Two Poems about War—Yosano Akiko (1878-1942)

I promised these translations over two years ago in the introduction to my translation of three poems from Yosano’s Bara to Hanako collection. The juxtaposition displays a political evolution that is also a decay of the poet’s literary powers. Yosano was, for most of her life, a leftist and feminist poet best known for her antiwar poem “You Must Not Die” (“Kimi shinitamau koto nakare,” 『君死にたまふことなかれ』 in the orthography of the time) and her collection of feminist erotic poetry Tangled Hair (みだれ髪 Midaregami). Late in life she abruptly went down the 1930s Japanese equivalent of the rightist Facebook boomer pipeline. The result was “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” (“Nihon kokumin, asa no uta,” 『日本の国民、朝の歌 』), twenty highly mannered, formally controlled lines of cliché-storm edgy fascist garbage extolling the virtues of blowing yourself up and firing machine guns at Chinese civilians.

My translations of “You Must Not Die” (1904) and “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” (1932) follow. I’m electing to put them under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on these translations only if they attribute the translation to both Yosano Akiko and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

You Must Not Die

O little brother, for whom I cry,

You must not die!

Last-born, with a special measure of our parents’ love,

Yet our parents gave you a sword

And taught you—what?

To kill, and kill, and then to die?

Was it for this that they raised you to twenty-four?

As proud proprietor now of the Sakai store,

A local notable,

And inheritor of our parents’ name,

You must not die!

What does it matter to you,

A merchant inheritor,

Whether or not Port Arthur falls?

You should know by now that that is not our family’s way.

You must not die!

His Majesty the Emperor does not himself

Go into battle;

He commands other men to shed other men’s blood,

As is the way of beasts.

He tells us death is a glory to mortal men.

If his august heart holds such deep compassion,

How could he think this?

O little brother, there in battle,

You must not die!

Our mother lags behind our father

In life’s long autumn;

It pains me to see her wail for you.

While His Majesty does well for himself,

Our mother’s white hair grows.

In the shadow of the shop curtain

Your delicate young bride hunches over and weeps.

Have you forgotten? Do you remember?

You were together only ten months;

Think on what that does to a maiden’s heart.

There is only one of you, irreplaceable.

Once and for all I implore you,

You must not die!

 ❦

Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song

O the staunchness of the Emperor’s Glorious Reign™! Wake up, human hearts!

It’s a world ablaze with a sense of responsibility—a world with just one goal: “Sincerity”!

Cut to pieces the vain mouth-flapping! Smash the dreams of compromise (more like cuck-promise)!

Know how to go on the right track—charge into a hundred hardships!

One’s body is just the one soldier, but…! When you grasp the destroying gun

You enter into a dance with the barbed wire entanglements! That body is strewn like powder!

One’s body is just the one field officer, but…! Don’t be taken in by the enemy’s mercy!

Your body scatters, Nobler Than A Flower™! You can leverage A Samurai’s Honor™!

And it’s not just those with you! There are like-minded patriots

Wherever the Imperial Japanese Army goes! North, south, rise up, gird your loins!

Indeed, I’m just one good example of this—we, too, The Women Behind The Men With The Guns™— [lit. “we of the home front”]

Each one of us is zealous for the work we have to do! I redouble my very own courage!

Citizens who aren’t the troops—we’re letting out blood from our sharpened hearts!

Bit by bit, holding onto our lives—unstintingly devoted to our country!

For example, my song right here—holding a destroying gun,

Leaning into the barbed wire—and opening fire! May it share in that feeling!

A helpless woman like me, too—I feel this way!

Not to mention what surpassing excels it all—citizens who succeed to The Glorious Ways Of Our Ancestors™!

O the staunchness of the Emperor’s Glorious Reign™! Wake up, human hearts!

It’s a world ablaze with a sense of responsibility—a world with just one goal: “Sincerity”!

Poems of Summer—Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

I think many of us know the drill with Bashō at this point, don’t we, readers?

No particular source for this selection, although most of the Japanese orthography is that of the Haiku International Association website.

❦

ほととぎす鳴く鳴く飛ぶぞ忙はし

hototogisu naku naku tobu zo isogawashi

Yack yack yack, how busily the cuckoo flits around!

鳴く naku is “to call,” as an animal, but the reduplication makes it sound a bit like the chatter of a constantly-on-the-go person.

❦

五月雨や桶の輪切る夜の声

samidare ya oke no wa kiruru yoru no koe

A voice in the night! A cooper’s hoop, cracking in monsoon rains.

“Cooper’s hoop” is an inexact rendering, fundamentally for euphony in English; an 桶 oke is more of a tub than a barrel.

❦

湖や暑さを惜しむ雲の峰

mizuumi ya atsusa wo oshimu kumo no mine

The clouded peaks shirk the heat we feel on the muggy lake.

湖 mizuumi just means lake, but it is a compound of words meaning “water” and “sea,” furthering the feeling that this is the dreaded wet heat.

❦

朝露によごれて涼し瓜の泥

asatsuyu ni yogorete suzushi uri no tsuchi

Splattered in morning dew, the coolness of the melon-patch…

The verb 汚れる yogoreru indicates a dirty, indiscriminate splattering, as of mud.

