A Kiss for the Absolute

In 1923, Shuzo Takiguchi's first year at Tokyo's Keio University was cut short by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which nearly destroyed the Japanese capital. When he returned to school two years later, he was hit by a second earthquake—French Surrealism. Takiguchi (1903-1979) began to write surrealist poems, translate surrealist writers, curate exhibitions of surrealist art, write art criticism, and, later, paint, helping introduce Surrealism to Japan. He eventually became a major Japanese artistic and cultural figure whose collected works number fourteen volumes.

In A Kiss for the Absolute, Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator Yuki Tanaka present the first collection in English of Takiguchi's ingenious, playful, and erotic poems, complete with an introduction and the original Japanese texts on facing pages. Takiguchi's obvious interest in style is perfectly wed to his daredevil rhetorical antics. His poems read as if they could have been written today, yet they are so original that they couldn't have been written by anyone else. Bang and Tanaka's skillful, colloquial translations offer English readers a long-overdue introduction to this important poet.