Hiroaki Sato

Hiroaki Sato’s translations range from anthologies, such as the PEN Translation Prize-winning From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, cotranslated with Burton Watson (Doubleday and University of Washington Press, 1981; reprint Columbia University Press, 1986) and Japanese Women Poets (Routledge, 2007), to monographs by authors such as Hagiwara Sakutarō, Miyazawa Kenji, and Ozaki Hōsai, among many others. In prose, he translated Yukio Mishima’s novel Silk and Insight (M. E. Sharpe, 1998) and My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Mishima Yukio (Columbia University, 2002). Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima (Stone Bridge Press, 2013) is a greatly expanded edition in English of Inose Naoki’s original profile, with Sato contributing new sociopolitical contextual content. On Haiku, a compilation of essays, was released from New Directions (2018). He is currently completing Death and the Samurai (tentative title) while at work on the translations of the gay tanka poet Ishii Tatsuhiko. Sato received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Translation Prize for Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saikō (Columbia University Press, 1997) and Silver Spoon (Stone Bridge Press, 2015). From 1984 to 1990 he wrote a biweekly column for The Mainichi Daily News and from 2000 to 2017 a monthly column for the Japan Times. Stone Bridge Press plans to publish a selection of his columns, essays, reviews, and poems he has translated.

Photo by 金箱つね子.