Lecture: Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko, Modern Japan’s Preeminent Female Poet, and her Revolutionary Poetry Collection ‘Tangled Hair’ (Midaregami)
March 26, 2003
Lecture: Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko, Modern Japan’s Preeminent Female Poet, and her Revolutionary Poetry Collection ‘Tangled Hair’ (Midaregami)
Janine Beichman (Professor, Department of Japanese Literature, Daito Bunka University; Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature, Tsukuba University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
5:00 PM
| In 1901, the young Yosano Akiko published her first collection of poems, Midaregami (Tangled Hair). A sensation at the time, it became one of the classics of modern Japanese poetry, and the only one by a woman. Akiko’s later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition and she is considered modern Japan’s preeminent female poet, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami still overshadows everything else she wrote, for it brought the modern ideal of individualism to traditional poetry with a passion found in no other work of the period. Professor Beichman’s lecture takes a fresh look at this classic, based on her new book Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry (July 2002, University of Hawai’i Press). The lecture will incorporate bi-lingual readings in Japanese and English of many of Akiko’s poems. Copies of Embracing the Firebird will also be available for sale.
For over thirty years, Janine Beichman has been living in Japan, where she teaches Japanese and comparative literature at Daito Bunka University and Tsukuba University. She is one of America’s foremost translators of Japanese poetry. |
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies
