Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Furari by Kumar SivasubramanianVenice

2018; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2018.0263

1945-8134

Zack Davisson,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Jiro Taniguchi. Furari. Trans. Kumar Sivasubramanian. Doddington, United Kingdom. Fanfare / Ponent Mon. 2017. 208 pages. Jiro Taniguchi. Venice. Doddington, United Kingdom. Fanfare / Ponent Mon. 2017. 120 pages. The world of comics lost a great artist when Jiro Taniguchi (1947–2017) died last year. He was a rare talent with unique vision, able to summon up beautiful worlds of quiet reflection. Thankfully, Taniguchi was prolific. He left behind a trove of works that are slowly making their way to English via Fanfare/Ponent Mon. Their latest offering is two comics, the 2011 black-andwhite Furari and the 2014 painted Venice, which was commissioned by fashion company Louis Vuitton. Furari’s plot is hardly enticing. In a time before accurate measuring devices, a man hopes to calculate the distance of one degree along a meridian. To achieve his purpose, he walks the same path every try, training himself to keep an accurate step as a human measuring wheel. Page after page he walks his course, counting his steps. Not exactly a recipe for high drama. But this is Jiro Taniguchi. Anyone who has read his 1992 comic The Walking Man knows Taniguchi can easily make a captivating work of art about a person taking a walk. Furari has that same feel. His lead character, the surveyor, wanders through a bustling town, full of life and the goings-on of ordinary people. His footsteps carry him through the works of artist Utagawa Hiroshige and the poet Kobayashi Issa. The world around him is of ukiyo-e and haiku. The surveyor’s mission is a scientific one, but his heart is full of beauty, and his mind goes on flights of fancy. He flies on the wings of a hawk and dives down into the river depths with turtles and otters. The man’s wife is supportive of her husband’s obsession; the two go on pastoral dates among cherry blossoms and drift on lake boats, sipping sake and generally being in love. Somehow, it is perfect. Furari’s translator, Kumar Sivasubramanian , did an excellent job of balancing the dialogue and poetry of this comic. Poems are rarely easy to translate, but Sivasubramanian makes it seem natural and effortless. There are a few notes to catch you up, but most of it stays on the page, allowing you to get swept up in the work. Furari uses the fine line and lush detail typical of Taniguchi’s comic work. His characters remind me of Katsuhiro Otomo’s— “realistic” but with expressive mouths and features. Terry Moore is another artist who matches Taniguchi’s ability to draw fully realized human beings that make use of the plasticity of the medium. The world the characters of Furari inhabit, however, is pure Hiroshige. Furari is a love letter to the brilliant Edo period artist, using his sense of perspective and design liberally. In stark contrast to this is Venice, which is fully painted in a style that begins as loose watercolor but slowly tightens up as Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 71 Kevin Higgins Song of Songs 2.0 Salmon Poetry With endlessly colorful wit, Irish poet and satirist Kevin Higgins offers an assortment of new and selected poems that rip into life and politics with “teeth or, at least, dentures.” Bursting with bathos as he riffs off of Wordsworth , Milton, and Burns or turning to absurdity the psalmic similes in the title poem, Higgins’s verse revels in pastiche and political irreverence. Richard Hoffman Noon until Night Barrow Street Press At times allusive and metacognitive , at others mostly narrative, the poems collected in Noon until Night are always reflective, a procession of angled glimpses at the thing, or things, called living. Denying dichotomy, the long title poem invites us to see in the many tones of life “pairs, not opposites; couples / not competitors.” Hoffman’s own tone in this latest book—unfailingly incisive, perceptive, and invigorating—rides the invisible rim between light and dark. the story progresses. Venice was commissioned as a travel book in a series from Louis Vuitton, meant to showcase the beauty of this famous city. Taniguchi strings together a base narrative of a man who finds a box of painted postcards in a...