from For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut
Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
1.
The radiant subway. The wall that clears up, endless. A thundering prayer of steel that fastens together the days, a brush of cloud hanging upon it, O beginning, it is there – your nest.
2.
The sound of the bursting flesh of fruit scatters between your ears. The forefront of this spray beckons to those outside of sorrow.
3.
Things that rain, and things that grow. They are all that hold my interest. (Until the things that rain have grown, and the things that grow have poured.) Things that grow, and things that rain. They are all that I desire. (Until the things that grow cease to grow, and the things that rain no longer rain a single drop).
4.
Unaware of the arc lamp above, one day she reads intently – “The one who loves without hope is the only one who knows that person.”
6.
In the wind-whirled grass, blend yourself in with the soft tear of the decayed rice paper or freshly unearthed beak. Break your bones, open your skin, and strive to get the inerasable grease, entangled and rippling up – to finally rise from the lips, toward the grass-tips, to bleed apart in scatters.
7.
Protected by a hard shell, the fight just to continue sleeping. Not only for those pitiful drupes, but also the bold army of snails who spiral single-file down the escape well of a skyscraper – single-mindedly, dragging along the breath of their sleep.
10.
First of all, here we do not know who sees through the interior. Upon this solid skin, inward gazes are hatched without lull, and those youthful yet deeply carved wrinkles render the skin of that sculpture called the exterior more distinct than daybreak. They frolic the way the water’s edge cleaves, and coagulate, and wrap, will wrap, endlessly, all of the ocean lost to those approaching, and the comets that fall there.
11.
The final puzzle regarding the shape of a poem dwells in the word ‘line.’ Dividing lines, changing lines. Straddling lines, crossing lines. As a line is followed, the chain of lines falls to pieces. The ‘line’ is neither a path, nor a discipline which closes the circle. What it is, is the shadow of a fragment. A place lacking something twice over. Speak, O seams by the name of brushstroke, the line midway – and the line space – of the line. Or is this perhaps an Archimedes’ screw? Eating death, the deed grows thin.
13.
The strange insect called scarabaeus skillfully constructs round pellets from the dung of hoofed animals such as sheep, cows, and horses, and takes them to an appropriate place to be slowly consumed. For its larvae, special pellets are made by selecting only the dung of sheep, which has the most nutritional value and is easiest to digest. First the mother carefully selects the ingredients, then crushes them finely, carrying it to an underground nest. There, beginning her operation in earnest, she creates a beautiful pear-shaped pellet, and through the small hole she has left open until the very end, pushes an egg into the center. When the larva is finally hatched from the egg, it finds itself in the middle of this enormous lump of dung, and peacefully eating its surroundings, little by little grows larger.
15.
From above the west-northwest cliff, an old mixing machine looks down upon the ruins of acrylic resin which, surrounded by fog, still operate with precision. The mixer stirs up memories of the few things that might have remained unscathed from itself. Honey bees, a burnt rice paddle, a broken compass needle, water at the bottom of the thermometer shelter, a woman’s tongue, fire. His job is done. And finally now, those memories are transferring themselves over into our hands.
17.
The radiant subway again. Today, too, in this still-radiant subway, small white explosions occur here and there. They are the sounds of our joints popping, the sound of an all-too-convenient despair fading away. The walls collapse, and the birds of the earth, now without hesitation, begin transporting their nests so as to set them into these daily-renewed explosions.
18.
May the hairy danger always be holding your hand. May the wicked prayers and select anxieties always move my lungs. And may the days not run by, the sound of love nearly escape confirmation, and the bone ash of our repeatedly burning stories cook our deeds in the furnace of destruction’s truth.
22.
It is now time to describe, toward a mossy nothingness, the shape of a fragment. The moment a shipwreck seeks – against its will – the pretense of wings, and when the eraser under the eaves just about to disappear first faces itself, and when this too is nothing more than a short-lived illusion. The dim brilliance of the fragment criticizes the sharpness of the form. I follow the contours of the blade. Not for purposes of sketching, but in order to draw up a contract with the sweat of things at the moment the line tears, and to cross over to the next shape.
24.
Kafukafu, says the dutiful crow circling around my skull. Crow, O crow, in the shallow forest of, Sendagaya, kind and warmhearted Jungle Crow. O antagonistic friend.
25.
Getting off the train, there was only one exit to the north. I passed by a quiet old commercial strip along the tracks, what seemed like a row of repeating liquor stores, grocery stores, and rice shops – in other words I took a long detour south around the station house. With someone leading the way, I was finally able to stand before the tree of my dreams.
57.
Spirits wrapped in a skin of green. On each one, lushly growing, a hanging drop of thunderstorm!
62.
