Paul Rossiter

From the Japanese Paul Rossiter

Not a book of  English translations of Japanese poems (although it does include versions of haiku by Basho and by the contemporary haiku master Natsuishi Ban'ya), but rather a series of 'translations' of the experience of a long-term British resident of Tokyo; it also acknowledges the personal and cultural gifts received 'from the Japanese' over the last forty or more years. The poems by Paul Rossiter collected here range in time from a version of a prose poem by Basho (done in London in 1969 before he had any idea he would visit Japan) to an elegy for the city of Ishinomaki, severely damaged in the tsunami of 2011. The book moves through the years between these two pieces by way of reports from Tokyo in the era of the Vietnam War, sharply visualised descriptions of dance and theatre performances, evocative poems of place, street-life vignettes, an appalled visit to Hiroshima, meditations on the pleasures and ambivalences of cross-cultural experience, and translations of two of Paul Rossiter's poems into Japanese by the well-known Japanese-language poets Arthur Binard and Kisaka Ryo, and of five of his haiku by Natsuishi Ban'ya.