Vanderbilt Library Open Journals

Huang, Christine

Christine Huang, “america”, AmeriQuests 13.2 (2017) 
	
	
america 
 
You are sugar and fat and cheap and rich 
 wanting convenience without the sacrifices 
 wanting the cheap labor and cheap cars and cheap phones and cheap food 
 but not those behind them 
 not those who toil and risk their lives to provide 
 for themselves for their children for their babies 
 the babies that those protesting outside Planned Parenthood say they care about. 
 
I am a moth 
 and you drew me in with 
 your deadly flame. 
 I did not know the real You. 
 
Like biting into a red apple only to find that the inside 
 is filled with rot. 
Or like being inducted into a club 
 fulfilling membership qualifications but 
 knowing on the inside that you do not and cannot really belong. 
 
the Center of the universe; all eyes on you 
 as you make your move, 
 like Atlas, only unaware of 
 the true weight of the world that rests on your shoulders. 
 
we wait. 
 holding our breaths as you 
 prioritize your Imagined Community 
 over People who are equally invisible to you. 
 
But 
 
there are those who see through 
 Lady Columbia’s disguise 
 who look forward and pray 
 to Knowledge and Understanding 
 and they will keep america’s true flame alive. 


English

america

Fletcher, Jessica

US Obligations Towards Syrian Refugees

Hendricks, Erica

Erica Hendricks, Syrian Refugees in America, AmeriQuests 12.2 (2016-7) 	
In the name of protecting the United States from “bad guys”, President Donald Trump 
signed an executive order on January 27, 2017, which temporarily suspended the US Refugee 
Admissions Programme (USRAP), and specifically bars Syrian refugees until further notice. 
Unsurprisingly, this ban has caused outrage worldwide. 
The United States’ obligation to shelter refugees is not just a moral duty, it’s a legal 
duty as well, since the US’s signing of the 1967 Protocol demands that it act in compliance 
with the United Nation’s 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The tenets 
of the Convention are ensconced into US law via the United States Refugee 
Act of 1980 (Public Law 96-212), which is an amendment to the earlier Immigration and 
Nationality Act , and the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, and was created to provide 
a permanent and systematic procedure for the admission to the United States of refugees of 
special humanitarian concern. 
.The Convention defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return 
to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of 
race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The 
1967 Protocol amends the Convention by removing the spatio-temporal restrictions to its 
application, and parties to it assume the responsibilities of the 1951 Convention. Under the 
terms of the Convention, the U.S. cannot ban asylum seekers from certain countries, and it 
has the international law-ensconced requirement to abide by the principles of non-
refoulement, an obligation that the US adheres to as well under the terms of the UN 
Convention Against Torture 
(http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CAT.aspx). Under this convention 
there is an absolute duty not to return a person to a state where they may face torture or 
other serious persecution, and many if not most Syrian refugees fall under this category. 
President Trump’s executive order not only departs from the Refugee Convention, but it 
also parallel’s dark moments in history. It can be compared turning boats or Jewish Refugees 
away during Hitler’s Third Reich1, or when the United States began interdicting Haitians in 
the 1980s2. Furthermore, while President Trump’s actions are in part to fight against ISIS, 
his executive order may fuel their propaganda: portraying America as intolerant and 
jingoistic.  
 The Executive Order regarding refugees is illogical. Prior to the order, it was already 
extremely difficult to enter the United States as a refugee. Between 2013 and 2015, 210,000 
refugees were accepted in the United States for resettlement, and only 1,823 of those were 
Syrian refugees. Refugees are the most vetted group to enter the United States. The 
resettlement process can take up to 36 months and involves screening by the Department of 
Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Defense, United States Customs and 
Border Protection, and the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center / 
U.S. Intelligence Community. In addition, Syrians must complete the “Enhanced Syrian 
Review”, which creates extra review steps with intelligence agency officers who have 
particular expertise and training in conditions in Syria and the Middle East.3 
  The ban will not make America safer, and conflicts with American values of 
freedom, fairness, compassions, and the U.S.’s role as a humanitarian leader. 
																																																																				
