Delicate life at the bottom of a bottleI drink you upSky-blue shadow resting on the landingI step up and onto youWhenever a gesture of lovesinged the cigarette’s rosean echo of O arose from the ash
The Echo’s Rose
Shuzo Takiguchi
Translated from the Japanese by Mary Jo Bang & Yuki Tanaka
Feature Date
- January 26, 2025
Series
- Translation
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Excerpted from A KISS FOR THE ABSOLUTE: SELECTED POEMS OF SHUZO TAKIGUCHI. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979) was a poet, painter, art critic, and one of the most prominent Surrealists in Japan. He introduced and actively promoted the works of André Breton, Max Ernst, and other European Surrealists through translation and criticism. He also helped revive the avant-garde scene in postwar Japan by spearheading an interdisciplinary art group called Jikken Kobo (“Experimental Workshop”) which was active from 1951 to 1957. His first collection of poems, The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927–1937, was published in 1967. In the late sixties and seventies he collaborated with Joan Miró on two books of poems and paintings. His fourteen-volume collected works was published between 1991 and 1998.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan, Yuki Tanaka is the author of a debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2025. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.

Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton University
"A Kiss for the Absolute introduces Shuzo Takiguchi’s surreal, mythical world to English readers, inviting them into a poetic landscape where Japanese culture and French surrealism meet in a celebration of beauty, desire, and wonder. This collection is more than an introduction to Takiguchi’s poetry; it’s an invitation into a cultural and linguistic dialogue that feels deeply mysterious and illuminating.”
—Georgia McInnes, The Indiependent
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