When the typhoon approached, clamping down the dying summer, and the small house on the embankment was washed by waves, the light was cut off and Teruzō – the disgruntled Irako Seihaku shining the sharp circle of his flashlight on a gulf on the map taped to the ceiling of his study – having abandoned his boat to the silence and retired in his old age to a sea village, suddenly became joyful, saying, “The wind will change at any moment,” and “Continue north or turn to the right” – with two books of meteorological studies by his side, it is said that he was filled with feverish excitement, and faltered, was moved. That small boat.
68.
Having passed through numerous summers, one poet wrote the following – “Why should it be that I would learn from what I have lost.” In the darkness of the penetrating cold, beside the train tracks, still aslant from a severe intoxication and hoping at least for the day to end, I find myself connecting strange thoughts – could I now learn, from what I am losing.
84.
An exacting room protected only by a distant resonance. There, introspection and bewilderment —— Juglans —— bewilderment and prayer —— Juglandaceae —— there is no salvation even in considering oneself a small animal.
85.
A hesitancy toward living, under the resist-dyed “Chinese” sign in the outlying quarters. Reflected in the glass in front of the food displays, the throngs of people waver. Brought together by chance, each placed on an imaginary scale: the true essence of that which is comforting, and that which comforts. In that kind of posthumous dusk.
86.
Poetry has continued to differ way too much from what people believe it to be. Yes, that must be it, and just now as I think this, a shelf in the bar tilts.
88.
If a work can stave off the strife of the world’s disasters, and simultaneously wrap this disaster in as the oxygen of its own world, then the gaps between words, seemingly hand in hand, between those breaths, one slightest hint and another, is the very basis of its solidity. And relaying through these vacant holes, the work is reversed back to the world. And so then we possess the ultimate right to read in any order each air hole in the work while overriding the time of the writing – the right to exercise the final disaster, so to speak, of the work.
90.
Concrete blocks with grass, flying about in the spread of cooled eyes. On each of the one thousand coffins blanketing the canal in a row, still one thousand more cooled eyes. The brigade of baby fog-particles racing down the hanging bluff. The boundless reflex knitting together the death-ruined city with one sweep. Only in such dazzle can I use up my secret art and, O sister, forever and whenever, hold you in your absence.
94.
With our blind eyes and ringing ears, Juglans, let us turn the corner at the end of this ravaged time. In the omen of couplings and floodings, Juglans, let us throw out our chests, and throw them out again, and raise our voices to their roughest extent, descending the stairs to the end of these desolate days. The seasons have been torn apart. And then the clouds, the waves, filling the earth madly, though with shyness, Juglans, a radiant, false after-death begins to slowly move through our underground.
95.
The battle of poetic forms, like a rag tossed on the pavement, is wet with recently-spilled stars. What passes above it is a mechanism simply for passing by, a glance to be ignored. The formulaic camp remains blind to this section where such scenery emerges, but wrapped inside an old rallying call is rather a single section of acropathy patients eager to capsize the encircling cobblestones through the freedom of poetic form. They close their small eyes to the fact that a form of free verse is already a form at the disposal of political power, and that a rag waves no differently from a nation’s flag.
104.
The window was always a mirror that gazed out onto a small graveyard. Everyone has those days when they do nothing but furrow, there, with a vague stare. Of course, I too once had a single room on the second floor of a wooden house flanked by a vague iron handrail.
109.
Juglans, with our blind eyes and ringing ears, I am the one who is eternally distraught, shorn of all I have. Juglans, my chest to be riven has drifted and is not here – up until the radiant station of the afterlife where anyone has relations with anyone else, it is I alone who grows bewildered, hanging between branches of migratory nerves. Juglans, in the radiant underground station where anyone has relations with anyone else – and I, Juglans, I am able to for the first time melt this rotten body in the flash of light from the one I had you keep watching for me – I dream this now.
110.
That’s enough, now. I’ll pass it from my lips to yours, that very special leap of a single drop in the bottle. Afterward, nut-cracking.
These poems are taken from the book, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2010) by Takashi Hiraide, translated by Sawako Nakayasu.
Takashi Hiraide, born in Fukuoka prefecture in 1950, is a major poet coming out of Japan's postwar generation. He is the author of over fifteen books, and is a recipient of several literary awards in the various genres in which he writes. These include poetry in free verse (The Inn), prose poetry (For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut), off-prose poetry (Notes for My Left-hand Diary), tanka (One Hundred and Eleven Tankas to Mourn My Father), criticism (At the Tip of Attack), essay (The Berlin Moment), and fiction (A Guest Cat). He is a Professor of Art Science and a member of the Institute for Art Anthropology at Tama Art University.
Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her books include Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press, 2005), and So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press, 2004). Books of translations include Time of Sky//Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata (Litmus Press, 2010) and For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions, 2008) which won the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent, as well as Four From Japan (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, 2006) featuring four contemporary poets, and To the Vast Blooming Sky (Seeing Eye Books), a chapbook of poems by the Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa. Her translation of Sagawa's Collected Poems is forthcoming in 2013 from Canarium Books. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese.