Because of the demands of work and writing, I will be stepping away from this blog for a while. I hope to return when the time is right! Thanks for reading, everyone.
We heard father’s voice A low voice, ooooh, ooooh My little brother clung to me and cried out to me, Is he dead? Maybe he’s not? When I went to ask Mother went into the bathroom, caressed father, groaned, and gasped She came out smiling
-Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Action Books, 2015)
ARAI Takako “Galapagos” 新井高子「ガラパゴス」
In the first few months after the March 11, 2011 disaster in Japan, a series of poetry vigils were held throughout the country, bringing together both new and established writers working in various genres. The result was the construction of a relatively democratic atmosphere in the literary world in which people could share their new works inspired by the disasters in the hopes of raising consciousness about the problems and money for the disaster victims. Arai Takako was a frequent participant in these public poetry vigils. Among the poems she read during these readings were a number that were eventually published in her 2013 book Beds and Looms (Betto to shoki). Among them is the satirical and humorous poem Galapagos (Garapagosu). The title comes from the fact that commentators, especially in the wake of 2011, sometimes compared the Japanese archipelago to the isolated group of Ecuadorian islands where change takes place at its own unique pace. Specifically, the word is frequently invoked in metaphors to describe the ways that Japanese business and economic development proceeds according to its own, local logic, cut off from the desires, needs, and practices of the rest of the world. With its playful tone and quick wit, Arai’s poem helped to lighten the somber atmosphere of the vigils, and quickly became an audience favorite.
Galapagos
Just gossip! The damn economy is Just a fairy tale! Stock prices, Come on and do it! Make fun of them all the more I’m sick of it All this goth clothing, all this Uniqlo-ing
It’s a mess! Eros Left out all the time! Thanatos Bring it back to life! Alienate them all the more Incessant cellphones Microsoft monsters
――― Isn’t that all you’d ever let us wear? Wasn’t that our national uniform? Before the quake The tsunami of the recession All we ever worried about?
That Is our protective wear It thrives on adversity It can withstand high waves Up to six meters tall No It’s more like swimming gear It looks like it might drown In the cold global Womb of grotesque globalism In Lehman Brothers Salaried men Don’t want anything Don’t say anything Won’t do anything, won’t do it anymore Girls, boys, the intermediate sex Not more procreating, unisex Just look At that fission They say they can’t get any fusion Between those sperm-like neutrons
It’s just been let go! Nuclear fission Just exposed! The womb of the reactor dome too Fuel rods (nenryōbō), safety hats (anzenbō), egg cells (ransaibō), stinginess (kechinbō), thieves (dorobō), Refrigerators (reibō), heaters (danbō), Babies (akanbō), deceased (butsunbō), floating (ukabō) on the great plain of the sea, on the verge of screaming (orabō), The reactor building about to fly off (buttobō), Embankments (teibō), conspiracies (inbō), ministerial offices (kanbō), Unbelievabō Incredibō TEPCO Puts on their Uniqlo To bulwark The tsunami
We’ll make electricity In our con-domes Is a half-life Good enough?
Us
– Translated by Jeffrey Angles
Translator’s note: As she watched the press coverage of the Fukushima meltdown, Arai was surprised that by complete coincidence, many of the vocabulary items that had started filling the news ended with the sound bō—nenryōbō (fuel rods), anzenbō (safety hats), teibō (embankments), inbō (conspiracies), kanbō (ministerial offices), and so on. Arai produces a flood of these words in rapid succession, replicating in her own particular satirical way the small tsunami of these words that washed over the Japanese press in the wake of 3.11.
Although this poem evokes laughs, it also touches upon many serious themes. She has taken many of the issues that filled headlines in the Japanese press in the year after the Fukushima meltdown and synthesized them into an organic whole: the downturn in the Japanese economy, the ongoing nuclear crisis, and even the success of the inexpensive popular clothing store Uniqlo, which is so popular that it began to look like a national uniform. In fact, in the wake of so much bad news in 2011, Uniqlo’s entry into several new, major global markets in 2012 proved to be a ray of hope to the media, which seized upon it as a step forward for Japanese business and the economy. Given this publicity, it is perhaps no surprise that Arai singles out Uniqlo for particular attention in this poem.
