of interesting doors for me and I’m excited to see what happens.
