Agreed, we have
no talent for poetry.
We smile. This love
will last twenty thousand years.
Is that a long time or brief?
—Yosano Akiko (tl. Sam Hamill & Keiko Matsui Gibson)
Ah! the anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart!
I speak, and the words I say are mere sound.
I suffer, and it's just me.
Ah! If I could only wrest from music the secret
Timbre of its shout!
What rage that my sorrow can't even shout,
That its shout goes no farther
Than the silence, which returns, in the air
Of the night filled with nothing!
—Fernando Pessoa, 15 January 1920 (tl. Richard Zenith)
There are two kinds of sorrow we might as well be proud of:
When at the start of the day
Slamming the room door behind me,
slamming the house door behind me,
I stand on the street invisible in the rain of the rainy season,
I wonder how I shall spend my day,
I wonder what I shall do today.
I find I am neither for nor against either side.
To whom shall I speak about these concrete questions I want to ask?
I, a hater of war, but not a pacifist,
Am filled with sorrow that all I can do is just
To keep on trying to keep my eyes open.
There are two kinds of sorrow we might as well be proud of:
I, though together with you,
Cannot understand what you are;
That's how I know you are there,
That's how I know I am here.
I am filled with sorrow that I cannot understand you,
I am filled with sorrow that you are no one but yourself.
—Tomioka Taeko (tl. James Kirkup)
The summer sun shone down on the blue-black stones,
the garden earth was sleeping in vermilion.
On the horizon, vapour rising
was like omens of the end of the world.
The wheat field where the wind beat roaring
was dim and grey.
Like shadows cast by flying clouds
passing over the field's face, an ancient giant's countenance —
the summer afternoon
when some were napping,
I was running in the fields.
I was champing hope between my teeth,
I despaired, with dazzled eyes…
ah, alive, I was alive!
—Nakahara Chuuya (tl. Paul Mackintosh & Maki Sugiyama)
This is the way to know that you're already dead
Blow onto the window
Put your hand on the left side of your chest
They say birth is always a plunge
and death is always a flight
so take off from the cliff's edge
Are you the daily plunge toward the paper's surface? Or are you the flight?
A butterfly standing on one leg dips its other leg into red ink and writes a letter
Mommy: You can't start laughing as soon as you're born?
You: No, I'm just seeing if I can!
When the plunge begins the flight of the scream also begins
The center of the abyss rises infinitely
Your wings flutter like ripples on the water
Now are you liberated from yourself?
Your feet have no prints
Your happiness has no breaths
Your letter has no name
You're as white as the salt in tears
You're as ah ah ah ah as the wind's yawn
Are you now vertigo without privacy?
Now you've become so light that you won't be able to plunge at all
You're merely a ripple upon ripple of the top floor of the abyss
—Kim Hyesoon (tl. Don Mee Choi)
1
One day you will look at me, laughing
because my face is too pale,
blown by the November wind, like fig leaves or something,
like an abandoned dog.
Truly that's how it seems to be:
I may be more wretched than a dog, perhaps;
I myself occasionally thought that way,
I myself might have sorrowed.
In spite of all that you will again remember,
in the time when I am not, on the day when I am no longer on this earth,
that man, that time, at that point on that road,
pale-faced, like fig leaves, blown by the wind — it was a cold afternoon —
disconsolate, abandoned like a dog.
2
The cat was mewing, when everyone had fallen asleep,
in the nearby lot, in the darkness,
really close, serene and fine-voiced;
serene and fine-voiced, mewing in the dark.
If tonight it so serenely
mews the whole night through,
the cat will surely be living
with a close heart…
So sad and full of yearning,
if this evening it is mewing that way,
somehow my existence too
doesn't seem altogether meaningless…
The cat behind the weeds in the lot,
feeling acutely the pebbles underfoot,
feeling that chill in its feet,
was mewing in the foggy night —
3
Your pipe's
filthiness, its char,
I know too well, yet,
almost uncannily clearly I know, yet…
This evening the lamp smoulders gently;
your and my shadows dimly falling
on the floor or on the walls;
there is the sound of a faroff train.
