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And the River Flowed as a Raft of Corpses - The Poetry of Yamaguchi Tsutomu, Survivor of Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Paperback)
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And the River Flowed as a Raft of Corpses - The Poetry of Yamaguchi Tsutomu, Survivor of Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Paperback)
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List price R340
Loot Price R283
Discovery Miles 2 830
You Save R57 (17%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Chad Diehl, a Columbia University doctoral candidate, introduces
Raft of Corpses as the first official translation of the tanka
poetry of Yamaguchi Tsutomu (1916-2010), a survivor of both atomic
bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Chad lived with
Yamaguchi in Nagasaki during the summer of 2009 to gain insight and
instruction in order to create the most accurate translations
possible. Chad includes in the book a lengthy introductory essay
about Yamaguchi's experience to provide essential context for the
poems, and he has also written a preface in Japanese for Japanese
readers. I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me to Nagasaki,
Yamaguchi recalled decades after the bombings as he tried to
explain his incredulity at the terrifying deja vu. Yamaguchi s
testimony of those days and subsequent years living with the
physical and psychological trauma characterize the theme of his
poems translated in Raft of Corpses. The paradox of surviving two
atomic bombs to live on for six decades stirs in the readers of
Yamaguchi's tanka poems simultaneous feelings of awe, disbelief,
horror, sympathy, and hope. The poetry included in Raft of Corpses
passes the baton carried by Yamaguchi to convey the experience of
the atomic bombings and spread a message of the importance of world
peace and the necessity to abolish nuclear weapons. In that spirit,
Chad has selected and translated a total of sixty-five of
Yamaguchi's tanka poems to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary
of the bombings this year (2010). The book also includes numerous
photographs and images of Yamaguchi's hand-written poems and
calligraphy. Some of Yamaguchi's paintings add an additional layer
to the book, and Chad hopes that the many poems included that do
not address the bombings will provide readers with a better
understanding of Yamaguchi's life and personality. Donald Keene,
Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University,
writes in the foreword, Chad Diehl has translated some of Mr.
Yamaguchi's poems. The translations transmit the horror of the two
terrible explosions and the disfigured dead. He has kept as close
to the originals as possible, but remembering Mr. Yamaguchi's
fondness for rhymed poetry, he has effectively used rhyme in some
of the translations. It could not have been easy to translate these
poems, but Mr. Diehl, who knew Mr. Yamaguchi well, felt impelled to
make these translations, the most fitting tribute to his memory.
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