❦

夏の夜や崩て明し冷し物

natsu no yo ya kuzurete akeshi hiyashimono

Summer evening; the leftovers from our cold dinner? The dawn.

I’ve taken somewhat less liberty in the order of the thoughts in this one than in the others.

❦

夏草や兵どもが夢の跡

natsukusa ya tsuwamono-domo ga yume no ato

The summer grasses soldiers’ dreams leave behind…

This is a well-known one from the legendary おくのほそ道 Oku no hosomichi. I was reluctant to touch the conventional translations. I certainly don’t think mine is better than, say, Donald Keene’s.

A Poem by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

This year I’ve taken a challenge to try to memorize at least one (short) poem each month. I’ll do my challengers one better: whenever the poem is in a language I can read other than English, I’ll (do my best to) translate it.

I’ve started with this well-known poem by Masaoka Shiki, probably Japan’s best-loved and most influential exponent of the haikai or haiku form since the country rejoined worldwide political and economic systems in the 1850s and 1860s. Like many luminaries of his period, Shiki died very young of tuberculosis, a disease that he had for much of his writing period and living with which he saw as a key point of his personal identity; this perhaps renders his innovative handling of Japanese poetry’s traditional focus on sense-media especially poignant.

柿くへば鐘が鳴るなり法隆寺

Kaki kueba

Kane ga naru nari

Hōryūji

“At first bite of this persimmon, the bells toll—the Temple of the Waxing Law.”

(Hōryūji is customarily rendered “Temple of the Flourishing Dharma.” I’ve gone with a different translation of this seventh-century Nara landmark, which contains the world’s oldest wooden building still in use, to defamiliarize it for readers who may already know of it.)

Some Poems by Chiyo-ni (1703-1775)

Chiyo-ni is the name by which posterity knows the eighteenth-century poet Fukuda Chiyo or Kaga no Chiyo; surnames were more mutable in those days. Chiyo is probably the foremost female practitioner of the haiku form, whose work maintains haiku’s traditional strong seasonal focus but shows more of a concern for human affairs than was typical for much of her writing period. Below I have translated seven of her poems on late winter and early spring; I hope to translate more of her oeuvre in the future.

I’m indebted to Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi's work on Chiyo-ni for bringing her to my attention. All of these poems can be found in their writing on her, some with slightly different orthography in the original.

❦

物ぬひや

夢たゝみこむ

師走の夜

My dreams

On a December night

I sew into my mending

❦

行く年や

もどかしきもの

水ばかり

O the passing years—

Troublesome things

Like so much water

❦

吹く風の

はなればなれや

冬木立

The cold wind doth blow

And breaks itself on

The winter treeline

❦

名月や

雪踏み分けて

石の音

Under the full moon

Stone-footsteps

Snow-echoing

❦

一人寝の

さめて霜夜を

さとりけり

Sleeping alone

A chill night of frost

Brings me to—

❦

ころぶ人を

笑ふてころぶ

雪見かな

Going to see the snow

People laugh seeing others fall over

And fall over themselves

❦

世の華を

丸うつゝむや

朧月

How the hazy moon

Wraps itself around

The flower of this world

(In this last poem, might maruu tsutsumu, “wraps around,” imply a pun on utsutsu, “reality” or “consciousness” as opposed to dreaming?)

“Aomori Elegy I”—Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)

Miyazawa wrote several versions of “Aomori Elegy” (青森挽歌 Aomori banka), of which this is the best-known. I did a translation of another version almost a decade ago, as part of my final for an upper-level undergraduate course called Readings in Modern Japanese II. That translation can be found here. Translating this version has been a longstanding personal goal of mine.

“Aomori Elegy” is a Modernist poem that in some versions has pronounced Buddhist themes; in all of its forms, it represents Miyazawa’s efforts to come to terms with the early death of his younger sister Toshiko. This version is probably the most explicitly Buddhist of the lot, although some of that might be lost on any reader accustomed to the “philosophy, not a religion” view of Buddhism, since Miyazawa’s Buddhism was expressly supernatural and intensely pietistic in character.

All versions are in the public domain in Japan, whose copyright regime is the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. This version is on Aozora Bunko, an excellent Japanese public domain online library somewhat along the lines of a Japanese Project Gutenberg, as part of Miyazawa’s Spring and the Asura (春と修羅 Haru to shura) collection. I’m electing to put this translation under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on this translation only if they attribute the translation to both Miyazawa Kenji and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

Aomori Elegy I

When the train passes through the fields on such a dark night as this,

The passengers’ windows all become the windows of an aquarium.

            (Like the ranks of dried telegraph poles

            That are passing swiftly by,

            The train races through a great hydrogen apple,

            The lambent lens of the galaxy.)

It runs through an apple,

But where on earth are we? What station is this?

There’s a fence made of torched railroad ties.

            (The silent agar of an August night.)

A single row of cross-barred poles

Is made up only of old familiar shadows

And two yellow lamps are lit.

The tall, pale stationmaster’s

Brass rod is nowhere to be seen,

And, in fact, he casts no shadow.

