Desolation of Dragons

They Never Asked: Senryū Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center, edited and translated by Shelley Baker-Gard, Michael Freiling, and Satsuki Takikawa:

An anthology of senryū poetry written in spring and summer of 1942 by Japanese Americans held captive at the WCCA Assembly Center in North Portland, Oregon. Senryū shares haiku's 5-7-5 sound unit form, but deals more directly with the business of being human, whereas haiku's focus is on nature and only tangentially references, or implies, human emotions.

The WCCA is the Wartime Civilian Control Administration, the government body set up to implement the mass forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. From the Densho Encyclopedia: "In addition to engineering the logistics of removing some 110,000 people from their homes and businesses in a short period of time, the WCCA also quickly built and administered a series of seventeen temporary detention camps to hold those who had been removed through the spring and summer of 1942, before overseeing their transfer to more permanent camps administered by the War Relocation Authority by the end of fall 1942." In North Portland, the temporary facility was previously the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center, the horse stalls converted into living spaces for those detained there.

This book has a thoughtful design and a conscientious attempt to put this poetry—and the people who wrote it—into context, providing historical background and examining the cultural relevance of poetry in Japanese communities, including an exploration of the individual poets incarcerated at the camps as well as the poetry groups held at WCCA camps, and an explanation of the form itself. The book has several introductory pieces, an afterword, two essays on haiku/senryū, a timeline of relevant events, end notes for references, a full bibliography, and biographies of the poets. The one thing it doesn't have is an index, which I found myself wanting multiple times over the six months it took me to read this.

The poems are presented with the Japanese script given prominence in a bold vertical line down the center of the page, one poem per page, and then a transliteration of the Japanese and, finally, the poem translated into English, in three lines. Each poem has a footnote with a "literal" translation and any translation notes, including occasions where kanji have been simplified since the writing of the poem, or instances where the poet (or transcriber) seems to have made an error. However, the literal translations are anything but. They're of a more conversational nature than the actual choppy bits of language you usually get when Japanese is translated literally into English, and in some cases, I found them more interesting or nuanced than the final translations, which could feel a little melodramatic at times. But it's entirely possible that's just my bias for haiku showing up. Here's a poem by Jōnan that really struck me because of the way it mimics a common structure in haiku and through that offers an extreme understatement of human misery:

even autumn
comes on command here—
assembly center

This book was published in 2023 by Oregon State University Press, and I checked it out of the Multnomah County Library.