NISHIWAKI JUNZABURO

(1894–1982)

   Nishiwaki Junzaburo was a poet and literary critic from Niigata Prefecture. He attended Keio University to study economics and foreign languages and there became interested in writing English poetry and published a few poems in literary journals. After graduating, he studied abroad at Oxford, where he was exposed to modernist literature and French surrealism. Upon returning to Japan, Nishiwaki took a teaching post at Keio and continued writing on the side, composing poetry in Japanese for the first time. He published the first Japanese surrealist poetry magazine in 1927 and founded a poetry journal, Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics). After World War II, Nishiwaki published another large poetry collection and translated T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into Japanese.