from Castles in the Air – a dream journal
Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
Horse
For some reason I acquire a horse, but I don’t know how to harness it. A rope around its neck would probably be painful. I try to remember how I had seen a horse bridled, but I don’t quite know how to make it bite. I wonder if it will eat grass when it gets hungry. Or if it will be okay if I tie it under a tree and it rains and gets wet. I can’t find a stable anywhere. Then the horse disappears and becomes my younger sister. She lies down upon the bare night grass and tries to sleep. I think she’d get cold like that, but she rolls around as if to say, “I’m fine.”
Grown thin
I go to visit Y in what is perhaps her study or dressing room, where the walls are plastered over with pictures, and letters with drawings, and there are little doll-like things hanging. It is like the room of a young girl. Y has grown thin and is bald, and the adolescent Y is seated sideways in front of the mirror stand with eyes vacantly open. Her legs are all bone. There is a bandage on her bared bottom as well as bruises. It’s a painful sight. Y does not at all notice my presence nearby as she sits in a daze surrounded by windowless walls. Coming to understand that this may be the end of our relationship, I look at the pictures on the wall and read some of the letters.
Overpass at night
I arrive alone at the station in the middle of the night. The platform is elevated, and I go down the stairs of the overpass, but it is so dangerous I need to hold the handrails on both sides. For the time being I let the things in my hand fall down to the ground. When I make my way to the bottom, with both hands on the handrails, my young mother is waiting for me in the darkness below, wearing a shawl. “Where are your things?” she asks slightly reproachfully. When I tell her, “I dropped them from up above,” she regretfully says, “Oh.” “Look, it’s no problem,” I say casually as I quickly retrieve from the dark ground all the things I had dropped from above, picking up my short pencils, notebook, paperback, and empty lunchbox. “This is enough.” I think that it is a well-organized pile of belongings, if I do say so myself.
Falling apart
Repeatedly, something falls apart. I simply have the actual feeling that I accept that “this is how things fall apart,” but there is nothing I can see. Its concrete texture has flowed past and disappeared.
Ability to take action
A man places his hand on my tense, frozen back and inspects it, concluding, “On a scale of large, medium and small, your ability to take action is small.”
Travel scene
I go on a trip, and take in the sight of a deceased person’s bedding being slid piece by piece down the corridor of a tall tree and shoved down below, which leaves a lingering resonance in my ears. Later, there is nowhere for me to spend the night.
Two pieces of cloth
“Knead and mix them together,” I am instructed—so I try to do so, but when I take a closer look they are two thin pieces of cloth and it is very difficult to get them to mix together.
These poems are taken from the book, Time of Sky and Castles in the Air (Litmus Press, 2010), by Ayane Kawata and translated by Sawako Nakayasu.
Ayane Kawata was born in 1940 in the city of Qiqihar in the Heilongjiang Province of northeast China. In 1969, the publication of and subsequent acclaim she received for her first book, Time of Sky (Kumo Publishers, 1969), established her as a prominent and emerging Japanese poet. The same year, she moved to Italy, where she has lived for most of her subsequent years. Kawata has published ten books of poetry, the majority of them by the most important publishers of contemporary Japanese poetry: Shichosha, Shoshi Yamada, and Seidosha. Her poems have often featured in major poetry publication journals in Japan, such as Gendaishitecho, Midnight Press, and Eureka, and have been widely anthologized. In 1994 she was selected to have a book in the prestigious Gendaishi Bunko Series, anthologizing and republishing a sizable selection of her work. Time of Sky / Castles in the Air is Kawata's first book-length translation into English.
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.