            (That entomology adjunct there

            In such fluid as fills this passenger car,

            Lusterless red hair aflutter,

            Is sleeping leaning on his luggage.)

My train is supposed to be northbound, but

It is running southward here.

The burnt fenceposts have fallen here and there,

The faroff horizon traced in yellow.

It muddles together—those stagnant beerlike dregs

Of heat haze on an ominous night,

The flickerings of lonely minds,

The Pale-Blue Station on the Pale-Blue River.

            (What a terrible pale-blue void!)

I can’t but soar up swiftly

From such a lonely fantasy

That the train’s switchback is at the same time a reciprocated desire.

Up there the roads are strewn with countless blue peacock feathers

And sleepy fatty acids of brass

And the five electric lights in the compartment

Liquefy at colder and colder temperatures.

            (Because it hurts, and because I am exhausted,

            I try not to remember

            Things I cannot but think about.)

Today, around noon,

Under the light-scorched clouds,

I swear, we congregated and pawed idiotically

Around that heavy red pump.

I commanded us, dressed in yellow.

So I can’t help but be exhausted.

             (O! du, eiliger Geselle,

             Eile doch nicht von der Stelle

             (A German first-grader)

             Who is it suddenly crying out

             So wickedly?

             But surely it is just that first-grader.

             Opening his eyes so wide

             Now, in the wee hours,

             Is that German first-grader.)

Did she pass through such a lonely station

Alone, and continue her journey?

In some direction that nobody knows,

Along an unknown path, to what kind of world

Did she take that lonely walk?

            (There are grasses and marshes.

            There is a single tree.)

            ((Giru-chan was sitting with a ghastly pale face.))

            ((Her eyes were wide open, but

            She didn’t seem to be seeing us.))

　　　　((Oh, I dare say, she, eyes glaring red,

            Narrowed the circle like so.))

            ((Shh. Break the circle and give me your hand.))

            ((Giru-chan looked so pale you could see right through her.))

            ((Oh, so many birds, so many birds burst across the sky

            As at sowing-time

            But Giru-chan maintained her silence.))

            ((The sun was a strange, toffee-like color.))

            ((Giru-chan didn’t look at us even a little

            And I felt horrendous.))

            ((She ran too fast through May’s three-leafed arrowheads.))

            ((Why didn’t Giru-chan look at us?

             ((Did she forget even us her playmates?))

But if I have to think about it

Then I have to think about it.

Toshiko passed in that manner

That everyone calls death.

I don’t know where she went after that.

It can’t be measured in our customary spatial directions,

When we try to sense that insensate direction,

Everyone whirls around giddily.

            ((A tinnitic roar, and I can hear no more.))

Having said this so kindly

It was clear that she could not hear the old familiar voices

Of the people around her whom she could still plainly see.

Suddenly she stopped breathing and her pulse failed,

And afterwards, when I ran to her,

Her beautiful eyes

Roved in vain as if looking for something.

They could no longer see our space.

What could she sense after that?

Surely she still had visions of our world

And hallucinated that she could hear it

As I, right by her ear,

Brought to her voices from far places.

The sky, love, apples, wind, the joyful origin of all the powers—

When I screamed, at the top of my lungs,

The name of the living being to whom all things return,

She took two breaths like little nods,

Her pointed white chin and cheeks trembled,

Coincidentally, the same face she made

When she was a little girl and had done something goofy.

But she definitely nodded.

            ((Dr. Haeckel!

            I would be greatly honored if you entrusted me

            With the peerless task of proof, of verification.))

From within the clouds of the silicate siesta,

That cowardly scream, as if being frozen…

            ((The evening we crossed Soya Strait,

            I stood on the deck all night.

            My unhelmed head cauled in a devious mist,

            My body filled with corrupted wishes,

            And so I decided to be truly defiant.))

Certainly she did nod.

And since, until the next morning,

Her chest remained warm,

After we cried out that she had died,

Toshiko could still sense the shape of this world.

And in that faint sleep, away from mania and pain,

She may have dreamed the way she dreamed here,

And I can’t help but feel that those serene dream-visions

That lead on to the next world

Might have been shining and fragrant.

You have no idea how much I wish that.

In fact, a piece of that dream

Drifted into that sunrise

Where Shigeko, among others,

Dozed exhausted from solicitude and sorrow.

             ((I’ll bring yellow flowers too…))

Surely Toshiko, in that daybreak,

Still within dreaming distance of this world,

Walked alone in an open field

Strewn with windblown leaves. As she so did,

Muttering as if she were someone else,

Going likewise into a lonely wood,

Did she turn into a bird?

Listening to l’estudiantina in the wind

In a dark grove of running waters

Did she fly off singing sadly?

And then, before long, did she wander aimlessly

With new friends who sang innocent songs

And sounded like little propellers

As they flew?

            No. I don’t think so.

Why isn’t some communication allowed?

It is allowed. The communication I got

Is the same as what our mother dreamed, caring for her on summer nights.

Why don’t I think that’s the case? It manifestly is.

Her dreams of the human world fading,

She senses a sky of rose-colored dawn,

Senses with her fresh new senses,

Senses smoke-like gossamers in the sunlight,

Glimmering, with a faint smile,

Passing the poles of light that crisscross

The glittering clouds and the frozen aromas,

Going that mysterious direction we call Upward.

