THE TEXT/TECH PAPERS

F. Fukuzo Tanaka — Songs of Hyakunin-Isshu Anglicized

August 25, 1885, Japan – February 14, 1948, Los Angeles, California

F. Fukuzo Tanaka was a Japanese-born Los Angeles author whose two known books joined metaphysical self-help to an ambitious experiment in poetic translation. His Essentials of Happiness appeared in 1922; sixteen years later, from an address on South Hill Street, he privately issued 250 signed copies of Songs of Hyakunin-Isshu Anglicized, the earliest complete American book translation of the classical one-hundred-poem anthology. Tanaka retained a five-line, thirty-one-syllable shape, supplied romanized Japanese, and followed every translation with a prose “Significance of the Poem.” This edition resets the complete sequence from the original scan, preserves those integral glosses, and adds the only original poem yet securely identified in his writings.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Tanaka, F. Fukuzo. Essentials of Happiness: A Manual of Humanity, Its Character and Attainment. J. F. Rowny Press, 1922.

———. Songs of Hyakunin-Isshu Anglicized: Poems of Thirty-one Syllables Known as the “Tanka,” or “Waka.” Trade Pressroom, 1938.

Works About the Author