It's been a recent trend in the music industry to come out with boxed sets commemorating the work of some of our most celebrated musicians, from John Coltrane to the Beatles. That such a trend has spread to the world of poetry is no small cause for celebration.
Iwanami Shoten has just brought out a groundbreaking CD-ROM that includes 2,000 of Shuntaro Tanikawa's poems from all of his books, 630 of which are also in English, and 70 of which are read by the poet himself. We can now hear a poem in the poet's voice as we read it on the page. It's a poetry lover's feast.
Born in Tokyo in 1931, Tanikawa is one of Japan's most prolific and best-loved poets and writers. His work, written over 40 years, is cut to a universal scale. As a virtual archive, the amount of work on the CD-ROM, ranging from 1952 to 1999, is unsurpassed, including three of Tanikawa's video films, a biography with photographs, selected criticism, short essays and other assorted pieces that compose an impressionistic collage of the imaginative work of this poet's life. But mainly, thousands of poems on everyday events -- both ordinary and transcendent -- are collected here, including some English translations that have not yet been published in book form. This is a title poem from the unpublished translation of "The Naif":