The Global Japanese Studies Model Unit will organize the lecture “Between Languages, Dissonant Beauty” by Jeffrey Angles from Western Michigan University.
Abstract
The history of world literature is filled with countless cases of multilingual writers who have drawn upon the rich resources of their first language to push the boundaries of what they can write in their second language. In fact, transnational writers who cross linguistic boundaries are often among the most innovative, ground-breaking figures in the history of all literature. Novelist Tawada Yōko has written in her German-language essay “Akzentfrei” (Accent Free), “It can be an advantage for multilingual poetesses and poets when the walls in their brain are not tightly screwed down.” In this event, the American poet Jeffrey Angles, who has published original writing in both English and Japanese, discusses his experiences living and working in two languages. By reading examples of his own poetry, he will demonstrate how the sounds of different languages can seep into one another to produce a new kind of atonal, strangely beautiful music.
Event Overview
- Date and time: June 22, 2023, 15:00 – 16:30 (JST)
- Language: Japanese
- Lecturer: Jeffrey Angles (Professor, Japanese Literature and Translation, Western Michigan University)
- Venue: Conference room 10, Building 33, 16 Fl. Toyama Campus, Waseda University, and online
- Timetable
15:00-15:10 Introduction: Hideto Tsuboi (Professor, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Waseda Univeristy)
15:10-16:10 Lecture: Jeffrey Angles (Professor, Japanese Literature and Translation, Western Michigan University)
16:10-16:30 Q&A session - Participation is free.
- Advance registration required.
Click here or scan the QR code for the registration by 17:00 (JST) on June 8th, 2023.
Contact: [email protected]
Jeffrey Angles
Jeffrey Angles was born in Ohio in the American Midwest in 1971, and now lives in Michigan. He has translated a wide range of Japanese writers ranging from the early twentieth century, including Edogawa Ranpo and Orikuchi Shinobu, to contemporary postwar poets, such as Itō Hiromi and Takahashi Mutsuo. His work has earned numerous translation awards; for instance, his translations of Tada Chimako won both the U.S-Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature and the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. More recently, his translations of Orikuchi Shinobu’s modernist classic, The Book of the Dead, won both the Scaglione Prize and the Miyoshi Award. He is also a poet. His collection Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line, 2016), written in Japanese, won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. In addition, he has published numerous academic works in both English and Japanese, including Writing the Love of Boys, which examines representations of male same-sex love in Japanese modernist literature, and These Things Here and Now: Poetic Responses to the March 11, 2011 Disasters. Among his newest translations are Itō Hiromi’s The Thorn Puller (2022), Takahashi Mutsuo’s Only Yesterday (2023), and Kayama Shigeru’s Godzilla & Godzilla Raids Again (2023).