Your pipe's
filthiness, its char,
I honestly know very well, yet
in the span of eternity, I wonder what will
become of that…
This evening my life is smouldering,
your and my lives are smouldering;
I can only think our lives, like tobacco,
are burning swiftly away.
Truly impressions' clarity,
our memories, so to speak our lives' footprints,
are too clear;
what on earth do they mean?
This evening the lamp smoulders gently;
your and my shadows dimly falling
on the floor or on the walls;
there is the sound of a faroff train.
In any case, when aims are uncertain,
resignation becomes courage;
by the way, that aims are absolutely uncertain
is surely impossible.
There my life smoulders gently,
your and my lives are smouldering;
I can only think our lives, like tobacco,
are burning swiftly away.
*
The crickets are singing
the bugle is sounding the last post
trains are still running
it's the witching hour
no, it's not that late yet
that's two hours from now
then, the boy, can he stay awake?
No, the boy should go to bed early
Once he's gone to bed, can he get up later?
In the morning, he can get up
How do you make the morning come?
The morning will come by itself
How and where will it come?
It will wash its face, then come out
Is that tomorrow?
That is tomorrow morning
Now the crickets are singing, aren't they?
And the bugle is sounding the last post, isn't it?
Trains are still running
It's not the witching hour yet, is it?
THE END
—Nakahara Chuuya (tl. Paul Mackintosh & Maki Sugiyama)
I'm nothing to you, I mean zero.
I know, there's nothing more to say.
And yet I love you still more dearly,
ecstatically and without mercy,
and like a drunk, I stumble, reel,
and loiter in a lightless alley,
insisting that I love you still —
no mercy, and ecstatically.
—Maria Petrovykh (tl. Boris Dralyuk)
Behind your ears, boiling pasta and forgetting
about six minutes, letting it turn to glue. I remember
once you said, this tree is torn to shreds and we stood
and stripped it further. The night I looked at you terrified.
This was back when we belonged to no one,
when your hand found my rib in the dark. I played dumb
so as not to lose you. I watched you choose lovers,
watched as you changed on a whim when a man entered
the room. Laura, I want you embarrassed
by long dresses, by the fun of the carnival.
I remember the first time I convinced you to keep living.
It didn't take much. I tricked you into walking to the place
on the corner with cheese danishes glazed thick
with sugar. We never got them. On the sidewalk a child
was playing in her plastic kitchen. She poured us imaginary
water, offered us mud soup. We put out our hands.
You took the mud almost to your mouth.
—Natalie Dunn
Swings the way still by hollow and hill,
And all the world's a song;
'She's far,' it sings me, 'but fair,' it rings me.
'Quiet,' it laughs, 'and strong!
Oh! spite of the miles and years between us,
Spite of your chosen part,
I do remember; and I go
When laughter in my heart.
So above the little folk that know now,
Out of the white hill-town,
High up I clamber; and I remember;
And watch the day go down.
Gold is my heart, and the world's golden,
And one peak tipped with light;
And the air lies still about the hill
With the first fear of night;
Till mystery down the soundless valley
Thunders, and dark is here;
And the wind blows, and the light goes,
And the night is full of fear.
And I know, one night, on some far height,
In the tongue I never knew,
I yet shall hear the tidings clear
From them that were friends of you.
They'll call the news from hill to hill,
Dark and uncomforted,
Earth and sky and the winds; and I
Shall know that you are dead.
I shall not hear your trentals,
Nor eat your arval bread;
For the kin of you will surely do
their duty by the dead.
Their little dull greasy eyes will water;
They'll paw you, and gulp afresh.
They'll sniffle and weep, and their thoughts will creep
Like flies on the cold flesh.
They will put pence on your grey eyes,
Bind up your fallen chin,
And lay you straight, the fools that loved you
Because they were your kin.
