In Some Girls, ‘Mountain Girls’ is perhaps the signal expression of this collective concept of swarming girls. Empowerment, but also expressive proliferation, excess and superabundance of girlhood, that tireless throttle of the diverse poems in this collection, condenses into a fable-like interaction. This poem has a comic dimension. ‘Mountain Girls’ wryly transforms the presumably racialised question of ‘where I’m from’ into a gurlesque empowerment tale of culturally specific origin stories. Namely, in response to the racialised question’s speaker, who still proves unsatisfied when being told that the I-voice comes from the mountains, a rant about the reborn ‘mountain hag’ responds:
The facial expression that leads me to fess up and say I am from Awa’re-zan, the mountain where desperately starving young men would carry their old grandmas on their backs and leave them deep in the woods to wither and die, except that these old grandmas developed their own community of mountain hags and managed to live a grand old life, burrowing into the mountainside only when they were truly done with life
Nakayasu is one of the outstanding contemporary poets to have made translation the key generative element for exploring new collective relations. Alternative collective formations that reject standardistion, we saw earlier in Nakayasu’s approach to translation, also apply to sociological frameworks and individual identity: in ‘Girl Respond Quickly To A Call From High Up’: ‘Society is grotesque and / proliferates in broad daylight, but there is time within time and adolescence still waiting’ (9). This celebration of adolescence – ‘girlhood’, by extension, then – reminds one of ‘the child is the father of man’ but mutated. It is as if the Romanticist algorithm for innocence has been repositioned for the twenty-first century as an opting-into the permanent revolution and detournement of adolescence; adolescence of idea and word – always in motion, dynamic – and still awaited, not yet come, an unarrested becoming. Not ‘there is time and there is time’ but ‘time within time’ – immanence rather than transcendence.
Some poems take translation experiment to Oulipo-esque extremes. Of the poems in Some Girls most resembling Oulipean exercises, it would be ‘Couch’, a recurring poem that is itself a translation of ‘Blow Up And Accelerate’ and ‘Charge’. Really, it is a sort of meta-Oulipean experiment, because the original ‘Couch’ is concealed; no ‘Couch’ that is not a translation of ‘Couch’ appears, in other words. Furthermore, ‘Charge’, a poem in Japanese, has almost nothing in common with the phonetically legible but unorthodoxly spelt English-language poem ‘Blow Up And Accelerate’, and seems to be related to the phonetically challenging ‘Couch’. The procedure, in other words, is illegible, concealed by translation experiment. In accordance with Nakayasu’s decentred celebration of the generative possibilities of translation and its resistance to assumed original-ity or author-ity, the reader is dissuaded from seeking out an original. Rather, the reader is urged to enjoy the poems enabled by translation.
Nakayasu’s most challenging translation experiment could be ‘Girls Inhabit Arch’ and ‘少女栄巣弓’. Actually, these two poems constitute a case in which the translation procedure is legible. Here, Nakayasu appears to be asking what linguistic motivations might underlie the exploration of alternative orthographies, transliteration methods, translation experiments, and creative revisions, beyond simply anarchic impulses. ‘少女栄巣弓’ comes later in the book, as if to suggest that this poem is a Japanese (although Chinese-character-only Japanese, and thus highly unusual) translation of the earlier English poem. ‘Girls Inhabit Arch’ is stylistically odd as a Japanese poem written only in Chinese characters (kanji). One simplistic interpretation of the effect created would be that it evokes a vaguely antique feeling, suggesting an earlier period of Japanese letters prior to the introduction of phonetic letters. Consider, for example, the use of 城市 (castle town) as a substitute for ‘city’ in the English poem, which is expressly antique; ‘castle town’ works as a topographical substitute for city at a certain point in history, and the out-of-placeness of the word conveys the effect of a retrograde movement in language time, an experiment in anachronism. Then, of course, there are the concrete poetry-like repetitions which are overtly dissonant, such as ‘歩歩歩歩歩歩女女女女女眼眼眼眼眼’, connoting a world apart from antiquity.
Nakayasu in Some Girls realises a radical reconception of translation and authorship thanks to her attentive engagement with the possibilities of linguistic alterity. Nakayasu’s professional history as a practice-concerned scholar of the history of transcultural and ‘multilectical’ language art have led her to the discovery of new linguistic frontiers, frontiers we should all explore. This book is timely, despite being still poorly recognised two years after publication. Some Girls has been unduly overlooked due to the vicissitudes of a pandemic’s colonization of the neurosphere by fight-or-flight modalities, such that new books, for a time, ceased to mark the moment as they once did.
Timely Some Girls truly is. In 2022, we remain ever more occupied with a world order in which English remains positioned as the global lingua franca on an increasingly digital social plane, and with such totality that the average English reader is positioned to assume that anything worth reading must somehow be found in English, often with the dimension of translation unacknowledged. Paradoxically, digital interconnectivity has made us inherent collaborators and distributors of interlingual communication of an order unthinkable in Sagawa’s time; not surprisingly, the roles of translators have become at once more necessary for the functioning of today’s linguistic economy, and yet have been obscured by the scale and complexity of the field. Perhaps poets such as Nakayasu remind us of the diverse creative urges undergirding the multilectical sphere. Certainly, the effulgence of Some Girls reminds us of what we overlook when we elect for the translator’s invisibility. No, may the translators proliferate! Some Girls suggests that other modes of interaction via English activated by translators acting in other languages are possible and gather steam.
Ask what acts, what translators were at play in the realisation of this book, poem, or word. While we cannot fabricate in our twenty-first century moment that same event of first introduction Japanese modernists experienced when they were stimulated to ask that very question of their art, Nakayasu seems to say in this new translational imagination that we can find a comparable curiosity for language beyond what we once had known. What Some Girls may help you to experience, something I believe Nakayasu experienced through Sagawa, is the translatability of language for others. Most excitingly, one does not have to be multi-lingual to begin with. One can come across a name in a book and thenceforward start the adventure.
