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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Trajectories of Form in Modern Japanese Poetry Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76w004n6 Author Beville, Ryan Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Trajectories of Form in Modern Japanese Poetry by Ryan Kyle Beville A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese Language in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Daniel O’Neill, Chair Professor Mack Horton Professor Kristin Hanson Fall 2015 Trajectories of Form in Modern Japanese Poetry Copyright 2015 Ryan Kyle Beville Abstract Trajectories of Form in Modern Japanese Poetry by Ryan Kyle Beville Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese Language University of California, Berkeley Professor Daniel O’Neill, Chair Form is central to poetry, if not all artistic endeavor. The Japanese literary tradition contains an array of poetic forms since its earliest extant texts, though some, like waka and kanshi, dominated poetic production for centuries. With Japan’s increased exposure to Western literary forms after the start of the Meiji era in 1868, the variety of new forms expanded rapidly. For many of Japan’s readers and poets, exposure to European and American literature was initially mediated by translation anthologies. As this dissertation seeks to show, many of the translators grafted new poetic practice onto pre-existing techniques, resulting in new forms and styles of poetry. Vernacular poets, often working with keen awareness of the translations, further adapted and altered those forms in their own work. Each chapter that follows documents and analyZes key aspects of form in modern Japanese poetry, including meter and rhyme. My primary tool of analysis is close reading, down to the phonemes, as rhyme and meter require, together with textual comparisons. Such close readings, often informed by linguistic research, reveal both the richness of form practiced in Japanese poetry, as well as its possibilities. They also trace the trajectory of these forms and their permutations over time. Ultimately, these analyses show that form is anything but static. 1 Acknowledgments This dissertation is dedicated first and foremost to: Professor Lewis E. Nicholson (1922-2015) of the University of Notre Dame, my first literature professor, my undergraduate advisor and my long-time mentor; who encouraged me more than anyone to pursue graduate studies, who continued to write to me throughout the years, and who threatened to haunt me from the grave if I didn’t finish this dissertation. I regret I didn’t do so while he was still alive. I found out only after his death that, on his way to two years of military service on the island of Nouméa, he survived a Japanese aerial attack on his convoy. Famous as a Beowulf scholar, he generously bequeathed to me his books on Asia, which surprisingly turned out to include a rather large collection of books on Japanese literature, culture and history. The books also turned up many letters that he exchanged with Japanese professors over the years, as well as newspaper clippings about Japan. It saddens me that such a great scholar, who even earned the admiration of Seamus Heaney, was likely never accorded full professorial status because of his sexuality. I can still hear his booming voice. Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum. This dissertation is also dedicated to: my grandfather James Baumgardner (1917- 2012), who also served two years in the Pacific War (one of them, incidentally, on Nouméa) and who never had one ill thing to say about the Japanese; to my grandfather William Beville (1916-2001), who served in Europe during WWII and who also encouraged me to continue my education, noting in his deathbed letter that his life had been harder for the lack of one; to my grandmother Sarah Beville, who called me regularly to ask about my dissertation progress, and who managed to live against the odds to see me finish it; to my parents, Don and Lynn Beville, who I very clearly remember returning to school while working and raising me, and who sacrificed so that I could attend university; and to my wife, My Huynh, who (together with her mother, Hue Ngo) largely looked after our kids, Cy and Kylie, during my writing phase, and whose example–a refugee from Vietnam who eventually graduated from UC Berkeley–has always been an inspiration to strive harder and take nothing for granted. I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Professor Dan O’Neill, who was also my M.A. thesis advisor, for his years of support and patience; Professor Mack Horton, i who never failed to show me old is new, and new, old; and my outside professor, Professor Kristin Hanson, whose course on meter and rhyme was the most fascinating one I took at UC Berkeley. I also owe thanks to Professor Robert Hass for his guidance over the years; to Professors Michael Brownstein and John Matthias, of the University of Notre