Japanese tradition and Western innovation in the work of Nakahara Chūya

Abstract

The subject of the study is the poetics of the Japanese poet Nakahara Chūya. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that there is very little research on the poet’s oeuvre in general, and in Ukrainian Japanese studies there is none at all. And despite the fact that Nakahara Chūya is one of the key figures of the Japanese avant-garde in the early twentieth century, there is no edition of translations into Ukrainian, just as there is not a single publication in Russian, except for a few amateur translations on the Internet. The novelty is due to an attempt to fill the gap and to present a number of translations of key texts by Nakahara Chūya into Ukrainain, as well as to present the translations of studies devoted to Chūya’s oeuvre, taking into account a lack of commentary materials. The interest in the poet is due to the fact that despite a rather limited period of his creative activity (only one collection of works during his lifetime) Nakahara Chūya absorbed the current trends of Western modernism and combined them with the Japanese poetic tradition — this is a problem that our article is devoted to. The aim of the study is to show how traditional Japanese poetics with its norms constituted as far back as the 9th – 10th centuries was able to go beyond the limits of constraint in form and content, particularly under the influence of avant-garde experiments of Dada. The study revealed that the cultural and social processes, which Western avant-garde artists reacted to by absurdism, violation of the form, an attempt to go beyond the word order, destruction the image, abandoning mimetic principles of art, is a trend inherent not only in the Western tragic worldview of the late 19th — early 20th centuries, but it is also intrinsic to Japanese art as well. A feature of Nakahara Chūya’s artistic practice is interweaving methods of traditional Japanese poetics to the Western forms, and thus his poetry may be described as allegory of the conflict between westernization and preservation of old foundations.