Translated by Jeffrey Angles
Noisy Animal is the first collection published in English by rising star of Japanese poetry, Sayaka Osaki. Expertly and sensitively translated by Yomiuri Award winning poet Jeffrey Angles, Noisy Animal presents an astonishing new voice from the emerging generation of Japanese poets to world poetry.
'Language is the first disaster that humanity experiences. Language is the violence that we, as people, continue to experience every day. We experience this disaster, this violence, and, yet babies still begin to speak, unable to keep quiet. They repeat somebody else's words just as they are, reproducing the form of someone else's experience with disaster. As a result, I do not know where "this disaster" begins, nor where it ends.' Sayaka Osaki
'The world of Osaki's poems is underlaid with silence, an eerie quietness that is at once soothing and disturbing. Through this silence, we nonetheless hear an echo of the Great East Asian earthquake and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster which took place in Japan in 2011, at the time Osaki was making her debut ... In the poet's mind, the natural disaster seems to be associated with the very concept of language. The silence in Osaki's poems, however, is also soothing. It reminds us of the deeper silence that existed before this world came into being and that will remain after we are all gone.
Sayaka Osaki writes in a simple, everyday language but penetrates the surface of this time and space and reaches the depths of mythology that underlie our ordinary lives. Her poems are personal yet socially relevant at the same time. Among the current generation of young Japanese poets, who tend to be content to remain inside each one's individual micro-cosmos, she is a unique epic poet, speaking of this world, she writes on her web site, with the senses and body of a "noisy animal".' Yotsumoto Yasuhiro
