Using Kitasono as a window on Japanese literature in the twentieth century, John Solt analyzes the relationship of Japanese writers to foreign literary movements and the influences of Japanese writers on world literature. He also provides a critical analysis of Kitasono's poetic working methods with several translations of poems written in Japanese to English. He mentions that in the late 1920s, Katue published "Collection of White Poems" that was translated by Solt. This is a constellation long before Gomringer declared this form, concrete poetry, e.g. white residence - white table - pink noblelady - white distant view - blue sky, etc. Solt records the following. "Other Western poets took notice of the VOU translations. High praise came from Hugh Gordon Porteus, who wrote in Criterion in 1939, "The most fruitful experiments with language are likely to continue to emerge from those who concern themselves with images and their relations, rather than with idle wordspinning. Nothing more novel and exciting has been done lately, along these lines, than by the poets of the Japanese Vou group." He went on to elaborate about the VOU Club. His comments raise several points already discussed, namely, the Japanese language, translation, and VOU's role in the international avant-garde prior to World War II. Vou is a meaningless name, like dada. But the poetry of the Vou club, which is animated by the theories of "ideogram and ideoplasty" of its founder, Mr. Katue Kitasono, is to be distinguished from the superficially similar poetry of the dada and surrealist movements. It is written in kanamajiri, that is, in a mixture of Chinese ideograms and Japanese phonetic script, and it is devoid of all rules, though bearing some resemblance to the traditional kyoka, or comic epigrammatic verse. The Vou club prints its work in a magazine which deserves notice for several reasons. In the first place, this publication proves that there is a vital and original spirit still at work In the Far East. In the second place, it proves that despite the most formidable political, national and linguistic barriers, cultural exchange is still possible between literary innovators of the East and the West. The July issue of Vou prints (in Japanese) the first half of the suggestive essay on "Language and the Experimental Writer" by James Laughlin IV which appeared in 1937 (in English) in New Directions. And three of the poems in this issue have also appeared, translated by their respective authors, in the second number of The Townsman. I don't know what the Japanese are likely to make of J. Laughlin IV. But it should be pointed out that the poems, as translated, are inadvertently more quaint than their Japanese originals. There is more than a touch, here and there, of "English as she is Japped." A suspicion that The Townsman enjoys exploiting this element, (i.e. the leg-pull element present in much experimental art, of the dada order) is confirmed by the transliteration of Mr. Nagayasu's name as 'Syuiti Nag.' Here it may be noted that as good art has :been done with the tongue in the cheek as with the most solemn intention; and, art aside, we should invariably prefer the clown to the magician." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.