The Glass Clouding

Author: Masaoka Shiki

Translator: Abby Ryder-Huth

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2024)

The Glass Clouding blends translation and poetry in an extended meditation on and through Masaoka Shiki’s late-life writing. Shiki, a Japanese poet and critic who died in 1902 of tuberculosis at the age of 35, revitalized the form of haiku. His work, a study in looking, documents his experience of confinement with a spare immediacy and a rich sense of the visible outside world he could not directly access. The Glass Clouding wrestles with the limits of translation, using experimental forms, image, parallel texts, and prose to question what translation can and cannot make visible.