Hiroaki Sato [Sato Hiroaki] 佐藤 紘彰 (b. 1942, Taiwan) is a Japanese poet and translator who has been living in New York since 1968, the president of the Haiku Society of America from 1979 to 1981.
Educated at Doshisha University, Kyoto, after his family fled back to Japan at the end of WWII, and in 1968 he moved to New York, where he has lived ever since. A prolific translator (mostly from Japanese into English), he has made available to English-speaking readers the works of major Japanese authors including Basho, Miyazawa Kenji Sakutaro Hagiwara, and Yukio Mishima.
After translating anonymously for Weatherhill publishing house, he first published under his own name in 1973, a collection of poems by Princess Shikishi [or Shokushi] 式子内親王 (1149 – March 1, 1201), a famous poetess who was the third daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa. Since then, Hiroaki Sato has explored the universe of Japanese women poets, translating poetess Ema Saikō (江馬 細香, 1787 – 1861) and publishing an anthology of women poets (2007).
In 2008, he remarked
the 34-volume Nihon shijin zenshu, “complete Japanese poets,” that Shinchosha published in the latter half of the 1960s includes, among the nearly 200 poets from the end of the 19th century onward, only seven women. The paucity of women in this large enterprise is remarkable, shocking even, because it covers all genres of poetry in a country where there are sharp genre demarcations in poetry — those who write tanka are called kajin, those who write haiku haijin, and those who write non-tanka, non-haiku poems shijin—and the “poets” in each genre tend to stay away from those in the other two. Only seven women wrote “poetry” in the seventy years since Shimazaki Toson (1872−1943) proclaimed, in his Wakana-sho (Collection of young herbs), in 1897, “At long last, the time for new poetry has come”? The imbalance, in some ways, is even worse with the 99-volume Gendai Nihon bungaku taikei, “modern Japanese literature series,” that Chikuma Shobo published, from 1968 to 1973. Of the thirteen volumes dedicated to shiika, “poetry,” ten show the names of the poets in lieu of titles, and they together cover sixty-one poets, but just one woman among them: Yosano Akiko (1878−1942). Of the remaining three, vol. 93, devoted to gendaishi, “modern poetry,” covers twenty-seven poets, but only one among them,Ishigaki Rin, is a woman; vol. 94, devoted to tanka, covers twenty-two, but there is no woman among them. Vol. 95, devoted to haiku, is a lot better, but even then only five among the thirty-six are women. [‘Personal Predilection in Compiling and Translating an Anthology of Japanese Women Poets’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 1 Nov 2008.]
Hiroaki Sato contributed a translation of Mishima’s theater works [My Friend Hitler and Other Plays, 2002] and translated Mishima’s exhaustive biography by Inose Naoki in 2008. His entire body of work is intended to build “a bridge of words” between West and East, to use the title of his 2022 book.
Selected Publications
- [tr.] Shikishi. Poems of Princess Shikishi, Bluefish, 1973.
- Ten Japanese Poets. Hanover, New Hampshire: Granite, 1973. ISBN 0−914102−00−1.
- [tr.] Minoru Yoshika: Lilac Garden, Chicago Review, 1975.
- [tr.] Takahashi Mutsuo: Poems of a Penisist, Chicago Review, 1975.
- [tr.] Miyazawa Kenji: Spring and Asura, Chicago Review, 1975.
- [tr.] Takahashi Mutsuo. Winter Haiku: 25 Haiku by Mutsuo Takahashi, Manchester, NH: First Haiku Press, 1980.
- [tr.] Takamura, Kōtarō. Chieko and Other Poems of Takamura Kōtarō, University of Hawaii, 1980.
- [ed. & tr. with Burton Watson] From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1981. ISBN 0−385−14030−4. [American PEN translation prize in 1983].
- One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English. New York, Weatherhill, 1983. ISBN 0−8348−0176−0.
- [tr.] Yagyu Munenori. Sword and the Mind, Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1986.
- Haiku in English: A Poetic Form Expands, Tokyo, Simul Press, 1987. ISBN 4−377−50764−8.
- That First Time: Six Renga on Love, and Other Poems. Laurinburg, NC: St. Andrews Press, 1988.
- [tr.] Miyazawa Kenji. Future of Ice: Poems and Stories of a Japanese Buddhist, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.
- [tr. into JP] John Ashbery, 波ひとつ [A Wave], 書肆山田 [Shoshi Yamada], 1991.
- [tr.] Takahashi Mutsuo. Sleeping Sinning Falling, City Lights Books, 1992.
- [tr.] Takamura, Kotaro. A Brief History of Imbecility: Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kotaro, University of Hawaii Press, 1992.
- [tr.] Ozaki, Hosai. Right under the big sky, I don’t wear a hat: the haiku and prose of Hosai Ozaki, Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1993.
- [tr.] Shikishi. String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi, University of Hawaii Press Press, 1993.
- One Hundred Frogs. New York, Weatherhill, 1995. ISBN 0−8348−0335−6.
- Legends of the Samurai. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1995. ISBN 0−87951−619−4.
- [tr. and annot.] Matsuo Basho. Basho’s Narrow road: spring & autumn passages, Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996.
- [tr.] Saikō, Ema. Breeze through Bamboo: Selected Kanshi of Ema Saiko, Columbia University Press, 1997. [1999 Japan‐United States Friendship Commission Japanese Literary Translation Prize].
- [tr.] Mishima Yukio. Silk and Insight, Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998.
- [tr.] Hagiwara Sakutaro. Howling at the Moon and Blue, Green Integer, 2001.
- [tr.] Taneda Santoka. Grass and Tree Cairn, Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2002.
- [tr. and annot.] Mishima Yukio: My Friend Hitler and Other Plays, Columbia University Press, 2002.
- [tr.] Yagyu Munenori. The Sword and the Mind: The Classic Japanese Treatise on Swordsmanship and Tactics, Fall River Press, 2004.
- Erotic Haiku. Yohan Shuppan, 2005.
- [tr.] Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, University of California, 2007.
- Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007. ISBN 0−7656−1784−6.
- ‘Personal Predilection in Compiling and Translating an Anthology of Japanese Women Poets’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 1 Nov 2008.
- [tr.] Inose Naoki, Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima. Stone Bridge Press, 2012.
- Snow in a Silver Bowl: A Quest for the World of Yugen. Red Moon Press, 2013.
- [tr.] Sakutarō Hagiwara, Cat Town, New York Review Books, 2014.
- [tr.] Kansuke Naka, The Silver Spoon: Memoir of a Boyhood in Japan, Stone Bridge Press. 2015.
- On Haiku, New Directions Publishing, 2018. ISBN 978 – 0811227414.
- A Bridge of Words: Views Across America and Japan. Stone Bridge Press, 2022. ISBN 978 – 1611720785.