1 https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267 
2 http://immigrationtounitedstates.org/536-haitian-boat-people.html 
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-is-it-so-difficult-for-syrian-refugees-to-get-
into-the-us.html?_r=0 
Erica Hendricks, Syrian Refugees in America, AmeriQuests 12.2 (2016-7) 	
Despite the United State’s failure to oblige by it international legal obligations, it’s 
likely that little can be done in the enforcement realm. International refugee and 
international human rights laws rely heavily on the attempt to publicly shame or pressure a 
nation to comply with its international legal obligations. This can be impactful on some 
smaller states, but for a nation as big and powerful can easily set aside its international duties 
without much repercussion from the international community.  


Syrian Refugees in America

In Japan, the first full translation of The Flowers of Evil, done by Fumio Yano (1901-1995) in 1934, occupies a unique place in the history of Baudelair

Suzuki, Kazuhiko

Kazuhiko Suzuki, “The Flowers of Evil in Prose”, AmeriQuests 13.1 (2017) 
 1 
One of the first Japanese translators of The Flowers of Evil was Fumio Yano (1901-1995). In 
his early twenties, attracted by Catholicism, he began to attend a catholic church, where he 
met a French priest named Mathon, who taught him French and helped him discover 
Baudelaire and The Flowers of Evil. My objective here is not only to shed new light on our 
understanding of Baudelaire by demonstrating that of this translator, who is almost forgotten 
today, but also to examine the poetic translation into Japanese and some problems that it may 
pose. 
First, I shall briefly compare the main differences between the Japanese language 
with French and English. To offer a brief metaphor, it has been said that an English soccer 
player cannot play well when moved to the Spanish league. This is because, traditionally, 
England has a “long ball strategy,” which consists of sending a long ball from beyond 
midfield toward the goal. On the other hand, Spanish players tend to work the ball through 
various channels by making short passes. Essentially, this is a question of differing style. The 
same might be said of language; each language has a distinct style and grammatical structure. 
Certain characteristics of the French language cannot be translated into Japanese such as 
word order, because in Japanese, as in English, the adjective comes before the noun. 
Sentence order is more complicated, which in Japanese, in general, is subject-object-verb. 
Further, the Japanese language does not employ the relative pronouns such as who, which, or 
whom, so that the relative clause comes before the antecedent. For example, if you translate 
“The white house where I live” in Japanese, the word order must be entirely reversed. Some 
Japanese translators of western poetry claim that they try to respect the word order of the 
original text, but this is not possible. What the late Umberto Eco called the “linear 
manifestation” of the poetic text becomes entirely disordered when translated into Japanese. 
Even before Fumio Yano’s 1934 translation, there were scattered translations of 
Baudelaire in Japanese, but his was the first complete translation of the 1868 edition of The 
Flowers of Evil. Yano’s pioneer work occupies a unique place in the history of Baudelaire’s 
reception in Japan because Yano translated The Flowers of Evil in prose rather than in verse. 
He explains this in the postscript of his translation: 
 
Some people may have some doubts concerning the form I chose. I eliminated 
entirely the conventional form of poetic translation because I find it absolutely 
pointless to apply causeless line breaks like raindrops to the Japanese free verse, 
which does not use rhymes in particular; and to make matters worse, it might 
only make it hard to understand the poem by breaking the coherence between 
lines. Thus I just tried to separate stanzas; moreover, by rejecting flowery and 
esoteric language, I tried to translate as simply as possible and even went so far 
as to risk nursery rhyme in certain cases. 
 