Amazed that that is what it is,

She climbed, faster than Coriolis winds.

I can even trace those tracks.

There, looking out over a tranquil blue lake-surface,

Too smooth and too bright,

Seeming in some way to reflect absolutely everything,

A treeline shaken by sorrowful light…

I found such accurate transmission suspect,

And in time I became able to see,

In trembling joy, that it was the lapis lazuli surface of Heaven.

The music of the sky, flowing like ribbons,

Or like necklace pendants, or like dubious gossamer,

The living creatures with big feet,

Which aren’t going to leave, but do come and go,

The scent that flowers have in far-off memories—

Did she stand calmly amidst all this?

Or, after not hearing our voices,

A deep, bad, empty, dark-red cave,

Voices like sentient proteins being crushed,

The stench of sulfuric acid and laughing gas—

If she saw those in that place,

She would stand amidst them, pale with horror,

Not knowing if she was standing or staggering,

Hands on her cheeks, as if the dream itself were what was standing.

(Is it really true

That I feel this way these days?

Is it really possible

For such a one as I to see such things?

And yet I really am seeing.) thus

She might be brooding to herself…

These lonesome thoughts of mine

Come to everyone at night.

When day breaks and we reach the coast

And the waves are awash in sparkling light

Maybe everything will be all right.

But Toriko having died

Is no longer something I can think of as a dream

But a cruel reality,

Thinking on which I feel uneasy anew.

When sensing something is too raw,

Conceptualizing it instead

Can stop one from going mad.

It is certainly one of the defense mechanisms we the living have,

But one should not expect it to work forever.

After all, since she’s lost this world’s sense faculties,

What kind of body did she get?

And with what kind of sense faculties does she feel?

How often I think about this!

After so many experiments conducted once upon a time,

The Abhidharma tells us (see above)

“Don’t try this a second time.”

Ahead, monads of nephrite and silver

Are filled with gases emitted from the half moon.

The moonbeams permeate

The guts of the cirrocumulus,

Form a strange fluorescent screen,

Emanate more and more a bizarre scent of apples,

And seamlessly pass even through the cold windowpanes.

It is not just because this is Aomori;

Something like this tends to happen when the dawn moon

Enters the cirrocumulus…

            ((Oi, oi, that face of hers went pale))

Shut the fuck up!

Whether my dead little sister’s face

Went pale or went dark,

How can you speak of it?

Wherever she’s fallen

She already belongs to unexcelled enlightenment.

Whosoever advances there, full of strength,

Can bravely leap into any dimension.

Soon the steel of the east will shine.

In fact, today…or maybe yesterday, around noon,

At that heavy red pump, we…

            ((Listen up once more, please.

            Uh, actually,

            Her eyes then were white

            And didn’t want to shut right away.))

Do you ever shut up?

Soon, when the night’s egress opens,

Everything that is what it is,

Everything that sparkles how it sparkles,

Your weapons, and everything else of yours that isn’t a weapon,

All of which terrify you,

Will be shown in truth to be joyous and bright.

            ((Since from the beginning we are all siblings,

            You must never pray only for one.))

Oh, I have never done that.

Day and night, since she went away,

I do not think that even once

I have prayed that her, and only her,

Going to the good place would be enough.

A Poem by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

Matsuo Bashō is one of the most famous, popular, and influential poets in Japanese history, one of the early masters of the haiku form as a sort of truncated waka (5-7-5 rather than the traditional 5-7-5-7-7). He is a philosopher of some stature due to his poetry’s tendency to capture the sublime in the particular and immediate. His best-known writing is probably found in Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to Oku), a prose travelogue interspersed with haiku about the sights and culture of what was at the time far northeastern Japan.

Currently I miss my parents’ cat, Papako, herself named after a cat whom we met at a hotel in more or less the same part of Japan in 2013. (I highly recommend visits to Aomori especially for people who, like me, like snow, apples, and dramatic seaside landscapes.) Thus I decided to translate a Bashō haiku about a cat. This one touches on cats’ tendencies to be finicky about their food, one of the first things I ever noticed about them when my family got our first cat in my early childhood. It’s also arguably a bit sexist, but that’s a problem with most older literature in general, Japanese or otherwise. The poem appears in Aya Kusch’s lovely collection Cats in Spring Rain: A Celebration of Feline Charm in Japanese Art and Haiku. Her translation philosophy is a bit different from mine but still well worth a look.

麦飯にやつるる恋か猫の妻

A cat’s wife—has a lean diet worn thin her love?

Three Sea Poems by Kaneko Misuzu (1903-1930)

Kaneko Misuzu was a Japanese poet of the early twentieth century who specialized in children’s poetry, but the kind of children’s poetry that rips out one’s guts when one rereads it as an adult. She has been described as a sort of Japanese Christina Rossetti, but instead of Rossetti’s explicit and orthodox religious sensibility she shows a more characteristically Japanese grounding of religious ideas and religious meaning in the world around her. In particular, since Kaneko was a lifelong resident of a small fishing town until her suicide during a custody battle with her abusive ex-husband, her poetry shows a special love of the sea. I have translated three of her “sea poems” below.