They will praise all the bad about you,
And hush the good away,
And wonder how they'll do without you,
And then they'll go away.
But quieter than one sleeping,
And stranger than of old,
You will not stir for weeping,
You will not mind the cold;
But through the night the lips will laugh not,
The hands will be in place,
And at length the hair be lying still
About the quiet face.
With sniffle and sniff and handkerchief,
And dim and decorous mirth,
With ham and sherry, they'll meet to bury
The lordliest lass of earth.
The little dead hearts will tramp ungrieving
Behind lone-riding you,
The heart so high, the heart so living,
Heart that they never knew.
I shall not hear your trentals,
Nor eat your arval bread.
Nor with smug breath tell lies of death
To the unanswering dead.
With snuffle and sniff and handkerchief,
The folk who loved you now
Will bury you, and go wondering
Back home. And you will rot.
But laughing and half-way up to heaven,
With wind and hill and star,
I yet shall keep, before I sleep,
Your Ambarvalia.
—Brooke Rupert
I don't know who I am right now. I dream.
Steeped in feeling myself, I sleep. In this
Calm hour my thought forgets its thinking,
My soul has no soul.
If I exist, it's wrong to know it. If I
Wake up, I feel I'm mistaken. I just don't know.
There's nothing I want, have, or remember.
I have no being or law.
A moment of consciousness between illusions,
I'm bounded all around by phantoms.
Sleep on, oblivious to other people's hearts,
O heart belonging to no one!
—Fernando Pessoa, 6 January 1923 (tl. Richard Zenith)
Please forgive me.
I am not allowed to live
in this world. Saké,
pale lavender, just sends me
and I'm hopelessly lost.
—Yosano Akiko (tl. Sam Hamill & Keiko Matsui Gibson)
Why is it I feel this shame;
autumn is a mountain's shadow on a day of white wind.
In the pasania's leaf litter,
unnaturally mature trunks burst forth;
branches, intertwined, seem sad;
the sky is filled with dead children's spirits, twinkling;
just then over yonder above the fields
astrakhan interwoven became a dream of ancient mammoths.
In the pasania's leaf litter,
unnaturally mature trunks burst forth;
that day, between those trunks, intimate eyes,
sisterly colour, you were there.
That day, between those trunks, intimate eyes,
sisterly colour, you were there.
Ah! Past days' low flames flare up from time to time,
my heart, why, oh why, this shame.
—Nakahara Chuuya (tl. Paul Mackintosh & Maki Sugiyama)
I've never known anyone who took a beating.
All my acquaintances have been champions at everything.
Whereas I, so often shabby, so often disgusting, so often despicable,
I, so often and undeniably a sponger,
Inexcusably filthy,
I, who so often have been too lazy to take a bath,
I, who so often have been ridiculous and absurd,
Who have been tripped in public on the rugs of etiquette,
Who have been grotesque, petty, obsequious and arrogant,
Who have been humiliated and said nothing,
Who, when I've spoken up, have been even more ridiculous,
I, who have been the laughing stock of chambermaids,
Who have felt porters winking behind my back,
Who have been a financial disgrace, borrowing money I never paid back,
Who, when punches were about to fly, ducked
Out of punching range—
I, who have anguished over the pettiest things,
Am convinced there's no one in the world as pathetic as me.
No one I know has ever done anything ridiculous.
No one who talks to me has ever been humiliated.
They've been princes in life, every last one of them . . .
If only I could hear some other human voice
Confess not to a sin but to an infamy,
Tell not about an act of violence but of cowardice!
No, all the people I listen to, if they talk to me, are paragons.
Who in this wide world would admit to me that he was ever despicable?
O princes, my brothers,
I've had it up to here with demigods!
Where in the world are there people?
Am I the only one on earth who's ever wrong and despicable?
They may not have been loved by women,
They may have been cheated on—but ridiculous, never!
And I, who have been ridiculous without being cheated on—
How can I speak to my betters without stammering?
