I am saddened beyond measure to report the sudden passing on December 4 of the translator Takako Lento (1941–2024), our predecessor in Japanese literature at the University of Iowa, and our collaborator and friend. Takako received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1967 during a time when there were very few women and very few people of color in the workshop. She taught the first Japanese literature classes here from 1968–71; she told me once that at that time she was translating poems in the evening that she could use in class the following day. She was an early translator of two prominent poets from the early days of the International Writing Program (IWP): Tamura Ryūichi (IWP 1967–68) and Yoshimasu Gōzō (IWP 1970–71). She was one of those who could say that they were there at the beginning of the IWP, a close friend of IWP directors Paul and Hualing Engle. When we brought Takako back to campus in 2017 for the first time since she left in 1971, she and Hualing had a warm reunion as though no time had passed, and she and her husband Tom enjoyed getting to know our current community.

Takako won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature twice, once in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin, whose own work she recently elegantly translated from English into Japanese. Takako’s life was devoted to making Japanese poetry visible in English, and if anything the pace of her work accelerated in her 70s and 80s; she published at least nine volumes of translations since 2011. Takako was by all accounts full of life on a whirlwind tour of Japan in November, meeting with poets and making plans for the poetry anthology that her co-editors are committed to continue working on in her memory, the Cornell Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, edited by Jeffrey Angles, Andrew Campana, Kendall Heitzman, Takako Lento, and Yasuhiro Yotsumoto (forthcoming, Cornell University Press).

“She worked tirelessly for decades to share modern Japanese poetry with the world, producing mountains of translations that are not only solid but that sing,” the translator Jeffrey Angles wrote in one tribute to her. The poet Yotsumoto Yasuhiro (IWP 2023) sent a message to many of the poets she had worked with in Japan, saying, “Imagine how dismal the place of Japanese poetry in the world would be had Takako not existed.”

In 2022, Takako was named to the University of Iowa’s inaugural class of “Eight Over 80,” honoring eight people 80 years of age or older connected with the university who are still making a difference in the world. She was astonished to share the honor with such an accomplished group of people, including a former president of the university, but Takako was a perfect choice for the award: she was still hard at work on the last day of her life, doing what she loved. There is something for all of us to aspire to in that.

--Kendall Heitzman