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Left Bank Books Presents: Mary Jo Bang & Yuki Tanaka
Reading from A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi
November 19 @ 7:00 pm
This reading will be held in-person at Left Bank Books, and also streamed live to Left Bank Book’s YouTube page.
Join us as we welcome Mary Jo Bang & Yuki Tanaka, translators for A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. This is the first book of poems by the great Japanese surrealist to be published in English. Join award winning poet, translator, and professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis Mary Jo Bang with professor and poet Yuki Tanaka for their collaborative translation.
EVENT INFO
- Books available from Left Bank Books
- Curbside pick-up, in-store pick-up, and shipping available
- RSVP is encouraged
ABOUT THE BOOK
A KISS FOR THE ABSOLUTE: SELECTED POEMS OF SHUZO TAKIGUCHI
The first book of poems by the great Japanese surrealist to be published in English
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.
ABOUT THE POETS & TRANSLATORS
MARY JO BANG is the author of nine books of poems—including Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf Press 2023), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Her translation of Paradiso is forthcoming in July 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi—forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan, YUKI TANAKA is the author of a debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2025. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
