Lauren's response

 From this week’s reading, what “stuck” with me most was keynote speaker, Janine Beichman’s idea of “stickiness.” I appreciated her putting a word to a concept that is hard to pin down but seems important for working with translation. Certain phrases, images, and words have more staying power than others, but this feels especially relevant when working cross-culturally. I loved Beichman’s reflection of the octopus pot reminding her of a lobster pot, then creating a new layer of connection to her home. Beichman proposes that a good poem opens effortlessly to include our own experiences, a point furthered by the Afterword to Salad Anniversary. I thought this sentence was an absolute gut-punch: “It is ironic that (if we may believe her) Machi Tawara has no real lover; these real-sounding love poems spring largely from imagination, based (she says shyly) not on a particular longing for any one person so much as a general longing for human contact” (141). I don’t think there’s a way to more quickly endear me to a writer, but if there was, it would be telling me that they worked full-time in a thankless job like school teaching (although I’ve heard it’s less thankless in Japan). I found myself wanting to know more about Tawara and discovered on her Wikipedia page that there was a translation to Salad Anniversary published two years before Carpenter’s. I would love to know more about how two translations came to be published so close together. I appreciated the context on haiku and learning more about Bashō. I also was curious about Yosano Akiko’s superlative of being “Japan’s very first feminist poet” (what a strange and, I’d imagine, heavy crown). I was moved by her anti-war poem addressed to her brother.