Building Ties With Verse; Japanese and Korean poets team up to publish a joint anthology.(Voices Across the Strait)(Book Review)

Byline: Hideko Takayama

In ancient times--unlike today--there was no cultural border between Japan and Korea. People traveled back and forth across the Sea of Genkai, between Japan's southern island of Kyushu and the southern ports of the Korean Peninsula, sharing ideas and creative energy. Some scholars argue that "Manyoshu" ("Anthology of 10,000 Leaves"), the great anthology of classical Japanese verse, had a strong Korean influence. In fact, they believe that some of the 4,516 poems in the seventh- and eighth-century collection were actually composed by Koreans. Now, 13 centuries later, Japanese and Korean writers have joined forces to produce a new anthology of Japanese and Korean poetry, "Voices Across the Strait" (286 pages. Kankanbou) .

The collection, published in both languages, contains contemporary works by 138 poets, 106 of them Japanese and 32 Korean. In evocative, often superbly composed language, they cover subjects ranging from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the graves of war dead in Okinawa to solitude and the joys of early spring. The project was conceived by Yasue Tajima, a poet and publisher who lives in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka, right across from the Korean Peninsula. "We once used the same Chinese characters centuries ago," Tajima says. "I always felt strongly that we shared the same roots." She teamed up with Choi Kwang Joon, a professor of Japanese literature at Silla University in Busan, South Korea, and together they worked ...