Sensei Pulvers’ miraculous year

Click the cover to find this book on amazon.

A friend of Jim’s in Japan brought Roger Pulvers and me together three years ago. The friend referred to Pulvers in the most natural way as ‘Sensei Pulvers’. And this is totally appropriate. Anyone whose children have attended karate classes will know that there ‘sensei’ means ‘martial arts instructor’, but actually in Japanese it approximates to Teacher, Mentor and almost Philosopher.

There can be few non-Japanese in the world as well qualified to teach the rest of us about Japan, to induct us into its life and culture, as Roger Pulvers. In 2019 Alison and I attended the UK premiere of Pulvers’ film STAR SAND, set in post-war Japan, and were overwhelmed by its truthfulness and beauty. His books The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn and The Unmaking of an American carry you straight into the mind of modern Japan. I cannot wait to read also his My Japan: A Cultural Memoir, the 2020 English-language edition of an earlier book in Japanese entitled If There Were No Japan.

Pulvers’ energy is staggering. He spent much of 2020 in lockdown at his home in Sydney, Australia. This unfortunately meant that he had to postpone shooting his next film, which was all set up to go, but instead he produced a 195-page selection of Sergei Esenin‘s verse in his own translation (Pulvers was a Russianist before he went to Japan), wrote the play and lyrics in English and Japanese for the musical of Miyazawa Kenji‘s novel Night on the Milky Way Train, and published a 200-page book of all the other poems that he had translated from three languages and himself written in lockdown, not to mention performing his translations every few days on YouTube!

Anyone interested in Russian literature but who does not know Russian should read Wholly Esenin, which has been well received over here. Not only has Pulvers snappily and accurately translated a wide selection of Esenin’s verse, his extremely informed commentary amounts to a short biography of the ‘blonde angel’.

But my personal choice from Pulvers’ annus mirabilis is Poems 2020, whose cover I feature above. A third of its contents are translations of Japanese poems that I did not know before. Again, Pulvers’ notes are as readable and enjoyable as his English versions. Inevitably, perhaps, I am drawn to ‘new’ haiku by one of my favourite Japanese poets, Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Here are two, with commentaries:

Autumn fly
The swatters are all full
Of holes

This is an intriguing image. The swatter [fly swat] has been used so much that holes have opened up in it. This indicates that the autumn fly’s life may be saved thanks to the sacrifices made by its predecessors. (p. 171)

The snail is enticing
Rain clouds
With its antennae

This haiku employs one of the key elements seen in the genre, that of contrasting scale. We can see the snail’s antennae, the sky and the whole space in between at once. Haiku often make you look elsewhere in order to see something central. In other words — and this can be said for much of Japanese aesthetics — things on the periphery of or quite a distance away from something may call attention to that thing much more vividly than the thing itself. It is a kind of poetic entanglement. (p. 173)

You may think Pulvers uses ‘entanglement’ here in its ordinary English sense…but you can be sure that he is also referring to the EPR Effect of quantum physics, i.e. ‘measurement on particle 1 produces instantaneous change at particle 2 […] some counterintuitive togetherness-in-separation between 1 and 2’ (John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction, p. 79). You can be sure, because Roger Pulvers is almost as much a polymath as George Calderon — Pulvers is the uomo universale of the Antipodes!

With its direct, unrhymed versions of Pushkin, Tiutchev, Gumilev, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva, Mickiewicz, Borowski and other Russian and Polish classics, accompanying those of twelve Japanese poets, Sensei Pulvers’ Poems 2020 is fantastic value.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.