Sleeping, Sinning, Falling

Hiroaki Sato is a prolific, award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry into English. American poet Gary Snyder has called Sato" perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English."

Hiroaki Sato has received several translation prizes. Among them are the PEN America prize, with Burton Watson, for From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1981); the Japan-United States Friendship Commission translation prize for Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saikō (1997) and for The Silver Spoon (2015).

He has written columns for a dozen publications, among them The Mainichi Daily News (“Here and Now—in New York”) from 1984 to 1989 and for The Japan Times (“The View from New York”) from 2000 to 2017.