For some reason, I had expected "Poesie Yaponesia" to be a collection of poems by longtime, English-speaking residents of Japan, each given in two versions, Japanese and English, both penned by the same poet. As it turned out, "Poesie Yaponesia" is not exactly that. An assemblage of pieces read in the "Power of the Spoken Word" series held in Tokyo from 1999 to 2000, most of the works are indeed poems, but the translations vary in ways that raise some interesting questions.
To begin with, Arthur Binard, the one poet who does what I thought the contributors would do, represents himself in that fashion with just one poem, "Tag." The discrepancies between the Japanese original and the English translation are sufficient enough to make the reader wonder which language came first. Did he write out his thoughts in Japanese and then add details in "translating" that composition into English? Or did he translate thoughts that originated in English into Japanese, then re-create them in his original language?
Binard translates two works by other poets, and one of them, "December in Sazu," by Katsumi Sugawara, suggests that he tends to add words in English, but the samples are too small to make any judgment.