From a Woman of a Distant Land by Tada Chimako and translated by Jeffrey Angles

This is poetry from Japan.

From a Woman of a Distant Land by Tada Chimako translated by Jeffrey Angles is published by Green Integer. This is a Book originally written in Japanese. This was published in 2009.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781933382999E12.

From a Woman of a Distant Land, by Tada Chimako and translated by Jeffrey Angles, announces distance as both geography and voice. The title sounds like a letter, testimony, or message carried across cultural and temporal space. Tada’s Japanese poetry is learned, mythic, and precise, and Angles’s translation helps carry that intellectual music into English. I would read this book for the way it stages distance without making distance exotic. A woman from a distant land may be foreign to the reader, but she is also the speaking center of the poem. That matters. Translation should not merely bring the faraway closer; it should also let the faraway remain dignified in its own scale. This book sounds like a powerful exercise in listening across that interval.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.