In his later essay entitled “My Memories of the Whole Translation of The Flowers of Evil” 
(1967), he added: “As a bohemian poet, I wished to give artistic, poetic and transparent 
effects to my translation, which is different than those of the academics in French literature. 
Of course, there may be some errors. But they will be corrected by lots of translators of The 
Flowers of Evil in the future.” There are three points here that should be stressed. The first is 
that Yano is not an academician; after dropping out of college and after two years of 
journalism, he became a poet and painter. His first poetic work, published in 1928, is entitled 
The Night of Opium, which is reminiscent of Baudelaire. Yano’s work stands in contrast to 
most translators who were more or less the academic elite. Though his predecessors did not 
necessarily strive for fidelity to the original, the non-academic position Yano occupied may 
have allowed him to invent his prose translation. 
Second, Yano uses spoken language in his translation, which was not usual at the time 
and stands in contrast to Bin Ueda’s 1905 epochal anthology of Western poets entitled The 
Sound of the Tide (Kaichoon). French poetry has often been translated in more elegant 
language. Before the Meiji period (starting in 1868) the Japanese had a written language and 
a spoken language, which are quite distinct from each other. Here, “spoken” does not mean 
the language spoken, but the language that is easier to understand and more similar to the 
way we speak than a “written” language. In the Meiji period and beyond, when Japanese 
writers started to apply a colloquial style to their works, it took a long time to switch from 
literary language to spoken language in written works. In 1913, Kafu Nagai, known as the 
Kazuhiko Suzuki, “The Flowers of Evil in Prose”, AmeriQuests 13.1 (2017) 
 2 
author of American Story, written about his travels in the United States, published an 
anthology of French modern poets entitled The Coral Anthology. (Sangoshù). Nagai 
translated poems of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine in a very beautiful written language. 
In his preface he notes: 
 
In those days in Nagasaki port, Dutch trading vessels have amazed the Japanese 
people with the beauty of Italian coral jewelry and the marvels of Indian calicos. 
There were so many people who scrambled to get it that the Shogunate 
[government], afraid of the outflow of gold and silver, imposed a sea traffic ban: 
it was a good measure of the seclusion policy. Since the country reopened the 
door, the Japanese people, eager for foreign goods again, cannot stop admiring 
the newest and most extraordinary arts from abroad. 
 
Nagai’s remarks illustrate the enthusiasm that the Japanese felt for western culture in the 
Meiji period when “modernization” was a synonym for “westernization.” The “coral” in the 
title of Nagai’s anthology means a “foreign marvel” that Japan had never seen before. In this 
context, welcoming French poets with a highly sophisticated language might also be taken as 
a sign of longing for modern western culture. While Bin Ueda and Kafu Nagai fashioned 
Baudelaire’s poetry in decorative language, Yano, by contrast, aimed to make the French 
poet accessible to the public. I regret that I cannot show in English how his translation differs 
from that of Ueda, Nagai and the others, not only on the lexical level, but also in his use of a 
polite diction, ending a sentence with “desu/masu,” which is the way contemporary Japanese 
speak. This polite diction is more likely to create an effect of “addressing” the reader, rather 
than being a monologue of the poet. It thus enables the reader to revive or embody the voice 
of the poet. Yano’s Baudelaire speaks to his lovers, to his child, to his sister, to himself and to 
us, the readers, with such an intimacy that his language reminds us of these famous lines in 
“L’invitation au voyage:” “Tout y parlerait / À l’âme en secret / Sa douce langue natale” [...] 
[Notre] douce langue natale. 
Perhaps the poem is a beautiful piece of jewelry, as suggested in Nagai’s preface. No one 
can deny the aesthetic pleasure given by the elegance of classical language. It is as if when 
we see, in a museum, precious jewels in a glass display-case. This may explain why the first 
Japanese translators preferred Parnassian poets such as Leconte de Lisle and José-Maria de 
Heredia. But what good is the beauty of a poem if the beauty itself pushes the reader away? 
“The poem intends another, the poem bespeaks this other,” observes Paul Celan in his 
famous speech. Elegant language may be likely to reveal the aesthetic interest in Baudelaire, 
or if you like, to polish his “dream of stone.” But we know that The Flowers of Evil cannot be 
reduced to such a dream. Going against a traditional écriture, Yano proved there is something 
other than “order and beauty, luxury”—there is another beauty that only spoken language 
could translate, not only in Baudelaire’s poems but also in what we speak, in what we listen 
to, in what we live with. In the late Meiji period, when Ogai Mori translated Goethe’s Faust 
in modern Japanese, he was called “iconoclast” because the simplicity of his language 
dispelled the illusion of the Japanese public, who considered Goethe to be a more esoteric 
author than he was. Quite rightly, Ogai took the epithet as a compliment. Yano was also an 
iconoclast of The Flowers of Evil: to use the words of Michel Deguy, Yano managed the 
“deposition” of Baudelaire, whose crucifix had been raised above himself by translators 
during the age of westernization. 
Finally, Yano preferred prose to verse. We know that translating verse into prose is not 
new in the history of western literature. The works of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and 
Goethe, for example, have been translated in prose, and, as we know, The Flowers of Evil is 
also translated in prose in English as in German. But Yano’s translation needs to be separated 
from this context: the choice of prose is legitimate, he says, according to the properties of the 
Japanese language. In the Meiji period, writing in spoken language started with novels. The 
hierarchy between verse and prose could be transposed to between “literary” and “spoken.” 
Prose would haven been more likely for Yano’s colloquial expression as characterized by the 
use of “desu/masu” form. Using polite diction (desu/masu), as opposed to informal diction 
(da/dearu), is still considered to be a bold approach in poetic translation. 
One of the characteristics of prose translation is that it produces a narrative of 
storytelling so that sometimes we get quite a different impression of the original verse. As 
Kazuhiko Suzuki, “The Flowers of Evil in Prose”, AmeriQuests 13.1 (2017) 
 3 
Yano admitted, he took a nursery-rhyme tone; his prose thus reveals a certain affinity with 
“fairy-tales” inherent to some poems of Baudelaire as “Le châtiment de l’orgueil” and “Le 
spleen (III):” “Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux [...].” It is important to note that in 
Japanese the desu/masu form is often used as a narrative of fairy-tales. The English language 
prose translator of The Flowers of Evil, Carol Clark, says modestly that her translation “must 
simply try to put the reader in touch with the magical original;”1 prose translations could 
thus bring out in the original, as she does without knowing it, some of its characters of which 
the original itself may be unaware. 
However, we are usually told that prose brings death to verse. If it is true, analyzing its 
cause-of-death may reveal what makes the verse alive. For example, compare this stanza of 
“Le Crépuscule du matin” with its prose version translated by Carol Clark: 
 
