The poetry of women's emotions

About lyric poetry, Wordsworth said that it was "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." He implied that something repressed builds and breaks, and that the faster the flow, the fuller the stress.

If this is true, then it is not surprising there are so many Japanese women poets. Merely being a woman in Japan can be, depending upon the circumstances, a stressful situation.

Until recently regarded as chattel — the personal possession of some man — denied many a male prerogative, and otherwise seen as fodder fit for becoming only a good wife and a wise mother, the Japanese woman has traditionally had a lot to put up with.

So have women everywhere, but the traditional Japanese woman seems to have built up quite a reservoir of dammed emotion, powerful feelings that found their outlet in whole reams of lyric poetry.

This is not invariably true elsewhere. Fellow translator Burton Watson once dramatized this to Hiroaki Sato by saying: "Try writing 'Sappho' on a sheet of paper and then listing under it all the other famous women poets in Western literature down to the middle of the 19th century and you'll see what I mean."

In making this valuable anthology, Sato perhaps experienced some difficulty in restricting his list; there were so many Japanese woman poets lined up. Here he selects over 100 of them, from the earliest until now, from some anonymous eighth-century songs to the lyrics of a poet born in 1974.

He includes not only such famous poets as Ono no Komachi or Murasaki Shikibu, Akiko Yosano or Kazuko Shraishi, but dozens of less-known others, all spontaneously overflowing on these pages.

Not all of these lyrics, to be sure, are inspired only by the frustrations of being female in this country. There are many lyrics in the book that are about other things: family, nature, self. Just the same, the very fact that a poem is being written indicates, at the very least, a kind of comment — at most, a heartfelt complaint.

To be sure, men as well as women all suffer equally when we compare what little we have with how much we want. The most deeply felt poems are those that most honestly face our problems. But it does seem that in Japan women do have more to complain about.

Whatever — this overflow is a torrent of feeling and well indicates what Japanese women over the centuries have experienced. This they communicate directly and the result is an anthology just as modern as anything written yesterday.

Much of the admirable immediacy of this book is due to the translation. With Watson, Sato compiled the "From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry," which won the PEN America translation prize for the translators, and various other honors and awards.

Here, the work is no less fine, conveying in various subtle ways the import of the meaning, bringing us the freshness of an emotion from the past. And, in the introduction, one of the best analyses of the structure of Japanese poetics that I know.

Here sits the Japanese woman poet, brush in hand, remembering, reliving, again experiencing (the completion of Wordsworth's thought) "emotion recollected in tranquillity."