Elsewhere in the poem, Arai makes a brilliantly playful reference to the media’s ongoing concern about the low national birthrate using the image of nuclear reactions. Arai notes that, given the low birth rate, Japan does not have much “fusion” of sperm and ova; instead what the Japanese population has is mostly “fission”—namely the breaking apart of radioactive isotopes at the meltdown at Fukushima. Arai begins to criticize the discriminatory idea, circulated in the popular media and on blogs, that young people from Fukushima who had exposure to radiation should consider using condoms rather than having unprotected sex for fear that radiation might have affected the genetic information in their reproductive organs. In fact, when asked about this poem in 2013, she commented that when she encountered media coverage warning Fukushima residents to use condoms, she thought, “My goodness! Fukushima affected everything about us, even our sex lives!”
In the final stanza, she jokingly suggests that since the top has blown off the dome-shaped inner reactor at Fukushima, the population now has to use condoms, and perhaps that that friction should be the way that Japan should produce its energy. The ambiguous final question “Is a half-life / Good enough?” (hangenki / de ii no ka) could be read in a couple of ways. The word translated here as “half-life” (hangeki) meaning the period which it takes a radioactive particle to lose half of its radioactivity, is written in Japanese with three characters meaning “a period of lessening by half.” Although obviously inspired by the word from chemistry, Arai is using it here to ask if whether or not it makes sense to have a period during which sexual pleasure is lessened or perhaps diminished by the barrier of the condom, especially in the light of the issue of Japan’s low birth rate, even though conservatives might feel a longer period of refraining from direct, procreative sexual contact is warranted.
Arai leaves these questions unresolved and hanging in the air, followed only by the single word watashi-tachi, meaning “us” or “we.” Interestingly, this word is not grammatically connected to the lines before it and thus exists in isolation from the rest of the work. The reader is left pondering the relationship between the word and the themes presented elsewhere. First of all, who is the “us/we”? The author and her partner? Perhaps a larger pool of people—the author and her readers, wherever in Japan they might live? Perhaps the entire population of Japan? And more importantly, what is the relationship between the “us/we” (however it may be defined) and the themes presented elsewhere in the work? How will Fukushima affect “us”? Arai leaves those questions enticingly and provocatively open. She provides no simple solutions or answers, perhaps because solutions or answers have yet to emerge from the wreckage of Fukushima.
An earlier version of this translation appeared in the journal Poetry Kanto.
TAKAHASHI Mutsuo “As For This Moment” 高橋睦郎「いまは」
As for This Moment
The first things that broke down were words
The reason we did not notice was because Their destruction came so slowly
We noticed after the world had ended
When we tried to mend cracks and cave-ins
Words did not respond
That was when we finally understood
That the world is made of words
When words slowly broke down
The world, unseen, broke down as well
*
It may be that the broken world might be restored
It may be that words will not work for that It is probably best not to rush
Words broken over time
Can only heal with time
Best not to put too much faith in the idea That if broken, they will heal themselves
Know this instead, that when words broke down
You broke down as well
That you too are made of words
*
Best now to remember yourself before the dawn
A single word was born in the darkness inside you
The newborn word called another word to it
Words joined hands and rose up together
At that moment, you stood, an infant unafraid
The world of youth rose up precariously
You did not rush back then
You did not even know to rush
You should remember that time
You are before the dawn once again
*
Scientists tell us
The world started with the big bang
If that theory is right
Then the world started with destruction
The world, as it began, rose up slowly
From our perspective, the world began With a word, but it did not rush
It grew weak over time, slowly waiting
If we too are to rise with the word
Then we too should follow its example and wait
*
You think that you must sing
But you lament that you cannot
Your silence is likely a sign To you and world, both broken, to wait
Sleep with the darkness, rise with the light
Wait patiently through your daily work
For one word, then another To wake within and rise up
That moment will be the end and the beginning of the world We will have grown old and, in the same moment, reborn
– Translated by Jeffrey Angles
Translator’s Notes:
