Hangover

Notes on this poem

In even the smallest bookstores in Japan, one inevitably finds the work of Chūya Nakahara (1907–37), a passionate poet who has inspired generations of readers to fall in love with poetry. Even though Chūya was born over a century ago and died young at age thirty, he remains one of Japan’s best-known modern poets – the subject of numerous biographies, studies, creative works, manga, and even a recent opera. Born in Yamaguchi in southwestern Japan, Chūya became fascinated at a young age with European modernism, especially Dadaism, and during the 1920s, he filled notebooks with experimental poems, which only came to light long after his death. In 1934, he published the subdued, melancholic collection Yagi no uta (Song of the Goat), which contains all of the poems translated here (in MPT ‘Dream Colours’). As he lay ill from tuberculosis at the end of his life, his friends helped compile his second collection Arishi hi no uta (Songs of Days Gone By), but he died before it came out. Chūya was a great admirer of Arthur Rimbaud, whom he translated into Japanese and published in 1933. Because Chūya was so influenced by Rimbaud’s voice and style, the translations included here of ‘Overcast Sky’ and ‘Upon This Bit of Soiled Sadness’ attempt to use meter and rhyme like Rimbaud. Indeed, the kind of dramatic, rhythmic regularity one finds in these poems is one reason these poems all have been set to music multiple times.