I promised these translations over two years ago in the introduction to my translation of three poems from Yosano’s Bara to Hanako collection. The juxtaposition displays a political evolution that is also a decay of the poet’s literary powers. Yosano was, for most of her life, a leftist and feminist poet best known for her antiwar poem “You Must Not Die” (“Kimi shinitamau koto nakare,” 『君死にたまふことなかれ』 in the orthography of the time) and her collection of feminist erotic poetry Tangled Hair (みだれ髪 Midaregami). Late in life she abruptly went down the 1930s Japanese equivalent of the rightist Facebook boomer pipeline. The result was “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” (“Nihon kokumin, asa no uta,” 『日本の国民、朝の歌 』), twenty highly mannered, formally controlled lines of cliché-storm edgy fascist garbage extolling the virtues of blowing yourself up and firing machine guns at Chinese civilians.

My translations of “You Must Not Die” (1904) and “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” (1932) follow. I’m electing to put them under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on these translations only if they attribute the translation to both Yosano Akiko and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

These translations, like my translation of “Aomori Elegy III,” I undertook almost a decade ago for an undergraduate final. I stand by the way I translated these a bit more strongly than by the way I translated “Aomori Elegy” due to the simpler language. Yosano was a pioneering Modernist poet, but these poems were for her young daughter and most of the language in them is very direct. Think of this as a belated holiday upload; Children’s Day in Japan is May 5.