In anticipation of the one-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 disasters, the editors at Handbook of Contemporary Poetry『現代詩手帳』, cooperated with Asahi Shimbun『朝日新聞』, one of Japan’s largest daily newspapers, to publish a series of disaster-related poems by a variety of Japan’s most prominent poets. Takahashi Mutsuo’s contribution, entitled “As for This Moment” 「いまは」, which is dated New Year’s Day of 2012, takes on the large and thorny subject of the relationship between language and disasters. In this work, Takahashi seems to be addressing himself, as well as all of the other authors who were struggling with the question of how to write in the face of the apocalyptic disasters of 2011. This poem shows the extent to which 3.11 was also a disaster in art and language—enormous, difficult, traumatic events that seemed to belie any attempts to express them. Fukushima brought about not just a crisis on the ground; it brought about a crisis in representation and language as well. Indeed, it is never easy to find ways to represent destruction and trauma on such an enormous scale, but Takahashi sees this inability as symptomatic of a great, deeper problem. Language, literature, and poetry had already moved so far away from the ordinary lives of people that when poets attempt to deal with the disasters in the aftermath of the crisis, their writing did not come across as sincere or meaningful. In the continuation of the poem, however, Takahashi suggests that it is possible for this situation to change. He compares the disasters to the Big Bang, which created the world in a stupendous act of destruction, implying that the massive destruction of 3.11 can provide a creative burst of energy in which a new world of poetic representation could—and should—emerge.
TAKAHASHI Mutsuo “Since Then” and “Lovers in a Time of Nuclear Energy” 高橋睦郎「あの時から」「原子力時代の恋人たち」
The poems “Since Then” (あの時から), and “Lovers in a Time of Nuclear Energy” (原子力時代の恋人たち), appeared in the January 2012 issue of Handbook of Contemporary Poetry『現代詩手帖』. Takahashi has commented in private conversations that these two poems were among the works that he considers to be the greatest successes of his poems about the March 11, 2011 disasters.
Since Then Then the wall of separation collapsed
Since then, our world has been both this world and that
Food in this world was bathed in cruel, radiating light
Becoming, just like that, food of death, scorched in the flames of that other world
We face one another across a blanched table, exchanging glances
Both of us alive, yet also pale inhabitants of that world
Look, outside the windows covered with black cloth, a herd of starved cattle
From that world overflows the streets, drooling as they march
The black dogs of Hades bare their fangs, about to bark
—No, to tell the truth This world and that were contiguous right from the start
We never acknowledged it, but all that separated them
Was our own consciousness—in that moment The walls suddenly disappeared from our minds
Since then, we have all been people of that world
Squatting in the rubble of that world, which is also our own
Even though no death or resurrection will come
Lovers in a Time of Nuclear Power
You, the ones I love, I love, I love
You, my lovers in in an age of nuclear power
Beyond the window covered in black cloth
There is not a single tree to cast a shadow
Nor a single bird to wing through the air
Our field of vision is filled with thronging towers of flame Invisible, infinitesimal gods that split and fissure continuously
Sealed in darkness, we are buck-naked
There is no day, nor night, hundreds of times
No, thousands of times, we suck at one another
Ten thousand times, one hundred thousand times
We rub ourselves together
Now, no love juices overflow, no words of love leak
We discharge blood-water, painful itches run through our branches
The dead, dead, dead children born of our imaginary childbirth
Are covered in blood, for them we open the garbage in the corner of the room
We are reduced to skin and bones, our skeletons show through
Wrinkled sacks of skin merely holding dried-up organs
Our thin chests press against one another, our pelvises shudder without end
Other than one another’s eye sockets which we seek out
We do not see, nor do we try to All we have are one another, the partners we will love
Perhaps we are making love now, that is unclear
We suck at one another, we bite one another, we indulge ourselves
Until there is no we, nor me, nor you In the world of light beyond the window covered in black cloth
There are no longer any earth and stars, our field of vision
Is filled with forests of towers of our endless desire
That continue to multiply, that continue to spew out flame
–Translated by Jeffrey Angles
Translator’s Notes: “Since Then” The image of starving cattle in line seven derived its inspiration from the animals abandoned when farmers quickly and unceremoniously evacuated the area around the Fukushima reactors, but at the same time, this image also echoes an image out of the Bible. During his youth, Takahashi spent a year convalescing from tuberculosis in a Catholic hospital, and since he spent the year reading and studying the Bible, Biblical motifs have frequently appeared in his work. Given this, one might interpret the starving herd of cattle as a reference to Genesis 41: 2, in which the Egyptian pharaoh dreams of seven starving cattle—an inauspicious dream that foretells a disaster that will last for seven years. The image of wild, barking dogs outside also brings to mind the image of feral animals wandering through the abandoned streets of Fukushima, yet the reference to the Greek myth of Hades—another consistent source of inspiration for Takahashi—is used to illustrate the extent to which the wild world of death and destruction has spilled over into the ordinary world of everyday existence as it existed before the meltdown.