The copyright situation for Kaneko’s work is somewhat more complicated than for other Japanese writers of her period, for reasons that I do not fully understand. For that reason, I’m putting these translations under a complete Creative Commons free-for-all provided they aren’t used for any commercial purposes; commercial purposes are what the current Japanese rights-holders explicitly advise against. My only motivation for posting these translations is a desire to share Kaneko’s poetry with the world, an altruistic approach that I think one owes her perhaps more than any of her contemporaries.

“The Whale Memorial Service” can also be found in the excellent collection Are You an Echo? by David Jacobson, Sally Ito, and Michiko Tsuboi, but I did not consult Are You an Echo? before translating my own version, in order to avoid rights issues in English.

To Sea

Grandpa went to sea.

Dad went to sea.

Big Brother went to sea.

Everyone, everyone went to sea.

Over the sea

Is a good place.

Once they've all gone out that way,

There's no coming home.

I, too, will soon

Grow up,

And go out to sea

In my turn.

❦

The Whale Memorial Service

When the late-spring flying fish season comes around,

They hold the Whale Memorial Service.

While the booming of the bells of the beachfront temple

Goes out over the surface of the water,

While the village fishermen put on their nice coats

And hurry to the beachfront temple,

As a whale calf all alone out on the water

Listens to the sound of those bells,

It weeps, weeps, heartsick

For its dead father and mother.

How far does the peal of the bell resound

Over the face of the sea?

❦

The Very End of the Sea

Over yonder’s where clouds spring up,

And where the rainbow has its root.

I want to get on a boat someday

And go to the very end of the sea.

It’s so far away, and it’s getting dark

And now I can’t see any of it…

You can harvest beautiful stars by hand,

Like picking red jujubes.

I want to go to the very end of the sea.

“Iroha”—Japanese poem, Heian period (late 8th through Late 12th Centuries)

I’m continuing my experiments with recapturing emotional and tonal effects in translation (see here and here) with this rendering of the Iroha poem, a Heian-era Japanese pangram (piece of writing containing every item in a writing system—in this case, every kana then in use in Japanese). This is actually not my preferred approach to translation—that hews a little bit closer to word-for-word rather than thought-for-thought or feeling-for-feeling—but it is one that interests me very much, especially when it comes to source material with which I am very familiar.

Since composing an English pangram that adequately translates any particular piece of foreign-language writing is probably impossible, I have gone with another venerable bit of formal wordplay, the acrostic. Acrostics, as well as their somewhat more freewheeling cousin alliteration, have been part of the English poetic tradition since the salad days of Cynewulf and Caedmon; they are currently not usually taken very seriously, but then, neither are pangrams. Cynewulf and Caedmon were religious poets; the Iroha is a religious poem; religion generally is not taken as seriously as it used to be in much of the world; these things happen.

A literal translation appears below my acrostic translation.

Iroha

Although the fragrant colors flourish

Loveliest flowers fade.

People, too, are of this world;

How could we endure?

Across the deep karmic mountains

Boldly we set out today,

Empty of deluded dreams—

Teetotalers we.

Colored flowers are fragrant, but will eventually scatter. Who in our world will exist forever? Karma’s deep mountains—we cross them today, and we shall not have frivolous dreams, nor become intoxicated.

いろはにほへと

ちりぬるを

わかよたれそ

つねならむ

うゐのおくやま

けふこえて

あさきゆめみし

ゑひもせす

Ten poems from the Kokinshū

Ki no Tomonori (850-904) and Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945), the cousinly dynamic duo behind the Kokin Wakashū or Kokinshū (古今和歌集, “Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems,” the first of the Imperial Poetry Anthologies), were no strangers to brutally hot and humid summer weather. These men lived in Kyoto, where I have been in July and where you could not pay me to go in July again. In the Kokinshū they have many seasonal poems attributing to summer imagery a certain cruelty and brutality; often these poems are about cicadas, symbols of both summer and impermanence. In the interests of making Classical Japanese poetry timely and relevant to those of us who are beginning to experience summer as a somewhat apocalyptic time, I have translated all ten of these cicada poems. They are numbers 73, 448, 543, 715, 716, 831, 833, 876, 1,035, and 1,101 in the anthology. 73, 448, 543, and 716 are anonymous; 715, 833, and 876 are by Ki no Tomonori himself; 831 and 1,035 are by other named individuals. 1,101 may or may not be by Ki no Tsurayuki himself; I’ve seen manuscripts attributing it to him and manuscripts in which it is unattributed.

Note that the death, rebirth, and apocalypse-related overtones of the cicada poems gradually diminish throughout the anthology. The second-to-last cicada poem in the book, number 1,035, is outright sentimental, but can be taken seriously to provide something of a way forward in hard, seemingly impossible times: put simply, people can get used to an awful lot.

73.

空蝉の世にもにたるか花ざくらさくと見しまにかつちりにけり

What, O cherry blossom, are you so like this cicada shell of a world?

I see you bloom, and in that moment already you scatter.

448.

