Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“It is the vanity of the alien to show his mastery over a language that was neither his father's nor his mother's tongue.”
Neighbourhood:
Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
Samuel Hoffenstein entered the world on October 8, 1890, in the Lithuanian corner of the Russian Empire—a place of rolling fields, resilient Jewish communities, and the quiet tensions of life under imperial rule. Some records nod toward Odessa in what is now Ukraine as his birthplace, but the heart of his story begins with the immigrant voyage his family undertook when he was just four years old in 1894. Josiah Mayer…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Irony, Sorrow