Like the work analyzed earlier, this poem suggests how problematic it was that people assumed that they could benefit from nuclear energy while ignoring potential negative side effects. Before the Fukushima meltdown, Takahashi notes in this poem that before the meltdown, the population’s thoughts about their daily lives and the potential dangers of the reactors were kept apart by a conceptual wall that prevented them from seeing their daily life of consumption and casual energy use as connected to the nuclear threat in their own backyard. The Fukushima meltdown, however, revealed the disastrous outcome of this contradictory tendency to seek comfort while ignoring the exploitation of resources that made such comfort possible. It is essential, Takahashi believes, for humanity to recognize that the Fukushima meltdown and the destruction that it brought about were not mere accidents. They were the result of a worldview that held that people could engage in unending consumption even while ignoring the factors making that life possible. Now that the meltdown had revealed the falsehood of the myth of unproblematic, endless consumption, no one would come to save Japan’s population; the responsibility to fix the problem lay with themselves.
“Lovers in a Time of Nuclear Power”
This allegorical poem, which draws inspiration for its title from the famous novel by Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), builds upon the theme of nuclear power as an expression of human greed and desire; in fact, Takahashi uses in the poem the image of an endless orgy to describe the nuclear chain reaction occurring inside a nuclear plant. He imagines these orgiastic exchanges inside the reactor producing nothing but an endless stream of dead and bloody children like toxic waste; meanwhile, the number of dangerous, flame-spurting nuclear reactor towers multiplies outside. Nobody seems to notice, as all of the “lovers” in the reactor are so devoted to the single-minded pursuit of comfort and pleasure. It is significant that in passages such as “We do not see, nor do we try to,” the narrative voice identifies the orgiastic, desiring atoms using the vague pronoun “we” (watashi-tachi), which could refer to the entire Japanese population, or perhaps even all of modern civilization as a whole. Once again, Takahashi finds the root causes of the Fukushima disasters to lie with the contemporary society and its single-minded devotion to comfort and pleasure, even while ignoring the effects of that devotion.
TAKAHASHI Mutsuo “These Things Here and Now”
高橋睦郎「いまここにこれらのことを」
For a film of Takahashi reading selections from this poem, click here. The original Japanese for this poem, written in response to the March 11, 2011 disasters in Japan, was published in the June 2011 issue of the poetry journal『現代詩手帖』Handbook of Contemporary Poetry.
