Having no Japanese and not trusting Amy Lowell's What's o'Clock? or other Imagist imitations of Japanese style, such as Richard Aldington's:

One frosty night when the guns were still
I leaned against the trench
Making for myself hokku
Of the moon and flowers and of the snow

I hesitantly admire Graeme Wilson's translations of forty poems by Hagiwara Sakutarō. Although Hagiwara (1886-1942) was a sort of skeptical humanist who knew Baudelaire's work and who led a loose, drunken if not raunchy life, he seems to have overcome both the insipidity of early 20th-century Japanese culture and a prevailing subservience to Western models. With him I admire

The sleeping earth; and how therein
The simple creatures now begin
Building the house of your repentance.

My hesitation is caused only by what seems to be Mr. Wilson's excellence. In his introduction he says that he sought to report the tonal wholeness of Hagiwara's verse, that he could not and would not be literal. But his English versions are so readable that they tease us into wanting to know Japanese, that we might follow subtle shifts of view linked by the kakekotoba, evanescent suggestiveness, connections established by homonyms, by the "cutting word," by syllabic movement—linguistic features and prosodic devices to which we have no access in our Western languages. Only with difficulty and never with certainty can we grasp that—though not how—Hagiwara introduced colloquial speech into an aristocratic poetic tradition and, after long practice in tanka and other accepted patterns, worked out longer, larger, more open forms. Knowing that in Japanese rhyme is incidental and that Hagiwara passionately and relentlessly peered into himself, we cannot be sure, in "Sad Moonlit Night," to what extent the ending is introspective or derivative (Hagiwara's) or to what extent it is rationalized and rhymed (Mr. Wilson's):

On the rotting wharf that pilfering cur,
Pale yapping waif of a wharfinger,
Barks at the moon:
The lonely at the lonelier.
O listen hard. By the wharf's stone wall
Where in the dark the water curls
To lap at land's ramshackledom,
There gloomy voices rise and fall,
Gloomy voices of yellow girls
Singing, singing of kingdoms come.

Why must I hear such singing; why
Must I be so ware of the world gone wry;
And why, pale dog,
Unhappy dog, am I always I?

The fault is my ignorance. I doubt that even as generous and imaginative a translator as Mr. Wilson can get more than a third of the double-and-triple-meaning Japanese words into my syntaxed head, although sometimes, as in "Death of an Alcoholic," I find it hard to believe that anything has been left out:

The grass is sharp as shattered glass
And everything is shining
With radium's eerie light.

Landscape of despair,
Landscape with the moon declining.

Ah, in such a lonely place
The whitish murderer's hanging face
Laughs like a shimmer in the grass.

When Graeme Wilson has completed his project of translating all of Hagiwara's work, the darkness may be lifted a little from us all.