SD: I love that you mention Sailor Moon – she lurks in my imagination, too! I hope one day we can talk more about whether Sailor Moon is a friend of the house. Thank you, Aoyagi-san, for taking the time to speak to me. Thank you, Corey, for connecting us.
Recently I said to Corey that having this conversation was in equal parts exciting and sad – sad because it truly made clear to me how much poetry I’ll never encounter, because of language or lack of translation or sheer lack of access. I want to turn now to Corey, to what he would dream of for translated literature in Australia. I’m lucky to be reading and writing poems with Corey and Aoyagi-san, here, in this time.
Corey Wakeling: Natsumi Aoyagi is a poet and artist who is speaking to us now.
I can see why you might say you feel sad, Shastra. I think a lot of poetry in translation becomes isolated in a translation-only sphere for readers of a particular context and ends up left out of a dynamic conversation with contemporary poetics. Yet few literary paradigms of the past were ever so divorced from interlingual influence, translation, and dialect, right. Contemporary poets in translation are physically present beings writing (and reading) in the contemporary; they are discursive agents responding to a lifeworld that is shared to some extent with their readers. Your interview with Aoyagi-san reiterates that. So, the tide can change.
It might help readers to know how fragile the connection that poetry translation provides is. For example, translations of Aoyagi-san’s work present a tremendously limited account of it. That this poet is prolific would be an understatement. Presently, her poems appear in most volumes of the monthly Gendaishi techō poetry magazine – as they have often done so over the last few years. A collection following Done Being Nurtured, Logbook of a Sea Goddess, appeared in 2024. Her productivity is interwoven with constant activity both in Japan and abroad in the art world as “datsuo”; tomorrow, what will a translator have to catch up with, and how will it correspond to her broader output? What will you two talk about tomorrow?
But even a miniscule presentation of the work is a happy event for me. I expect readers of Aoyagi-san’s work will see what I see: the possibility of a writerly self-presence that transitions – sometimes even within a poem – into multi-character prose poetry and even conceptual projects; a poetics of childhood based on self-critique rather than euphoria; and the possibility of exploring nonhuman imagination without reliance upon theory or allusion.
For me, the situation of translation in contemporary poetics today is “mottai nai”: a bit of a waste. There are dozens of untranslated contemporary poets I’ve read that I could refer you to, and many times that number of barely known or even completely unknown figures from the past – and this is just Japanese poetry.
Poetry could become the medium through which English becomes more sensitive to other languages. Consensual learning of languages and the embrace of polylingualism shouldn’t mean the departure from one language to another; it can be the emergence of an expanded linguistic psychogeography. Given the tremendous linguistic diversity of Australia, and the colonial nature of English on the continent – and therefore the huge opportunity that lies ahead for any steps made with the revivification in the use of Aboriginal languages – the general neglect of translation’s opportunity has no persuasive justification. There are exceptions, of course, and a number of notable translators of poetry are active in Australia; I am only drawing attention to a general condition. Indeed, a polylingual turn in poetry by writers resident in Australia is currently undergoing great attention, and this is so very exciting for me. Maybe translation will be seen as a complement to this self-translational, interlingual turn.
Long before the monolingual person I had been sought literacy in Japanese, translated Japanese literature fired my curiosity in the language. Hopefully translated poetry stirs a similar interest in languages among other readers. Done Being Nurtured materialises a series of unanticipated discoveries by someone long concerned with poetry, by a translator who is not dispassionate artificial intelligence indifferent to transcultural and translinguistic encounters and their consequences, furthermore.
May more readers and poets like you get involved. When they do, they may, like me, discover modes of writing and being they had not anticipated before. If they share what they find, they might in turn contribute to more durable forms of collaboration and collective invention. Like you, working with Aoyagi-san has introduced me to a temporal compass made legible, to an extent, in writing informed by insect life and a consciousness of medium I would not have encountered without Japanese.
