Poetry International

(pseudonym of Noburiko Nishida, Kyoto, 1931) studied economics at Kyoto's Doshisha University and spent the next 23 years working in a bank. At present he is lecturer at Osaka's College of Literature and Kyoto's College of Art. He also edits the periodical Shi to Shiso (Poem and Thought).

He commenced writing poetry in the late fourties, and was clearly influenced by Mitsuharo Kaneko, a symbolist and translator of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Takashi Arima joined the group of modernists in Kyoto and since published twenty collections of poems, various essays and a number of children's books.

When Japanese `folk music' came into fashion around 1967, many of his satyrical texts were set to music; one still meets them on LP's and CD's right now. He often visited the country and became renowned as organiser of so-called `reading caravans' which brought the public in closer touch with poetry. Takashi Arima has traveled far and wide, as his work reflects. So far, his poems have been translated into eleven languages, such as French, German and English.

The Swiss author Adolf Muschg called him a descendant of the vagrant poets in Japan's past, one who came to live in this day and age, in the expanding labyrinth of the virtual whose habitants may be everywhere and nowhere, have everything or nothing in common. `That's why I don't know whether his voice comes to me from far away of from nearby. And yet I feel strangely relieved that this silent voice could turn into sound and unravel its text in my ear; as if it has entwined mine, as if it was a matter of nuancing, as if it held the beginning or the end of a red thread, soundly and cleverly interwoven - Ariadne's thread.'