Three poems by Nakahara Chuya, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

In every country, there are poets so influential and well-respected that every lover of literature devours their work. In America, Whitman or Ginsberg. In France, Rimbaud or Eluard. And in Japan, Nakahara Chūya—a brilliant, sentimental modernist who died from tuberculosis at the premature age of thirty. In the 1930s, Chūya became so infatuated with the new experimental verse of the Dadaists and other Japanese modernists that he soon began writing his own avant-garde poems. His work displays a variety of elements culled from his passion for literature, both in its older, traditional, romantic forms, and its newer, modernist manifestations—experimental, world-weary, and decadent. His style interrupts classical forms with modern turns of phrase, dialect, onomatopoeia, repeated rhythms, and other unusual elements, compelling the poetic language of his era to accommodate the eclectic nature of real, lived language. Because Chūya’s poetic voice is so distinctive, his poetry has become an undisputed fixture in the halls of the modern Japanese literary canon, so famous that nearly all of it has been set to music. These translations are part of a National Endowment for the Arts-sponsored project by Jeffrey Angles to translate Chūya’s collected work into English.

The poems here will appear in a collection of Jeffrey Angles’ translations of Nakahara Chūya to be published by Penguin Classics in May 2026.

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Jeffrey ANGLES is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. His collection of original poetry in Japanese won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a rare honor accorded only a few non-native speakers since the award began in 1949. He believes strongly in the role of translators as activists and has focused on translating socially engaged, feminist, and queer writers. Among his recent translations are Orikuchi Shinobu’s modernist classic, The Book of the Dead (which won two awards for translation, the Miyoshi Prize and the MLA’s Scaglione Prize), the feminist writer Itō Hiromi’s long novel The Thorn-Puller, the queer poet Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetry collection Only Yesterday, and the science fiction author Kayama Shigeru’s 1950s novels Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. Through National Endowment for the Arts support, he is completing a translation of the collected works of the major 1930s Japanese modernist poet Nakahara Chūya.

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Jona Fine is a non binary photographer, poet, and performance artist. Jona uses the gender neutral “they” pronouns. Jona’s artistic endeavors as of late involve photographing lots of eggs, and sometimes potatoes. They have also been nurturing Open Circle, a they body who is so full of trauma they rarely leave the under of their coffee table.  Jona currently works the graveyard shifts as a crisis worker for a lgbtq youth suicide hotline.

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