Leith Morton
Leith Morton (Professor Emeritus, Institute of Science Tokyo; Research Affiliate, School of Languages and Cultures, Sydney University) has written many books of poetry and has translated various poets into English. His books include: Divided Self: A Biography of Arishima Takeo (Allen & Unwin, 1988); Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View (Oxford UP, 2003); Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry, (Hawaii UP, 2004); Yosano Akiko no “Midaregami” wo Eigo de Ajiwau [Enjoying Yosano Akiko’s “Tangled Hair” in English] (Chūkei shuppan, 2007); The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature, (Hawaii UP, 2009); [trans.] Masayo Koike, Ishigaki Rin, Tanikawa Shuntaro: Selected Poems (Vagabond Press, 2014); [trans.] Minashita Kiryū, Yotsumoto Yasuhiro and Soh Sakon: Selected Poems (Vagabond Press, 2017); The Writing of Disaster: Literary Representations of War, Trauma and Earthquakes in Modern Japan (Peter Lang, 2020); How Dark is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2023) and co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (Routledge, 2016, 2025). In addition to the three volumes of translations included above, he has translated To the Summit: Why Should You Embrace an Ideal in Your Heart? by Hiroshi Tasaka, (Kumon, 2007); An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry (Garland, 1993); Mt Fuji: Selected Poems 1945 – 1986 by Kusano Shinpei. (Katydid Books, 1991) and was the poetry co-editor of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia UP, 2005) and is the author of the following poetry collections: Tales from East of the River (Rigmarole Press, 1982); The Flower Ornament (Island Press, 1993); A Day at the Races (University of Macao, 2003); At the Hotel Zudabollo (Island Press, 2004); Tokyo: A Poem in Four Chapters (Vagabond Press, 2006). He also is the author of various articles on modern Japanese poetry for The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics (4th edition).