Bush Clover*

空蝉のからは木ごとにとどむれどたまのゆくへを見ぬぞかなしき

As empty cicada shells cling to trees, thus the body is left in this world.

Yet how sad it is not to see the soul’s destination.

*Evidently “karahagi,” “bush clover,” the title of the poem, is a pun on からは木“kara ha ki,” “[something] empty [acting on] a tree.”

543.

あけたてば蝉のをりはへなきくらしよるはほたるのもえこそわたれ

From daybreak I spend the day crying without cease like a cicada.

By night my heart wavers and blazes like a firefly.

715.

By Ki no Tomonori. From a poetry contest held by Empress Dowager Tōin in the days of Emperor Uda (r. 887-897)

蝉のこゑきけばかなしな夏衣うすくや人のならむと思へば

A cicada cries; what a mournful sound.

I feel that person will become fickle, thin as summer clothes.

716.

空蝉の世の人ごとのしげければわすれぬもののかれぬべらなり

Hearsay leafing out verdantly in this cicada shell of a world

Will wither even the bonds I won't forget.

831.

By Monk Shōen. Composed after the Horikawa Chancellor’s (836-891) death and funeral at Mt. Fukakusa.

空蝉はからを見つつもなぐさめつ深草の山煙だにたて

Just viewing the empty cicada shell of his body was some consolation.

O Mt. Fukakusa, at least let the smoke rise high.

833.

By Ki no Tomonori. Composed after the death of Marquess Fujiwara no Toshiyuki (d. 901 or 907) and delivered to his house.

ねても見ゆねでも見えけりおほかたは空蝉の世ぞ夢には有りける

Sleeping and waking, I see him still.

It is true what they say—this cicada shell of a world is as a dream.

876.

By Ki no Tomonori. Once when he stayed over at someone’s house to avoid going in an unlucky direction, his host lent him a robe to wear at night, and he composed this poem upon returning it the next morning.

This night garment is as light as a cicada’s wings.

Yet how heavy hangs and spreads the lingering fragrance.

1,035.

By Mitsune, either the famed poet Ōshikōchi no Mitsune (859-925) or another man or woman with the same (unisex) given name.

蝉の羽のひとへにうすき夏衣なればよりなむ物にやはあらぬ

A bond grows more comfortable with wear, like an unlined summer garment

With nothing under it, the thinness of a cicada's wings.

1,101.

Cicadas*

そま人は宮木ひくらしあしひきの山の山びこよびとよむなり

Woodsmen have been felling trees for the shrine all day.

From the footsore mountains mountain-echoes resound.

*The word used for “cicada” in this title, “higurashi,” is not the word, “semi,” used elsewhere in the anthology. It is a pun on ひくらし “hikurashi,” “all day.” The pun on “all day” and a symbol of impermanence or fragility would not have been lost on the tenth-century Japanese readership.

宮 “miya” can mean either “palace” or “shrine.” I depart from most translators here by giving it the sense “shrine.”

“Waiting for the Barbarians”—Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)

Yes, I am able to read and translate from Greek as well as Japanese, although I’m much rustier (and really limited to translating relatively short poems, whereas in Japanese I simply prefer to do so).

Cavafy is one of the great gay poets of modern times but this particular poem, one of his most famous, has little of the erotic in it. It is rather one of the most accomplished, lapidary, and devastating portrayals in our poetry of a civilization in self-involved decline—rather like Verlaine’s Empire à la fin de la décadence, only regarding les grands Barbares blancs as, quite deliberately and self-consciously, an excuse. I think that Cavafy’s poem contains messages for our current age, unfortunately.

I’ve indulged in a couple of colloquialisms that most people who translate this poem don’t. It’s supposed to represent phrasings that I find especially snide or sardonic in other ways in the original.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Why are we awaiting, gathered in the agora?

Because the barbarians arrive today.

❦

Why such inaction in the Senate?

Why do the Senators just sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians arrive today.

What would the Senate bother to legislate about?

The barbarians will legislate when they get here.

❦

Why did our Emperor get up so early this morning

And go to sit in the great gate of the city

Upright on his throne, in state, crowned?

Because the barbarians arrive today

And our Emperor is waiting to receive

Their leader. He went so far as to prepare

A parchment for him, festooned with titles

And names to bestow upon him.

❦

Why have our Consuls and Praetors come out

Today, in their embroidered crimson togas?

Why have they put on their amethyst-choked bracelets

And rings of bright, gleaming emeralds?

Why wield they their precious sceptres,

Blinged out, as they say, with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians arrive today,

And things like that amaze the barbarians.

❦

Why don’t the orators come out like always,

To lay it on the line, to say their piece?

Because the barbarians arrive today,

And rhetorical flourishes bore them.

❦

Why so worried all of a sudden,

So confused? (How serious everyone’s faces are!)

Why do the plazas and avenues empty so quickly,

Everyone loping home, so pensive?

Because it is night, and the barbarians have not arrived

And some coming in over the frontier

Say there are no longer such things as barbarians.

❦

What will become of us without barbarians?

Those people were, from a certain point of view, a solution.

