Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles (ジェフリー・アングルス) (born 1971) is an American scholar of modern Japanese literature and an award-winning literary translator of modern and contemporary Japanese poetry and fiction. He is a professor of Japanese language and Japanese literature at Western Michigan University.

Biography

Angles was born in Columbus, Ohio. When he was fifteen, he traveled to Japan for the first time as a high school exchange student, staying in the small, southwestern Japanese city of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, which represented a turning point in his life. Since then he has spent several years living in various Japanese cities, including Saitama City, Kobe, and Kyoto.^[1]

While a graduate student in Japanese literature at The Ohio State University in the mid-1990s, Angles began translating Japanese short stories and poetry, publishing in a wide variety of literary magazines in the United States, Canada, and Australia.^[2] He is particularly interested in translating poetry and modernist texts, since he feels these have been largely overlooked and understudied by academics in the West. He is passionate about translation as a discipline, stating that “without translation, we would be locked within our own cultures, unable to access the vast, overwhelming wealth of the rest of the world’s intellect. By translating literary works, we are making that world heritage available to literally millions of people.” ^[3]

Angles earned his Ph.D. in 2004 with a dissertation about representations of male homoeroticism in the literature of Kaita Murayama and the popular writer Ranpo Edogawa. This is the basis for his book Writing the Love of Boys published in 2011 by University of Minnesota Press, which also includes new research on Taruho Inagaki and Jun'ichi Iwata. In this book, he shows that segments of early twentieth-century Japanese society were influenced by Western psychology to believe that homosexuality was a pathological aberration. These views, however, were countered by a number of writers who argued precisely the opposite: that it was a vital, powerful, and even beautiful experience that had a long, rich history in Japan. Angles draws upon fiction, poetry, essays, diaries, paintings and other visual material to trace the relations between these writers and the inspiration that they drew from early Western homophile writers, such as Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, and Walt Whitman. In the conclusion of the book, Angles also discusses the ways that contemporary BL manga have inherited and built upon the ideas fashioned by Kaita Murayama, Ranpo Edogawa, and Taruho Inagaki several decades earlier.^[4] Angles' other research involves studies of popular Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s, writing about contemporary Japanese poetry, and studying the history of translation in Japan.^{[2] [5]}

He has also contributed a critically acclaimed voice-over commentary to the Criterion Collection's release of Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff. ^[6]

Honors

In 2009, Angles received the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, administered by the Donald Keene Center for Japanese Studies at Columbia University for his translation of Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Chimako Tada.^[7] This same book also won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2011.^[8] His book of translations, Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō, published in 2009 by Action Books, was a finalist in the poetry category of the Best Translated Book Award offered by Three Percent.^[9] His translation of the wartime memoirs of the gay writer Mutsuo Takahashi, Twelve Views from the Distance, was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award (memoir category) in 2013.

Angles has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts^[10] and the 2008 PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center for his translation of the memoirs of the contemporary poet Mutsuo Takahashi. In 2008, Angles was invited to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC to serve as the curator for the literary events in the Japan: Culture+Hyperculture Festival.^[11] He has also been interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered about the short story collection Japan: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, which he co-edited with J. Thomas Rimer.^[12]

In 2009–2010, Angles was a visiting researcher at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, where he organized a group research project about the history of translation practices in Japan.^[5] In 2011, he was a visiting professor in Comparative Literature at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo.

Major publications

Translations

• Tada, Chimako (2010), Forest of Eyes: Selected Poetry of Tada Chimako, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-26051-1 
• Takahashi, Mutsuo (2010), Intimate Worlds Enclosed, Sakura: Kawamura Memorial Art Museum 
• Takahashi, Mutsuo (2012), Twelve Views from the Distance, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-0816679362 
• Itō, Hiromi (2009), Killing Kanoko: Selected Poetry of Hiromi Itō, Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, ISBN 978-0-9799755-4-7 
• Itō, Hiromi (2014), Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, ISBN 978-0-9898048-4-4 
• Arai, Takako (2008), Soul Dance: Selected Poems by Takako Arai, Tokyo: Mi'Te Press 
• Translations of stories by Ranpo Edogawa, Kaita Murayama, Taruho Inagaki, Kyūsaku Yumeno, and Sakutarō Hagiwara in Tyler, William J. (2008), Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-3242-1 

Author

• Angles, Jeffrey (2011), Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-0-8166-6970-7 
• Angles, Jeffrey (2016), These Things Here and Now: Poetic Responses to the March 11, 2011 Disasters, Tokyo: Josai University Educational Corporation University Press, ISBN 978-4-907630-54-6.

Editor

• Edited with J. Thomas Rimer, Foreword by Donald Richie (2006), Japan: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Berkeley: Whereabouts Press, ISBN 978-1-883513-16-0 
• Special issue on Hiromi Itō, U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, vol. 32., Tokyo: Josai International University, 2007, ISSN 1059-9770 

References

External links

Articles, videos, author interviews

• Personal homepage of Angles at Western Michigan University
• Fuller list of Angles’ publications
• Videos of Angles giving readings with the poet Hiromi Itō at Western Michigan University
• Article by Angles on translation, especially on translating Tatsuji Miyoshi, in Poetry International Web
• Angles interviews the poet Takako Arai, whom he has translated, for the journal Full Tilt
• Angles interviews the prominent Japanese-to-English translator Hiroaki Sato about Sato’s work for the journal Full Tilt
• Jeffrey Angles interviews the writer Mutsuo Takahashi about his experiences in the gay world of Japan for the journal Intersections

Translations online

• Six poems by Tatsuji Miyoshi on Poetry International Web (Links to poems on upper right-hand side. The translations marked with an asterisk are by Jeffrey Angles.)
• Ten poems by Yōsuke Tanaka on Poetry International Web (Links to poems on upper right-hand side.)
• Four poems by Hiromi Itō on Poetry International Web (Links to poems on upper right-hand side.)
• Five poems by Hiromi Itō in the literary journal Action Yes
• Three poems by Takako Arai in the journal Octopus
• Six poems by Takako Arai in The Other Voices International Project
• Two poems by Takako Arai in the journal Ekleksographia
• Three poems by Takako Arai in the journal Action Yes
• Three poems by Mutsuo Takahashi in the journal Full Tilt
• Five poems by Mutsuo Takahashi in the journal Intersections
• Poem by Hinako Abe in the journal HOW2