Certain Noble Plays of Japan

About

Ernest Fenollosa's translations of Japanese Nō plays, edited and published posthumously by Ezra Pound in 1916, were one of the most important literary discoveries of early modernism: Pound, Yeats, and others immediately recognized in the Nō tradition a formal model for the non-naturalist theater they were seeking. Yeats drew directly on these texts for his own Plays for Dancers. The Nō plays — Nishikigi, Hagoromo, Kagekiyo, and others — combine dance, chant, mask, and poetry in a theatrical form of extreme economy and haunting beauty. This translation, while now superseded by more scholarly versions, remains historically important and poetically alive.