Japanese Poets

The world's attention is on Japan. The devastation from the earthquake and tsunami and the unfolding nuclear crisis is literally woe on treble woe, and truly difficult to comprehend. Food, water, shelter, safety, help and donations, are desperately needed. Other than prayers and hopeful thoughts, poetry is the only tangible offering I can offer at this moment.

The following are from Eric Selland's blog The New Modernism: Japanese Modernist & Avant-Garde Poetry, Translations, Explorations which I located this morning in my search for contemporary Japanese poets.

The Island
Going ashore on the island the man finds amongst the crags large arched fragments of bones belonging to beasts and fish bleached by the sun as it rotates the shrunken map of a black octopus head the coast of the eyes of the man who gradually becomes horizontal is like the acute angle of the moonrise let us forget now in extremely high-definition the eggs of the seabirds advance why is there no music at a time like this so when the arc of insomnia takes shape the distant hands and feet the man flings out barely move on this occasion from the lower extremity the dimensions of the island begin to narrow this place is most certainly the nest of tomorrow’s setting sun for the phantom birds who do not take flight magnified at the man’s side the entire surface of the eggs exposed to the intense light search as one may, not a trace of even one fingernail of the adventurous human can be found he does not choose this Atlas from the interior of a skinny womb the man squeezes a bit of voice and some blood on the other side the winter waves continue to slip along the insulating material

Recovery
Chewing on pickled scallions that’s the time I’m partial to nestled in the deep folds of a hospital ward blanket I wait patiently neither for treatment nor for death but for the splendor of consumption it is April the bees wiggle their hips in fields and in skin laden with pollen the moon in its final days of erotic desire draws near since my crushed thighbone brings perpetual leisure I listen to the music of blood undergo phosphorization or discharge my vitality and then as a black staff show a scene from a deserted pastoral landscape pushed into a mountain of straw raising no cries of love two crows are made to fly off my sister visits me frequently and praises the malignant disease of the neighboring patient she strikes my lowered head momentarily attracting the explosion of a pomegranate I take a walk in the garden which is always frozen rather than the many cranes and flocks of nurses I approach an ugly woman I agitate her womb with an inelegant dictionary and voluptuous dreams next I take a whiff of an intense drug in a flash I am anointed with the balm of rebirth and assailed by a gradual death the notion of ready-made apparel is lost and I fall on my knees in the form of a camel which the woman believed since childhood to be a disgusting animal annoyances occur in every walk of life atop the stretcher upon which I am carried out it is a dawn in which the chafing of starched flesh and bone begins my thirst is mediated through my eyes and overflows from the swamp of ice beginning to melt I get wet up to my tail like an embryonic fish and all in one gulp drink the water down to the last dropfrom blog October 15, 2010 by ericselland Yoshioka Minoru: Prose Poems from Monks (1958) (tr. Eric Selland)

“From a Woman of a Distant Land” (Tōi Kuni no Onna Kara)

この国では死人を葬りません。お人形のようにガラ
スのケースにおさめ、家のなかに飾っておくのです。

Kono kuni dewa shinin o hōmurimasen. Oningyō no yō ni garasu kē
su ni osame, ie no naka ni kazatte-oku no desu. (39)

And in Angles’s rendering:

In this country, we do not bury the dead. We enclose them like dolls in
glass cases and decorate our houses with them. (23)


私たちは合唱しません。四人集まると四つのべつべつの
旋律がからみあいます。私たちはこれを関係とよびます。
それはつねに一種の「もつれ」です。もつれがほどけると
私たちは四方へ散ってゆきます。あるときはほっとして、
あるときは当感して。

Watashitachi wa gasshō shimasen. Yonin atsumaru to yotsu no betsubetsu no
senritsu ga karamiaimasu. Watashitachi wa kore o kankei to yobimasu.
Sore wa tsune ni isshu no “motsure” desu. Motsure ga hodokeru to
watashitachi wa shihō e chitte-yukimasu. Aru toki wa hotto shite,
aru toki wa tōwaku shite. (39)

We do not sing in chorus. When four people gather, we weave
together four different melodies. This is what we call a relationship. Such
encounters are always a sort of entanglement. When these entanglements
come loose, we scatter in four directions, sometimes with relief, sometimes
at wit’s end. (24)

from Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako. Translated from the Japanese with introduction and notes by Jeffrey Angles. University of California Press, 2010.

Night Mechanist (1924)

the café girl
is completely transparent
continuing her pink breathing
she makes her expensive finger shine
and hides mint-colored talk
in a lobelia leaf
while playing the table’s piano
dreamer of chairs and curtains
bohemian of a pitiful city.
———————————
from the shadow of curacao
and peppermint
she flashes a seven-colored heart
seducer with stunning matches
on stove chimneys
ties passion ribbons
and dissolves her lovers
into cash register buttons—
mechanist of splendid night
from Human Dismantled Poems (1926) Kitasono Katue – Poems (trans. John Solt)
April 2, 2010