Eric Selland is an American poet and translator living in Tokyo. He is the author of Object States (Theenk Books, 2018), Beethoven’s Dream (Isobar Press, 2015), Arc Tangent (Isobar Press, 2013), Still Lifes (Hank’s Original Loose Gravel Press, 2012), and The Condition of Music (Sink Press, 2000). His translation of The Guest Cat, a novel by Takashi Hiraide, was on the New York Times bestseller list in early 2014, and his translation of poems by Kiwao Nomura, The Day Laid Bare, was chosen as a Recommended Translation by The Poetry Book Society, UK, for their winter 2020 season. His most recently published book-length poetry translations are Paul Klee’s Table & Other Books: Poems 1955–1980, a collected early poems of Minoru Yoshioka, and Kusudama, Yoshioka’s final masterpiece (Isobar Press, 2021 and 2025). Selland has co-edited an anthology of twentieth-century Japanese experimental poetry with poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu, which is scheduled to appear from New Directions Books in 2026. He makes his living as an independent translator of Japanese economic research reports.
Click here to read an informative interview with Eric Selland by Gregory Dunne, focusing on both his translations of Yoshioka and his own work.
Isobar books:
Isobar translations:
Kiwao Nomura: The Day Laid Bare
Minoru Yoshioka: Kusudama
Minoru Yoshioka: Paul Klee’s Table & Other Books: Poems 1955–1980
Introduction:
VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978
To visit Eric’s blog, The New Modernism: Japanese Modernist & Avant-Garde Poetry, Translations, Explorations, click here.
