Join Sho Sugita, translator of Spiral Staircase, the collected poems of Japanese Futurist Hirato Renkichi, on the Austin stop of his U.S. tour. Sho will be joined by local writer and literary translator Eduardo Aparicio. Eduardo will give a reading from his Spanish translation of Richard Blanco’s Looking for the Gulf Motel / En busca del Gulf Motel; Tina Posner will read the English version.
Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance. Contributing to the earliest productions of Japanese avant-garde poetry, his aggressive experimentation with speed, spatialization, and performability would later influence what became a lively community of Dadaist and Surrealist writers in pre-war Japan. Spiral Staircase is the first definitive volume of Renkichi’s poems to appear in English.
About Spiral Staircase, David Grubbs writes: “Translator Sho Sugita’s ingenious handling of the high-impact, anxiously mutating poetry of Hirato Renkichi—central to the blink-and-it’s-over Japanese Futurist literary movement—brings into sharp focus a momentous, of-the-moment figure little known in the English-speaking world.”
Born Kawahata Seiichi on December 9th 1893 in Osaka, Hirato Renkichi (above left) attended Sophia University in Tokyo for three years before dropping out and attending Gyosei Gakko to study Italian. He started writing poetry in 1912, first publishing in Banso under the guidance of Kawaji Ryuko. Although he worked at Hochi Shimbun News and Chuo Geijutsu Art Publishing, he suffered from a pulmonary disease, often failing to make ends meet for his family. He passed away on July 20, 1922 in Tokyo, at the age of 29.
Sho Sugita (above right) lives in Matsumoto, Japan. His recent poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in VOLT, Poems by Sunday, Chicago Review, 6×6, Lana Turner, Paperbag, A Perimeter, and Asymptote.
Eduardo Aparicio is a writer, translator, and photographer, living in Austin, TX. His most recent publication is Richard Blanco’s Looking for the Gulf Motel / En busca del Gulf Motel, which he translated into Spanish and is available in a dual-language edition from Valparaíso Ediciones. Eduardo is currently translating into English Miami Century Fox by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, recipient of the Paz Poetry Award in 2016, forthcoming in a dual-language edition from Akashic Books.