A poem by Saigyō (1118-1190)

This waka (the “most traditional” Japanese poetic form—the 5-7-5 familiar from haiku, followed by two more lines of seven morae each) is the work of the twelfth-century monk-poet Saigyō. It appears in the seventeenth volume of 1205's Shin Kokin Wakashū (新古今和歌集, “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems”), the eighth of the twenty-one Imperial Poetry Anthologies, whose intermediate points in the sequence is reflected in its modifier-heavy title. The doves in the poem make me think of this as something of a “Pentecost special,” especially since there is plenty of explicitly Pentecost-themed literature, such as Eliot's “Four Quartets” or O'Connor's “The Enduring Chill,” with just as morose a style and tone.

Many of Saigyō's poems, as with those of his later emulator Bashō, are unmediated descriptions of experiences he had traveling around Japan. In perhaps no other literature is the travelogue as august a literary form. Japan mastered it as early and as thoroughly as Occitania mastered the lyric poem or England the novel.

古畑の そばの立つ木に ゐる鳩の 友呼ぶ声の すごき夕暮れ

The voice of a dove calling for a companion from a tall tree—

The awesome sereness of this field at dusk.

Three poems from “Roses and Hanako”—Yosano Akiko (1878-1942)

These translations, like my translation of “Aomori Elegy III,” I undertook almost a decade ago for an undergraduate final. I stand by the way I translated these a bit more strongly than by the way I translated “Aomori Elegy” due to the simpler language. Yosano was a pioneering Modernist poet, but these poems were for her young daughter and most of the language in them is very direct. Think of this as a belated holiday upload; Children’s Day in Japan is May 5.

Yosano was for most of her life a progressive and feminist figure; unfortunately, in the last ten or twelve years of her life she veered sharply to the right. She died strongly supportive of Japan’s war aims in the Pacific Theater of World War II. I do not condone her views from this late period or the writing that she produced based on those views; a future upload will include my translations of an early antiwar poem and a late pro-war poem so that readers of English can see for themselves both the changes in Yosano’s beliefs and the decay of her poetic powers. However, the poems in Bara to Hanako (薔薇と華子 in prewar orthography) predate all that. The collection appears in volume 6 of her 2007 Complete Works (全集 zenshū); the poems in it were composed around 1927.

To my knowledge, Bara to Hanako has never had a translation published before and is in the public domain in Japan, whose copyright regime is the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. I’m electing to put these translations under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on these translations only if they attribute the translation to both Yosano Akiko and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

Roses and Hanako

The rose blossoms in Hanako’s garden,

because they are roses that Hanako planted

bloom looking just like her.

Their color is the color in Hanako’s cheeks,

the blossoms are in Hanako’s lips,

looking just like her, rose blossoms.

The rose blossoms in Hanako’s garden,

when the roses are pretty, if the sun too

scatters down its golden oil,

when the roses are pretty, a zephyr of air

comes to clothe them with the gauzy silk

in waves that cannot be seen by the eye.

In keeping with Hanako’s singing-day

the roses too take fragrant breaths

piping their voices like Hanako,

and in keeping with Hanako’s dancing-day

the roses too gently shake their forms

swaying like Hanako.

And on days when Hanako is out

they cover the eyes in which tears have welled,

those motionless downcast rose blossoms.

The meekness of the roses’ hearts,

this too is just like Hanako.

The rose blossoms in Hanako’s garden.

 ❦

Aeroplane

There, there, the passing aeroplane,

today too oblique to the city,

quavers with its wind-cutting sound,

with nimble carriage, way up on high

the fine form with outspread wings.

Put an opera glass to your eye,

and if you lift your eyes to the young passengers

who with thick stomachs took to the roads in the sky,

from the somewhat twisted fuselage,

sparkling golden reflections shine brilliantly.

The naïveté of the young passengers,

forsaking the hindmost, forgetting death,

not stopping for an instant, becoming

a new power they go flying on.

Forward, to the future, at full speed.

 ❦

Autumn is Come

Cool, cool, autumn is come,

Hanako’s beloved autumn is come.

The sky, of course, and the colors of the sun

and the water and the air and the blowing wind

neatly arrayed, clear up altogether.

Still more if it is a quiet night

little Hanako sits and reads

interesting fairy tales, and beside her

are the moon’s chilly golden color

and the insects’ dingdong ringing voices.

As thought up by little Hanako,

as when amidst the bamboo the beautiful

Princess Kaguya was found,

it is just that kind of an autumn day.

Cool, cool, autumn is come.

“Aomori Elegy III”—Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)

I did this translation almost a decade ago, as part of my final for an upper-level undergraduate course called Readings in Modern Japanese II. If I were doing this translation today it would probably be significantly different, but I am preserving the way I initially did it.

Miyazawa wrote several versions of “Aomori Elegy” (青森挽歌 Aomori banka), most much longer than this one. It is a Modernist poem that in some versions has pronounced Buddhist themes; in all of its forms, it represents Miyazawa’s efforts to come to term with the early death of his younger sister Toshiko.

