ABSTRACT
Shimazaki Tson, whose first book of poems, Wakana Sh, in 1897, marked the arrival of new poetry in Japan, recollected in 1904. When his first four books of poems were issued in a single volume, the excitement he and his fellow poets felt in creating a new style of poetry in their own language. Tsons poetry, in fact, immediately, profoundly, affected the young men and women of the day, among them Yosano Akiko. The first known Japanese anthology to be translated into a foreign language was the Hyakunin Isshu. F. V. Dickins, a physician attached to the British Navy, rendered it into English and published it in London, in 1866; it is a marvel of freedom in approach to translation. The first systematic attempt to introduce Western poetry in Japanese translation was made in 1882, and its three compiler-translators were a sociologist, a botanist, and a philosophernone a scholar of literature or a poet.
