Keene, Dennis 1934–

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KEENE, Dennis 1934–

PERSONAL: Born July 10, 1934, in London, England; son of Percy (a professional golfer) and Clara Evelyn (Phillips) Keene; married Keiko Kurose (a writer), May 5, 1962; children: Shima Daphne. Education: St. John's College, Oxford, B.A., 1957, M.A., 1961, D. Phil., 1973. Religion: Church of England. Hobbies and other interests: Music, gardening, walking.

ADDRESSES: Home—77 Staunton Rd., Headington, Oxford OX3 7TL, England.

CAREER: University of Malaya, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, assistant lecturer, 1958–60; University of Kyoto, Japan, lecturer, 1961–63; Haile Selassie First University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, assistant professor, 1964–65; University of Kyushu, Fukuoka, Japan, lecturer, 1965–69; Japan Women's University, Tokyo, professor, 1970–81 and 1984–93. Military service: British National Service, 1952–54; served in the Suez Canal Zone.

AWARDS, HONORS: Special award for foreign fiction, London Independent, 1991, for translation of Saiichi Maruya's Rain in the Wind; Noma Literary Translation Prize, Kodansha International, 1992, for translation of Morio Kita's Ghosts.

WRITINGS:

Surviving (poems), Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1980.

Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1980.

The Modern Japanese Prose Poem, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1980.

Universe and Other Poems, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1984.

(Editor) Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Selected Poems, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1985.

TRANSLATOR FROM JAPANESE TO ENGLISH

Riichi Yokomitsu, Love, and Other Stories, University of Tokyo Press (Tokyo, Japan), 1974.

Yumiko Kurahashi, The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q, University of Queensland Press (Brisbane, Australia), 1978.

Minoru Nakamura, A Shadow on the Sea, Selected Poems, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1981.

Morio Kita, The House of Nire, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1984.

Morio Kita, The Fall of the House of Nire, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1985.

Saiichi Maruya, Singular Rebellion, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1986.

Saiichi Maruya, Rain in the Wind, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1990.

Morio Kita, Ghosts, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1991.

Saiichi Maruya, A Mature Woman, Andre Deutsch (London, England), 1995.

Natsuki Ikezawa, Still Lives, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1997.

Saiichi Maruya, Grass for My Pillow, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Illusions, a long fiction in verse and prose loosely based on the life of the Earl of Surrey, a sixteenth-century poet.

SIDELIGHTS: Dennis Keene first made a name for himself as a poet while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. He stopped writing poetry before the age of thirty, however, and did not take it up again for more than a decade. His first book of poetry, Surviving, was published in 1980. Surviving and Universe and Other Poems have won him acclaim, and he has also garnered respect for his critical studies, particularly Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist, and for his translation of Japanese texts.

Most of the poems in Surviving consist of "words or phrases [that] are repeated, shifted and given fresh meanings in different contexts," reported Julian Symons in Times Literary Supplement. He felt that the technique, "at its most subtle … can be very effective," and he praised Keene for offering "some striking apothegms." In Universe and Other Poems, Keene offered a four-part work, each focused on a particular facet of astronomy. Personal experience, prose, and scientific evidence are all included in this book, which, at its best, presents "a genuine poetry of science" and "examples of what may be won back from the unknown by the disciplined application of intelligence and imagination," according to Times Literary Supplement reviewer Tim Dooley. The collection was also praised by Peter Porter, who in his London Observer review pointed out the author's admirable sense of perspective. He stated: "The reader experiences no bathos passing from the immensity of space to recollections of a London childhood where stars were the merest twinkling presence."

Keene's widely reviewed critical study, Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist, examines the career of the Japanese writer who was one of the few in his country to try and introduce the techniques of modern European authors into the literature of Japan. Yoshio Iwamoto, writing in World Literature Today, praised Keene's "intelligent and concrete treatment" of his subject, but Louis Allen expressed some reservations about the book, describing it in Times Literary Supplement as both "interesting and infuriating." Allen admitted, however, that Keene's "exposition is thorough, and the examples are generously provided so that the reader can make his own judgments."

Keene's first translation from the Japanese was of Riichi Yokomitsu's Love, and Other Stories. He went on to translate many other works, including those of Morio Kita and Natsuki Ikezawa, becoming one of the most respected translators of Japanese texts. One of his best-known translations is that of Kita's novel The House of Nire. Reviewing the work in Washington Post Book World, Carolyn Kizer applauded Kita's protagonist, Kiichiro Nire, and declared that Keene had "ably" translated Kita's prose into English. The following year, Keene also translated the sequel to Kita's novel, The Fall of the House of Nire.

Another translation to gain considerable approval was Keene's version of Saiichi Maruya's novel Singular Rebellion. It tells the story of a normally strait-laced Japanese businessman who marries a much younger woman who works as a model. In the New York Times Book Review, Richard Wiley applauded Maruya's comic tale while noting that "Keene's translation" is "a major and accurately performed task." Gillian Greenwood, in the London Times, labeled Singular Rebellion "a brilliant mixture of comic story-telling with an examination of the function and structure of a very formal society beset by change from within and without."

Grass for My Pillow is Keene's translation of yet another Maruya novel. This story concerns a draft dodger during World War II. The protagonist, Shokichi Hamada, is shown eluding his enforced military service in 1945, and then revisited twenty years later, after renaming himself and creating a new identity. His misguided urge to reclaim his old self leads to his undoing. The author's critique of the Japanese culture of that time is "scathing," according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, and his analysis of Shokicki's personal weaknesses is unrelenting. The result is "a masterly realistic novel."

Keene's translation of Natsuki's Ikezawa's story collection Still Lives renders into English the author's thoughtful stories of wandering souls. The people in these tales are rootless, distant from those around them, even insane anomalies in the highly regimented society of Japan. By translating the stories, "Dennis Keene has added to the body of serious Japanese literature that is available in English and has introduced English-speaking audiences to an important contemporary Japanese voice," approved Celeste Loughman in World Literature Today.

Keene once told CA: "I do not understand what motivation makes me write poetry, since I am too anxious that I may lose it, having suffered a long silence from the age of twenty-five to forty. My various researches into modern Japanese literature came about through the accident of living in Japan, and through working in the academic profession but not wanting to do research upon English literature, since it is a literature which has a personal relevance that Japanese literature does not have."