Dame, for their support during my undergraduate years; and to Professors Sugawara Katsuya and Toshiko Ellis, of the University of Tokyo. Thank you UC Berkeley for the scholarship that enabled me to attend school, and to the Fulbright Foundation for the scholarship that took me to the University of Tokyo for dissertation research. I would like to thank my classmates Abbie Yamamoto, Matt Fargo, Pat Noonan and Deborah Shamoon for the hours we spent outside academia. Noriko Sakurai deserves credit for her help in my poetry translations. Finally, no department would exist without administrators to keep chaos at bay; thank you Beth Bland, of Notre Dame, and Jan Johnson, of UC Berkeley. Everybody owes you! ii Introduction Meter, line, stanZa, rhyme. These concerns occupied early modern Japanese poets and translators intensely. Struggles and innovations with such aspects of form, stemming from encounters with European and American poetry, resulted in multiple trajectories of poetic practice. The culmination of at least one such trajectory led to the complete repudiation of form and meaning. This dissertation analyZes the evolution of form in Japanese poetry from the dawn of the modern era in Japan, marked by the Meiji Restoration in 1868, to the late 1930s, when literary production diminished due to censorship associated with the increasingly militariZed state. During the early decades of Japan’s moderniZation in particular, anthologies of European and American poetry translations became a space in which editors and translators negotiated cultural difference. This entailed not only what subjects or themes poetry could approach, but also the formal methods by which poets could treat those subjects. The differences between culture and language resulted in moments of weighted choice for the poets and great tension in the poetry itself, especially at the level of form, where the initial differences between available models were vast. Certain poets composing shortly after the appearance of those anthologies provide textual evidence that they interpreted and adapted new concepts of form, born from that tension, into vernacular poetry in unique ways. Most of the poets I analyze in this dissertation left lasting poetic legacies through their endeavors. Many of the forms and techniques they introduced appear in the work of subsequent poets, their innovations having found critical acclaim and, in some cases, widespread popular celebration. I believe that examining this evolution is important because form is central to the practice of poetry. We might even ask what poetry is, if not for form. Nevertheless, most treatment of modern Japanese poetry in Japanese scholarship– and especially Western scholarship–focuses primarily on semantic meaning and themes as they relate to larger political and socio-historical narratives. Form is perhaps no less relevant to such narratives since breaks or changes in form are often political as well as aesthetic in implication. We see some evidence of this in the institutional ridicule one early anthology received, in the adoption of certain poems for textbooks during a period of nation-building and growing awareness of national identity, and in the government censorship of poets in an increasingly jingoistic era. Lengthy and critically accomplished studies concentrating on a single aspect of form–notably meter and rhyme–do exist in Japanese criticism. Varieties of form, however, are often interrelated, sometimes mutually inclusive, and in this dissertation I take a more unified approach to analyZing form. What is rhyme without a line? How do lines relate to meter? These questions also demand more fundamental ones. What, exactly, is meter? What is rhyme? Too much criticism uses these terms based on nebulous assumptions that, when scrutiniZed, reveal 1 themselves to underpin erroneous conclusions. I therefore bring to my analyses a definition of these forms drawing from extensive linguistic research that breaks down language into constituents we can formaliZe, and that provides robust systems for understanding their interrelationship. We can, in other words, measure rhyme almost like a math equation and map lines onto a metrical template. As anathema as this may seem to any notion of inscrutable beauty in poetry, it in fact helps frame and elucidate the aesthetic achievements of the poets in question. It may often seem as if subtle changes in form are accidental, like a mutation in the natural world. I do not, however, believe that poets are totally unaware of even the most finite ruptures in language or form in their work, and some of my close readings seek to show this. Poets are often consciously pursuing some aesthetic model, as we may discover through diaries, correspondences, introductions or even manifestos. While we are right to question such statements, especially the degree of fidelity between those statements and what actually appears in corresponding text, they can nevertheless help illuminate our understanding of poetry.