TAKAHASHI Mutsuo These Things Here and
Now
If April is the cruelest month in that country Then March was even unrelenting in this country As the snow danced on top the sea It crashed one layer of seabed into another Mixing new desires into the ancient memories of
tide Seawater, awakened from slumber, grew into great
waves Took aim at the land, and descended again and
again Leaving vast quantities of debris and mountains
of sadness We watched this over and over as we wandered the
line Between dream and wakefulness
*
It was not just daily life as we once knew it That the black wave of March assaulted The Dwarf God imprisoned under tight control
suddenly escaped Swelled before our eyes into Daimajin, filling
heaven and earth People set adrift whole settlements at a time Not just one village, not just one town But an entire country, no, the entire world Entered into an endless Era of drift
*
The rain came (Rain mixing with snow, snow mixing with rain) The rain falls (Will the rain bathe the rubble and soothe the
dead?) The rain falls (Will the rain console all the people washed
away and caress the abandoned fields?) The rain falls (Will the rain cool the blazing reactor and
pacify the wild nucleus?) The rain falls (Does the rain represent hope or yet another
disaster?) The rain falls (The rain continues to fall on the broken land
and sickly sea)
*
Let us collect our thoughts, what is nuclear
power? Mother Nature’s greatest gift to humanity, or
rather, The miscarriage after the child rapes and
impregnates its own mother? Isn’t it true that we shut a demon in a cage and
forced it to work Then when its power was gone, we had it buried
alive? Isn’t it true that the buried, anguished corpse
has regained its breath And has returned, harboring its anxiety and fear
for revenge? Now is the time it reveals its secrets tucked
away
*
The rain lets up and a great rainbow hangs in
the sky Not the rainbow of promise, but terrifying
rainbow of our sentencing Deformed
fish will lose their teeth and flood our shores Sick
fruit, smeared with blood, will fall on our land The
wind, carrying abundant poison, will grow wet and heavy The
light will turn into countless needles and attack us persistently All
of our organs will rise in revolt inside Our
brains will burn with fever, broil, and melt We close our windows and cover the glass with
cloths But the flood of color that has burned its way
into our membranes Does not disappear, even when we close and rub
our eyes
*
We leave the televisions on and watch We read and reread the newspapers from top to
bottom We scour the internet for unpoisoned vegetables We call all over looking for non-radiated water Are we onlookers disguised in our masks and
sunglasses? If so, we are also victims and wanderers We float along in the arks of our homes Sufferers who float along continuously Not knowing our destination
*
What heals the sufferer is only more suffering We rail against the outrageousness of fate and
tear at our shirts We protest against the unfairness of providence
and weep continuously When cries catch in the throat, they comfort the
lamenter The flow of tears eventually purifies the one
who weeps But we are not comforted, we are not purified The reason is that our grievances and protests Are finally against ourselves, our avarice, and
our idleness We cannot be easily comforted We cannot be easily purified We must be scorned over and over We must be beaten over and over again
*
Will we be fortunate? If so, we must prick
up our ears all the more We must turn our eyes to what has remained The mute words of the countless dead snatched by
the waves The silence of the swelling numbers of displaced
withstanding privation And the brilliance of the youth who have stood
up from inaction Supporting them is none other than the silence
of the dead and displaced What we must learn is their anonymity, their
gracious unconditionality
*
I write these things here and now It does not matter that I, the writer, am anyone
in particular I should be a person without name and without
individuality A person with eyes but without a face, with
hands tied directly to sight Hands that must remember how to write in the
darkness Eyes that must see neither hope nor disappointment,
only truth
Translated by Jeffrey Angles
Translator’s note: Daimajin literally means “the god of great trouble.” An earlier version of this poem appeared on the website of Connotations Press.
伊藤比呂美『河原荒草』の英訳のビデオCM
Paul Cunningham at Action Books has just produced this short commercial for my translation of the book Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Itō. The alternation between quiet and crescendo, inertia and energy, organic and inorganic that Paul has captured so nicely in this video gets right at the heart of this beautiful and nightmarish little book. The black and white photos in this video are of the overgrown banks of the River Tsuboi in Kumamoto, right outside Itō’s flat. It was that landscape, covered in plant life so thick that is practically festering, that inspired many of the crucial scenes on this book.
A・K・アフェレズによる伊藤比呂美『河原荒草』の新書評 A.K. Afferez on Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank
Here is an excerpt of a new, enthusiastic review. For the entire review, click here.