I, who have been despicable, utterly despicable,
Despicable in the basest and meanest sense of the word . . .
—Álvaro de Campos (tl. Richard Zenith)
i.
The name I was called by is already lost.
Its face orbits around me
like the sounds of water at night,
of waters falling into waters.
And the last thing to go is its smile,
instead of my memory.
ii.
The most beautiful of all
on the night of those who leave me:
you whom I long for,
how endless your not-returning,
you as shadow till the day of days.
—Alejandra Pizarnik (tl. Yvette Siegert)
I
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
II
Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,
That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ...
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
I am already fed up with Bach and Mozart,
and completely fed up with that happy, easy-going jazz.
I am living like an iron bridge under a cloudy sky after rain.
I am pressed by things forever desolate.
I am not completely quiet in the midst of that desolation.
I am seeking something, always seeking something
in the midst of this terrible immobility, but also terribly impatient.
For the sake of this, my appetites and lusts are as nothing.
However what that thing is, I don't know, I have never known;
I don't think there are two, I think there is only one.
However, what that thing is, I don't know, I have never known;
Even one way or another to get there, I don't know at all.
Like when I tease myself, I ask myself sometimes:
Is it a woman? Is it a sweet? Is it glory?
Then my heart screams: That's not it; This isn't it; That's not it; This isn't it!
Then is it the sky's song, morning, high in the sky, the echoing sky's song?
II
No matter what, it is indescribable!
Sometimes I want to explain it briefly, but
since it's inexplicable, indescribable, I believe my life is worth living.
That's reality! Unsullied happiness! Anything anyhow is good!
Everyone, no matter if they know it or not, aspires after this,
even though it is not as plain as victory and defeat;
it's like a pleasant absent feeling known by all, desired by all;
everyone as long as they live in this world cannot desire it wholly!
If happiness is like this, like the limit of unselfishness,
if it is a thing these cunning merchants call 'Fool',
if so, this world in which one cannot live without eating,
I must say, is unfair.
But all the same, that's the world;
here we live, it's not arbitrary injustice;
since that is the principle on which we are constituted,
since it is so, then thinking there is no such extreme in the world, it's better for the moment to have peace of mind.
III
Then, in short, it's a question of passion.
Thou, if thou art angry from the bottom of thy heart, be angry!
Then thy anger,
even before thy ultimate aim,
never, never neglect it!
That is, your passion will run for a time, then stop, but
the public effect will persist
and obstruct the reform of your future conduct.
IV
Evening, under the sky; if you mind your body one speck, you will not mind about anything.
—Nakahara Chuuya (tl. Paul Mackintosh & Maki Sugiyama)
Yes it's me, I myself, what I turned out to be,
A kind of accessory or spare part of my own person,
The jagged outskirts of my true emotion—
I'm the one here in myself, it's me.
Whatever I was, whatever I wasn't—it's all in what I am.
Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn't want—all of this has shaped me.
Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it's the same nostalgia.
And I also have the impression—a bit inconsistent,
Like a dream based on jumbled realities—
That I left myself on a seat in the streetcar,
To be found by whoever was going to sit down there next.
And I also have the impression—a bit hazy,
Like a dream one tries to remember on waking up to the dim light of dawn—
That there's something better in me than myself.
Yes, I also have the impression—a bit painful,
As of waking up without dreams to a day full of creditors—
That I bungled everything, like tripping on a doormat,
That I got everything wrong, like a suitcase without toilet articles,
That I replaced myself with something at some point in my life.
Enough! It's the impression—somewhat metaphysical,
Like the last sun seen in the window of a house we're about to abandon—
That it's better to be a child than to want to fathom the world.
It's the impression of buttered bread and toys,
Of a vast peace without Proserpina's gardens,
Of an enthusiasm for life, its face pressed against the window,
Seeing the rain pattering outside
Rather than the adult tears from having a knot in our throat.
