Book record
The Iceland
Sakutarō Hagiwara
Translated from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
The Iceland, by Sakutarō Hagiwara and translated by Hiroaki Sato, brings one of modern Japanese poetry’s essential figures into a cold, estranging imaginative landscape. Hagiwara’s work helped transform Japanese free verse, often moving through melancholy, urban unease, bodily disturbance, and psychological intensity. The title’s “Iceland” may be less travel destination than psychic climate: remote, frozen, beautiful, and inhospitable. Sato’s translation gives English readers access to Hagiwara’s unsettling music. I would read The Iceland for its atmosphere of distance and interior cold. Some poets make emotion lush; Hagiwara often makes it stark, feverish, and strange. The result is a landscape where modern loneliness feels almost geological.
- Published
- 2014
- Publisher
- New Directions
- Language
- Japanese
- Country
- Japan
- ISBN
- 9780811221603