More than a Bildungsroman in verse, more than an epic for the modern ages, Wild Grass on the Riverbank subverts traditional literary and symbolic binaries—poetry vs. prose vs. drama, stream of consciousness vs. fragmentation, folk tales and traditional songs vs. modernity and pop songs, childhood vs. adulthood … Told from the point of view of the young girl, the result is a collage narrative that takes us to the furthest limits of what is visible and tangible in the human experience. Whether in verse or in prose, the poem forms an unfettered flow of thoughts structured around repetition and refrain, expressing saturation, and materializing the grass and vines that overtake everything in the landscape.
was born in Tokyo, moved to New York at the age of 12, and studied French literature at Yale University. Acclaimed for her audacious experimentation and skilful storytelling, Mizumura has won major literary awards for all four of her novels, one of which, a true novel, was published in English in 2013. The English translation of her bestselling book of criticism, the fall of language in the age of english, was published in January 2015. She lives in Tokyo.
Juliet Winters Carpenter studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. She is a two-time recipient of the Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, first in 1980 for her translation of Kobo Abe’s novel secret rendezvous and again in 2014-15 for her translation of Minae Mizumura’s a true novel.
“Informed by a brilliant ferality and tour-de-force grotesqueries, Wild Grass on the Riverbank plays upon elements of traditional Japanese sekkyō-bushi to explore the weird defamiliarizations and surreal transplantations of postmodern diaspora. Diaspora is infused with the organic horrors of sexual vines and seedpods, invasive spores, reanimated decomp, and naturalization means to be eaten alive by bugs and wild grasses. A challenging linguistic undertaking deftly translated by Jeffrey Angles, this is a stunningly brutal and relentlessly innovative book by Japan’s ‘shamaness of poetry.’”
- Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Dandarians
伊藤比呂美「コヨーテ」（朗読ｘ音楽）
I just found this video of a reading of one of Itō Hiromi’s most important and often anthologized poems, “Coyote,” with musical accompaniment. The reading is by Kawauchi Banri 河内伴理, the keyboards by Matsuura Kenta 松浦健太, and guitar by H. Yasuno. I am not sure that this is the music that I would have imagined for this particular poem, but those conceptual differences are what makes listening to literature so interesting.
Anthologies from the past decade—such as The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003), and Not For Mother Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing(Fence Books, 2007)—attest to the diversity of poetry about motherhood and resonate with Sylvia Plath’s observation in her poem “Morning Song”: “Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.” Three recent books, all from 2009, further magnify this vibrant field: Rachel McKibbens’ Pink Elephant, Hoa Nguyen’s Hecate Lochia, and Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Ito.
I couldn’t be more thrilled. One of the most provocatively poetic of young American novelists, Blake Butler (author of There is No Year), has written a review of my new translation of Hiromi Itō's Wild Grass on the Riverbank on the website Vice. In it, he writes,
The work follows the travel of a family of many children, their mother, and a father who is both alive and dead, through fields of insane fauna, dystopian wasteland landscape, eerie haunted temporary homes, refrains of song fragments, skin plagues, and breakouts.
Reminiscent of the plunging-network narratives of Alice Notley's Descent of Alette and Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the book goes into both the multivalent psyches of the human landscape and the ground we walk on, forging between them a trek that is by turns spiritual, spasmodic, romantic, furious, contemplative, and insane.
For the entire review, click here. The photo that appears with the review is from a reading that the two of us did during the fall of 2014 in South Bend, Indiana in the home of Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson, the editors of Action Books who have supported this translation from its very inception.
Wild Grass on the Riverbank will appear on shelves in early January 2015. I will post again as soon as the book appears on Amazon and SPD.
Transference is published by the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Dedicated to the celebration of poetry in translation, the journal publishes translations from Arabic, Chinese, French and Old French, German, classical Greek, Latin, and Japanese into English verse. The journal features translations as well as commentaries on the art and process of translating.
Submissions for the third issue will be accepted through February 28, 2015. Submit online and download past issues at scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference. Questions? Email the editors Profs. Molly Lynde-Recchia and David Kutzko at lang-transference@wmich.edu.