This particular version has never had a translation published before and is in the public domain in Japan, whose copyright regime is the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. I’m electing to put this translation under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on this translation only if they attribute the translation to both Miyazawa Kenji and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

Aomori Elegy III

In the remaining mist of the thawed silicate siesta[1]

through the icy glass of the windows

the scent of apples drawing unto dawn

becoming a transparent cord flows in.

And outside monads of nephrite and silver

as they are full of gas emitted from the half-moon

into the guts of cirrocumulus

the moonbeams piercing through

make a weirder fluorescent plate

exude the weirder and weirder scent or light

that comes through the very smooth hard glass.

❦

It is not that it is because it is Aomori

but that it is more or less a phenomenon that always occurs

when the moon enters the cirrocumulus

that appears like this near to the dawn

or remains melting in the blue sky.

When I stand up in this berth by night

more or less everybody is sleeping.

In the seats in the midst of the right-hand side

pale opened peacock feathers

the child nursing a soft grass-colored dream

Toshiko, they look like you.

❦

“Sometimes in life we see our perfect double

at the Hōryūji depot

in some other steam train

a child exactly the same.”

On some morning so Father said.

And it seems it was me

in the December after that person died

as if it was yeast the fine snow

the most severe driving snowstorm

came down as I ran down the slope from school.

Before the pure white glass of Yanagisawa Clothiers

within the smoke of that indigo evening cloud

I met a woman in a black cloak.

Her eyes were hidden in her head-covering

her jaw was white and her teeth clean

and she looked at me as if to laugh a little.

(Naturally this pertained to the refractive index of the wind and the clouds.)

I nearly screamed.

(What, you, saying some plausible thing

like “you died”?

Yet here you are now walking around.)

Still surely I so screamed.

But since it was in that kind of tempestuous snowstorm

that voice was lost in the wind

having disintegrated into the wind I am bereft[2].

❦

“In the great house that commands such a view of the ocean

when I slept with my face upturned

with a hello-hello-hello-hello

over and over again the policeman awoke me.”

Those wrinkled loose white clothes

in the evening, one night, under that kind of electric light of yours

the senior-high-school teacher who sat down there

when he arrived in Aomori

did he say to eat an apple?

The sea is shining all around

and around now there are no crimson apples.

If it was fresh green apples he meant

those are certainly ready now.

[1] Neologism; compound; meaning is unclear; both words are now obscure.

[2] Literally “have lost a part”.

“Hakata Lullaby”—Japanese popular song, Late 19th or Early 20th Century

“Hakata Lullaby” (博多子守歌 Hakata komoriuta) is a comic folk song (with a dark twist at the end) written by an anonymous nursemaid (子守 komori), probably a teenage girl, in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Japan. These nursemaids did not necessarily work in the grand households that might have had domestic servants in the West; often they worked for other working-class people, whose luck had simply not been as hard as their own. However, the master and mistress of this particular song might have had upper-class pretensions, since the mistress is described as 渋う shibuu, which has a double meaning of “astringent, bitter” and “austere, understated, tasteful”; I have translated it “elegant, but dour.”

The first stanza contains a lurking allusion to the sex trade by way of the word “willow” (柳 yanagi). An alternate reading of the character for “willow” was (and still is) used to describe geisha, who do not sell sex as an integral part of their profession but in many cases do so on the side. The reference to the “willow” that is the nursemaid’s own body in particular draws attention to the fact that, for many former nursemaids, the sex trade was their only viable future option. “Yanagimachi,” the “willow district” of the city of Hakata (now a neighborhood of Fukuoka in southwestern Japan), was known as a red light district in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’m indebted to Franklin Odo’s magnificent book Voices from the Canefield: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai’i for alerting me to this song’s arresting, disturbing final stanza, which led to my decision to translate the whole song.

The decision to use the singsongy 7.6.7.6. meter in English (technically, ballad meter with hypometric tetrameters for the longer lines and an XAXA rhyme scheme) was taken because the poetic form in Japanese is nominally intended to be sung to children (although I can’t imagine any child in their right mind enjoying this particular lullaby). A literal translation of the Japanese text that I am using, which I ran across in certain old books and musical recordings, appears below the metrical translation.

Hakata Lullaby

In Hakata’s “Willow District”

No trees have lately swayed.

The willow-withy there is

The figure of a maid.

The Mistress of this household

Is bad-persimmon-sour:

A lovely treat to look at,

Elegant, but dour.

The Master of this household

Is of a high estate;

And as to what is meant here—

As a drinker, he’s first-rate.

O Mistress, listen closely.

And Master, listen, you.

If you abuse the nursemaid

Then baby gets it too.

In Yanagimachi, Hakata, there are no willows. A girl’s figure is the body of the willow.

The mistress of the house is like a bad persimmon. She’s lovely to look at, but austere to the point of bitterness.

The master of the house is of a high station in life. What kind of station is this? A grade of sake.

Listen well, Mistress; you listen too, Master. If you do evil to the nursemaid, she’ll take it out on the child.

博多柳町　柳はないが

むすめ姿が　柳腰

うちの御 寮さんな　がらがら柿よ

見かきゃよけれど　渋うござる

うちのお父つあんな　位がござる

なーんの位か　酒くらい

御寮よく聞け　旦那も聞けよ

守りに悪すりゃ　子にあたる