On Knowing Oneself Too Well: Selected Poems of Ishikawa Takuboku

At the turn of the twentieth-century, Ishikawa Takuboku took Japan’s ancient, highly formal, at times formulaic poetic tradition and turned it to the purposes of an impassioned sensibility in a rapidly modernizing world. Beginning with poems rich in childhood sorrow and wonder, he progressed in his short life to a poetry of searing objectivity and miraculous self-knowing. Before dying of tuberculosis at twenty-six, Takuboku achieved in his poems a kind of Buddhist awakening, observing by their means the emptiness of self in a riveting, heartbreaking world. On Knowing Oneself Too Well offers, in Tamae K. Prindle’s lucid translation, the most comprehensive selection in English of this vital modern poet.