Jeffrey Angles

Angles was born in Columbus, Ohio. When he was fifteen, he traveled to Japan for the first time as a high school exchange student, staying in the small, southwestern Japanese city of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, which represented a turning point in his life. Since then he has spent several years living in various Japanese cities, including Saitama City, Kobe, and Kyoto.[1]

While a graduate student in Japanese literature at Ohio State University in the mid-1990s, Angles began translating Japanese short stories and poetry, publishing in a wide variety of literary magazines in the United States, Canada, and Australia.[2] He is particularly interested in translating poetry and modernist texts, since he feels these have been largely overlooked and understudied by academics in the West.

He is passionate about translation as a discipline, stating that "without translation, we would be locked within our own cultures, unable to access the vast, overwhelming wealth of the rest of the world's intellect. By translating literary works, we are making that world heritage available to literally millions of people."[3] Angles has also argued that although the Japanese literary establishment is fairly balanced in the numbers of male and female authors currently being publishing, translation tends overwhelmingly to prioritize the translation of male authors. That led him to focus on using translation to share underrepresented voices in Japanese literature, especially those of women, gay writers, and socially engaged writers.[4]

Angles earned his Ph.D. in 2004 with a dissertation about representations of male homoeroticism in the literature of Kaita Murayama and the popular writer Ranpo Edogawa. This is the basis for his book Writing the Love of Boys published in 2011 by University of Minnesota Press, which also includes new research on Taruho Inagaki and Jun'ichi Iwata. In this book, he shows that segments of early twentieth-century Japanese society were influenced by Western psychology to believe that homosexuality was a pathological aberration. These views, however, were countered by a number of writers who argued precisely the opposite: that it was a vital, powerful, and even beautiful experience that had a long, rich history in Japan. Angles draws upon fiction, poetry, essays, diaries, paintings and other visual material to trace the relations between these writers and the inspiration that they drew from early Western homophile writers, such as Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, and Walt Whitman. In the conclusion of the book, Angles also discusses the ways that contemporary BL manga have inherited and built upon the ideas fashioned by Kaita Murayama, Ranpo Edogawa, and Taruho Inagaki several decades earlier.[5] Angles' other research involves studies of popular Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s, writing about contemporary Japanese poetry, and studying the history of translation in Japan.[2][6]

He has also contributed a critically acclaimed voice-over commentary to the Criterion Collection's release of Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff.[7]

In 2009, Angles received the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, administered by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University for his translation of Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Chimako Tada.[8] This same book also won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2011.[9] His book of translations, Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō, published in 2009 by Action Books, was a finalist in the poetry category of the Best Translated Book Award offered by Three Percent.[10]

His translation of the wartime memoirs of the gay writer Mutsuo Takahashi, Twelve Views from the Distance, was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award (memoir category) in 2013. Moreover, his translation of the classic modernist novel The Book of the Dead, written in the middle of World War II by the gay novelist, poet, and ethnologist Shinobu Orikuchi attracted a significant amount of attention, winning both the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work from the Modern Language Association[11] and the first-ever Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Prize from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University.[12]

Angles has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts[13] and the 2008 PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center for his translation of the memoirs of the contemporary poet Mutsuo Takahashi. In 2008, Angles was invited to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC to serve as the curator for the literary events in the Japan: Culture+Hyperculture Festival.[14] He has also been interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered about the short story collection Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion, which he co-edited with J. Thomas Rimer.[15]

In 2009–2010, Angles was a visiting researcher at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, where he organized a group research project about the history of translation practices in Japan. In 2011, he was a visiting professor in Comparative Literature at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo.

In 2017, Angles was awarded the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a prize comparable to America's Pulitzer Prize, in poetry during a formal ceremony in Tokyo on Feb. 17. Angles won the prize for his book of Japanese-language poetry, "Watashi no hizukehenkosen" ("My International Date Line").[16] Angles is one of the few non-native speakers to win the award and is the first non-native ever to win for a book of poetry.