Les maisons çà et là commençaient à fumer. 
Les femmes de plaisir, la paupière livide, 
Bouche ouverte, dormaient de leur sommeil stupide ; 
Les pauvresses, traînant leurs seins maigres et froids, 
Soufflaient sur leurs tisons et soufflaient sur leurs doigts. 
C'était l'heure où parmi le froid et la lésine 
S'aggravent les douleurs des femmes en gésine ; 
Comme un sanglot coupé par un sang écumeux 
Le chant du coq au loin déchirait l'air brumeux ; 
Une mer de brouillards baignait les édifices, 
Et les agonisants dans le fond des hospices 
Poussaient leur dernier râle en hoquets inégaux. 
Les débauchés rentraient, brisés par leurs travaux. 
 
Carol Clark turns Baudelaire’s verse into prose: 
 
The houses here and there were beginning to smoke. Women of pleasure, 
their eyelids bruised, their mouths open, were sleeping their stupid sleep; 
female paupers, dragging their thin, cold breasts, were blowing on their 
embers and blowing on their fingers. It was the hour when, amid cold and 
miserliness, the pains of women in childbed grow worse; like a sob cut off 
by foaming blood, the cry of the cock in the distance tore the misty air; a 
sea of fog washed against the buildings; and the dying in the depths of the 
poorhouses were giving their death-rattle in irregular gulps. The debauchees 
were heading home, broken by their labours.2 
 
