About
Janine Beichman, born in New York and currently living in Japan, is a literary translator from Japanese to English. Her PhdD in Japanese literature is from Columbia University and she is professor emerita of Daito Bunka University.
Author of the original English-language Noh play, Drifting Fires, she has also published two well received biographies of modern Japanese poets: Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works, and Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry.
Her translations of poetry include Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems by Makoto Ooka, which won Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems by Ishigaki Rin, as well as the anthologies Poems for All Seasons: Japanese Poetry from Ancient Times to the Present by Makoto Ooka, and Well-Versed: Exploring Modern Japanese Haiku, by Minoru Ozawa.
Her translating and research projects on Yosano Akiko have received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America.
She has participated in poetry workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center and the 92nd Street Y, studying with Maxine Kumin, Marie Ponsot, Marie Howe, and Carl Phillips, among others.
She is currently a judge for the Japan International Translation Competition sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Culture and a member of the board of the Donald Keene Foundation.
Featured Work
This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems of Ishigaki Rin
https://isobarpress.com/titles/this-overflowing-light/
Born in central Tokyo in 1920, Rin Ishigaki was one of the most daring and gifted poets of Japan’s postwar cultural renaissance. She knew Japan before the war, during it, and afterwards, saw it move from hubris to disastrous defeat – which included the destruction of her family home during one of the worst firebombings of Tokyo in 1945 – to restoration into the community of nations. Her poetry is witness to this history as seen from her own specific viewpoint, that of a single woman working in a bank as the only support for her six-member family, at first engaged in labor union activities, but later moving to a politically more independent position. Her down-to-earth understanding of the politics of family and the workplace, helped to create her reputation as a writer of ‘life poetry’ and as a poet of resistance, but this combines with a matter-of-fact, unsentimental, and often humorous intimacy with the ordinary creatures and things of the world, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, to shed an almost other-worldly light over some of the poems, even though they speak in tones and about subjects refreshingly earthy and earthly.
