Shuntaro Tanikawa, Poet and Translator of ‘Peanuts,’ Dies at 92

Books|Shuntaro Tanikawa, Poet and Translator of ‘Peanuts,’ Dies at 92

Shuntaro Tanikawa, Japan’s most popular poet for more than half a century, whose stark and whimsical poems, blending humor with melancholy, made him a kind of everyman philosopher ideally suited to translating the “Peanuts” comic strip and Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese, died on Nov. 13 in Tokyo. He was 92.

The death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Shino Tanikawa, who did not specify a cause.

A perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mr. Tanikawa was a revered figure in Japan, not just in literary circles but also among casual readers. It was not uncommon to see commuters reading his books on the subway.

He published more than 60 collections of poetry, beginning in 1952, when he was 21, with “Alone in Two Billion Light Years” — a book that heralded a bold new voice who shunned haiku and other traditional Japanese forms of verse.

In the title poem from that collection (translated by Takako U. Lento), he wrote:

On this small sphere
humans sleep, wake, work
from time to time want friends on Mars

I don’t know what Martians do
on their small sphere
(maybe they sleep’eep, wake’ake, work’ork)
but from time to time they want friends on Earth
that’s absolutely for sure

Universal gravitation is
the force of being alone, attracting each other

The universe is warped
that is why all of us seek each other