Walter Benjamin points out the “paradigm of the arcade in this poem He writes that “the 
reader walks in this poem as in a gallery bordered by windows. In each of them is exposed 
the very clear image of a naked misery.”3 Benjamin’s analogy between text reading and 
window-shopping suggests that the poem is not only to be read, but also to be seen. The 
poem shows the world it sees, while at the same time showing how it sees the world. Here, 
rhymed couplet sequences provide the text with such a visibility. The poem is something 
visual; I do not mean what is termed “visual poetry,” but the poem is essentially a visual and 
almost physical construction. This stanza seems to me a multistory apartment building in 
Paris, where all residents live on the same level of misery. But monotonous prose destroys 
this construction, removing visibility. 
Let’s look closely at another “visual” poem, “The Bamboo” by the Japanese poet, Sakutaro 
Hagiwara: 
 
                                            
1 Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems, translated by Carol Clark (London, Penguin Books, 1995), 
xxxii. 
2 Ibid., 108. 
3 Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, translated by Jean Lacoste (Paris: Cerf, 1989), 398. 
English translation is mine. 
Kazuhiko Suzuki, “The Flowers of Evil in Prose”, AmeriQuests 13.1 (2017) 
 4 
In the shining ground the bamboo grows, 
the blue-green bamboo grows, 
underground the roots of bamboo grow, 
roots that gradually taper off 
with fine hairs sprouting from their tips, 
hazy fine hairs faintly growing, 
faintly trembling. 
 
In the hard ground the bamboo grows, 
aboveground the sharp bamboo grows, 
perfectly straight bamboo grows, 
with its rigid joints going rin, rin, 
at the base of the blue sky bamboo grows, 
bamboo, bamboo, bamboo grows.4 
 
This poem stresses the incredible, almost diseased vitality of bamboo. Each line imitates a 
bamboo shoot; the poem itself is like a bamboo forest. Meaning and form go together in the 
poem. This affinity gets lost when translated in prose; but also when translated in English, 
like this, because of the “horizontality”5 of the western writing style: bamboo does not grow 
in English as it does in the ground. 
As Yano’s translation leads us toward the confluence of verse and prose, let us consider, 
in conclusion, a brief allusion to the influence of Edgar Poe on Baudelaire. Baudelaire , who 
was was very conscious of the difficulty of translating poetry into another language, 
translated Poe’s “Raven” into prose.. Poe established his theory of metrics with perfect 
precision in “The Rationale of Verse” or “The Philosophy of Composition.” Baudelaire’s 
writing on Poe makes us sure that he knows, more than anyone else, how foolhardy it would 
be to try to translate the poem of his beloved poet into French verse. To avoid such a 
“rhymed aping”—singerie rimée, he writes—Baudelaire chose the prose form. His 
translation “Le Corbeau” was first published in 1853. Some time later, in 1855, he published 
“Le Crépuscule du soir” and “La Solitude,” his first prose poems. As we know, the 
composition of these prose poems, written with distinct paragraphs, resembles that of a 
sonnet, of Aloysuis Bertrand and also, his “Corbeau”, which is in fact the first prose poem he 
published. From verse to prose, the poem loses rhythm and rhyme. From “The Raven” to “Le 
Corbeau,” the bird loses his most melancholic cry of “Nevermore.” This is certainly a 
despairing pass. However, it may be this despair—the lost of rhythm and rhyme—that gave 
birth to Baudelaire’s prose poems, provided with “multitude of tones,” that are rational, 
sarcastic or humorous, in exchange for the melancholic one: 
 
(…) the author of a short story has at his disposal a multitude of tones, of 
nuances of language, the rational tone, the sarcastic, the humorous, which 
are repudiated by poetry and which are, as it were, dissonances, outrages to 
the idea of pure beauty. And that is also why the author who seeks in the 
short story the single goal of beauty works only at a great disadvantage, 
deprived as he is of the most useful instrument, rhythm. I know that in all 
literatures efforts have been made, often successful, to create purely poetic 
short stories; Edgar Poe himself has written some very beautiful ones. But 
they are struggles and efforts which serve only to prove the strength of the 
true means adapted to the corresponding goals, and I am inclined to believe 
that in the case of some authors, the greatest that can be chosen, these 
heroic attempts spring from despair.6 
                                            
4 I used a translation found online as a base from which I built my own interpretation by modifying 
certain words: 
http://www.vianegativa.us/2008/12/bamboo-two-poems-by-hagiwara-sakutaro/ 
5 Of course, the original version of this poem is written “vertically”. 
6 Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop Jr., trans. Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, (University Park: 
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964), 128. 
Kazuhiko Suzuki, “The Flowers of Evil in Prose”, AmeriQuests 13.1 (2017) 
 5 
 
Baudelaire titled his brief presentation of “Le Corbeau”: “The genesis of a poem.” I am 
inclined to believe that, for him, “The genesis of a poem” was also “The genesis of a prose 
poem”. 


