Vivek Narayanan
Thursday, May 12, 2005 02:45 GMT
L'Affaire Araki Yasusada
Rana, don't know if I told you this, but the Robert Lennon piece on your website may have been derived from L'Affaire Araki Yasusada. Yasusada was a Hiroshima survivor, whose brilliant, dark and erotic poems emerged in the early nineties and were printed in a number of major american poetry mags-- this was still the years of high premium on the act of witness, the poems were good, they were having their cake and eating it. Then it emerged that the poems were a "hoax"; it was argued by some that they were written by their editor, a brilliant poet and scholar of zen called Kent Johnson. Johnson insists that he is not their author, although he had much earlier published similar poems in a journal in the voice of a Hiroshima survivor, under his own name. Instead, he has said said that the poems were written by a Japanese poet impersonating a Hiroshima survivor, then that they were written by a Mexican poet impersonating a Japanese poet impersonating a Hiroshima survivor, and so on. When the "hoax" emerged, one journal called the poems' author "a criminal", a Japanese critic who had earlier praised the poems very highly rescinded his praise and said that it was an offence against the poetry written by genuine Hiroshima victims (which, by many accounts, is largely quite tepid and predictable), and Wesleyan University Press, which had more or less agreed to publish the poems, did an abrupt turn-around and rejected the manuscript. Even today, as far as I know, there still is only one very major journal that publishes Johnson's poems, translations and editions and that is the avant garde web journal, Jacket. A full documentation of the whole Araki Yasusada story, as well as reviews of other work by him, can be found there: http://www.jacketmagazine.com/bio/yasu.html http://www.jacketmagazine.com/05/yasu-lett.html