Nakayasu is quick to indicate in her own commentary of her work that she became aware of Sagawa not as an orthodox scholar of the writer’s work either in Japanese or English-language contexts. In an interview with Lithub, Nakayasu confesses that it started with happenstance, happenstance that a reader of poetry such as you might have when coming across a name in a book you had formerly not been aware of:

I first found [Sagawa] in a book written by John Solt called Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katsue, about Kitasono Katsue and the incredible avant-garde community of writers that he was a part of. In the first few pages of that book he wrote, ‘I could have focused on any of a dozen fine poets active before the war—such as Takiguchi Shuzo, Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Haruyama Yukio … and Sagawa Chika (1911–36).’ I picked up on that because she was a woman among all these men he listed, some of whom were already quite well known, and I wondered who she was.

(‘From a Teen’s Blog to International Acclaim: On Translating Sagawa Chika’)

Not the most prominent within the Japanese modernist milieu, Sagawa, no doubt due to being a woman, nonetheless stands out as one of its singular figures. Sagawa was certainly neglected prior to Nakayasu’s translations. In particular, Sagawa’s combination of idiosyncrasy and transcultural significance seems to have attracted Nakayasu to her:

One feature of Japanese Modernist writing is the incorporation of new vocabulary. Institutional efforts to standardize the language had been initiated during the 1920s, but that the time Sagawa was writing, writers still felt free to draw from a wide range of vocabulary, including words borrowed from Portuguese, Dutch, German, French, and English. … Sagawa’s poetry is exemplary of this multilingualism.

(Sagawa ix–x)

There lies a vast realm of lexical possibility in those cases where languages do not or have not been encouraged to interact through translation. Testament to the stimulus given to poetry via novel interactions requires no elucidation. Every major event in literary history has involved a leap from one linguistic divide to another, and the Japanese modernist period is but another instance of this. The point is not at all simply the assimilation of non-Japanese words into Japanese either. A new literary culture, with different reference points, contexts, figures, topologies, and identities emerged out of the contact and the mutation stimulated by translation. Imagine if this were a more significant part of our contemporary poetic landscape in the Anglosphere.

I will get to passages from Some Girls shortly. However, to provide one further thread in a short history of Nakayasu’s poetics, I would like to think about how Nakayasu has been changed by translation. Earlier books in the Nakayasu oeuvre, prior to her more active years as a translator, prove more comparable to the poetics of Lisa Robertson, Bernadette Mayer, Johanna Drucker, or Lisa Jarnot, all very different poets, but who share the exploration of concatenating prose poetry. Nakayasu distinguished herself in that mode as early as nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she (2006).

works by the light of the new soccer field outside—the whistle blows—a pause—two minutes—the wrong thoughts

stops solid, a young and living monument, mid-square

stumbles into the right or wrong car—a moving target of timing and geography, all manner of surface tension and internal projectile constellations of emotion

Prose poetry may remain an interest of Nakayasu’s, but concatenation and the long poem have mutated into figures of identity and situation, rather than lines of thought as such. The figurative role of swarm and intercultural elements, in particular, mobilized by what Charles Bernstein might call “multilectical poetry” enables a strikingly new world of narrative and characterological encounter for readers (Bernstein 294).

To Some Girls in earnest. As the title suggests, the concept of the book is of chronicling the activity of a coterie of ‘girls’, who are also collaborators, zones, sites, objects, and forms of relation. Since 2009’s Hurry Home Honey, and most certainly in The Ants, this book represents a new instantiation of a uniquely materialist procedural approach in which the tangibility and swarming, collective nature of non-human life comes to orient the phenomenal world of the poems in ways distinct from that earlier mode more concentrated on non-figural proceduralism. For example, ‘Aggregate Heat’ in The Ants:

An accumulation of very small things: for example, the heat transmitted from let’s say an ant in every instance of its putting down what is at the very end of one of six appendages or legs, shall we call them feet for the time being, as it makes its way across the surface of an open newspaper—except that only in the instances where an ant foot touches the black ink of a newspaper shall the heat qualify to be measured and included in the overall aggregate, in this case the Ant Heat Transmission with the Ink Provision.

Similarly, in ‘Girl D With Phosphorus Eyes’ from Some Girls:

Confession. I adore the word, phosphorus. Although I may never fall in love with the girl in this poem, I love phosphorus for its own sake. This is not the task of the translator, I believe, to zero in on an isolated word such as phosphorus. My task is to serve as a custodian angel, hovering close to a girl’s pulse so I can detect the heartbeat of the poet who breathed her onto the page. This poet, the lovely Sawako, and I are kindred sisters on opposite sides of this giant landmass. … The night rolls in as a whirling marine layer, depositing minute amounts of phosphorus in our hair and skin. We’re phosphorus girls with the eyes, far too much light.