The Flowers of Evil in prose

Space-Naming: The Sanctuary Movement and the Role of Institution Identity

A personal commentary on America in the style of The Beat

Cooper, Leigh

Leigh Cooper, “America”, AmeriQuests 13.2 (2017) 
“America” 
 
America I thought I liked you 
It doesn’t seem so anymore 
 
Vast 
Incomprehensible  
Indefinable  
More than meets the eye 
But also animalistic, basic, rudimentary 
Have we evolved? 
No, I don't think so 
Some days I think so 
Mostly, I wonder 
I wonder how our country can be so different - how can people be so different? 
Does my experience, my America, come at the cost of other's experiences? Other's 
Americas? 
 
Existential questions about human nature and the nature of society have been filling my 
mind recently 
But really, can't we all just be good people? 
My America isn't like the real America, so it would seem  
Where does the goodness go? Where does it hide? It hides from Washington now, rests in 
individuals where it grows 
Not Hibernating - the individuals don't allow it to pass into the cave  
I know it's there 
But is it strong enough? 
I want goodness back  
 
Progression is such a tease 
But - sometimes it stays? 
I am confused  
Who isn't confused? Those who watch Fox News 
I suppose 
Our president 
He doesn't allow himself to be confused  
That is some kind of America  
 
My America seems to change like waves  
Reality and realization of reality rise and fall in the way of grief 
Leigh Cooper, “America”, AmeriQuests 13.2 (2017) 
The kind of grief of losing your loved one 
What would I tell my father? 
This can't be our America, this certainly wasn't his.  
But America I don't want to grieve this loss - I'm not ready  
I don't want you to be lost  
America I thought I liked you  
People need you  
 
America you pathological liar 
Oh, is that not really who you are? Is it just our president? 
Does that make me feel better? 
 
America I thought I liked you 
I have no words 
Belief. 
It can be a scary thing  
Words. 
“What does it mean when he says words?” the reporter asked. 
I smiled. I thought I knew what words meant 
Can this be real? 
 
What do you need? Medicine? More sweets? 
It's like a puzzle  
 
Why do so many people believe him? 
Real policy from fake facts 
Where does he get his information? 
A president who gets his news from TV news 
What the fuck 
"The media's the opposition party," says Bannon 
I'm not getting less scared 
 
What can we do? Where can we go? Can we leave? I’ve always asked a lot of questions 
 
I feel the need to think of positive things 
To counteract 
How can I say only the horror? Feel only the devastation? There are good people here, 
too 
But sometimes it's nicer to melt into the fear, the shock, the heartbreak 
 
Leigh Cooper, “America”, AmeriQuests 13.2 (2017) 
These are thoughts. Just pieces. Not together - make you think of something else? Me, 
too. 
Does that sound familiar? 
 
A strong wind pushing under our wings, resilience bearing us forward - this we need. 
America we need to like you 
 
America I’ve followed you around, I’ve been here. 
A little prodding. A hip-check here and there. Sometimes a hug. 
Sometimes a raucous party, a celebration of you!  
But you need some shoves, a smack to the face, a means to utilize my kickboxing practice. 
It’s how I feel America 
But I want to love you. People want to love you.  
 
 
 


America

Negotiations on the front lines between Host country officials and vulnerable migrant

Barsky, Robert F.

How undocumented immigrants negotiate a place for themselves in America

In this article, we will try to present some particularities of Oté Takuji's translations

Hatakeyama, Toru

Oté Takuji, Baudelaire, and the Poetics of Symbolism

Please click the PDF button to access the review

Not a member yet