Enough, damn it, enough! It's me, the one who got switched,
The emissary with no letter or credentials,
The clown who doesn't laugh, the jester wearing someone else's oversize suit,
And the bells on his hat jingle
Like little cowbells of a servitude weighing on his head.
It's me, I myself, the singsong riddle
That no one can figure out in the rural sitting room after dinner.
It's me, just me, and nothing I can do about it!
—Álvaro de Campos, 6 August 1931 (tl Richard Zenith)
In the Canadian province of Alberta, a massive wildlife—uh, wildfire—exploded to ten times its previous size Thursday.
—Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 2016
They say the blast was triggered by a passenger pigeon's ghostly
coo, swifting over the oil fields—at which the grasses stiffened,
shot up a warning scent—which made the beetles shudder from
their beds—which spread a rumor among the earthworms, until,
so quietly at first that no one noticed, a thin hoof cracked
open a patch of earth: last spring's last-born caribou, the one
who'd gotten separated from the herd and gutted by flies, now back
and raising an orchestra of dust with its kicking, calling forth
hoof by hoof, the whole herd, stampeding from their graves,
flesh and fur remapping onto bones as they percussed out,
pulling with them the pine martens and black-footed ferrets,
who regathered their bones from the soil and darted up
to hop aboard the pine trees now rushing from the horizon,
stretching their newborn necks toward the sun's familiar laugh
as shrikes and warblers flocked giddy to their shoulders, we're back,
we're back, they giggled as firs and ferns yawned upright to marry
the sparrows and the softshell turtles, whose humble jaws birthed
ponds and marshes with each exhale, inviting the whooping cranes
to unfurl their bodies from the wind and gladly, gladly swoop
down to bless the fish, which in turn gave the whales the idea
to distill back into their old forms from the clouds overhead, until
the sky was clogged with blubbery gods—right whales, gray, beluga,
and even a rumor of a blue whale somewhere over Calgary, casting
a great gray shadow over the baseball fields, every parking lot
and highway cracking open as the earth remembered, rejoiced
with its remembering—and as some of the humans kept trying
to drag up the earth's black blood, to sell off their mothers'
old marrow, suddenly, then, each pump and spigot spouted forth bees,
butterflies, short-horned lizards, plovers and prickly pears, grizzlies,
snakes, owls of all feather and shape, shrews, sturgeon, each drop
of oil renouncing its war draft and returning to its oldest names:
muscle; stamen; tooth; shell; the land and water laughing aloud,
a laugh that spread the way a fever spreads, like the opposite of death—
just the earth, with its thousand mouths, singing: I will. I will.
—Franny Choi
（一一）いまさらに一人ある身を思ふなよ
（一二）移ろはむとはかねて知らずや
（一三）置きわぶる露こそ花にあはれなれ
>水無瀬三吟何人百韻から
めぐり逢ひて 見しやそれともわかぬ間に
雲隠れにし 夜半の月かな
—紫式部
奥山に 紅葉踏みわけ鳴く鹿の
声きく時ぞ 秋は悲しき
—猿丸太夫
ポッカリ月が出ましたら、
舟を浮べて出掛けませう。
波はヒタヒタ打つでせう、
風も少しはあるでせう。
沖に出たらば暗いでせう、
櫂（かい）から滴垂（したた）る水の音は
昵懇（ちか）しいものに聞こえませう、
――あなたの言葉の杜切（とぎ）れ間を。
月は聴き耳立てるでせう、
すこしは降りても来るでせう、
われら接唇（くちづけ）する時に
月は頭上にあるでせう。
あなたはなほも、語るでせう、
よしないことや拗言（すねごと）や、
洩らさず私は聴くでせう、
――けれど漕ぐ手はやめないで。
ポッカリ月が出ましたら、
舟を浮べて出掛けませう、
波はヒタヒタ打つでせう、
風も少しはあるでせう。
—中原中也
花さそふ 嵐の庭の 雪ならで
ふりゆくものは 我が身なりけり
—入道前太政大臣
許したまへあらずばこその今のわが身うすむらさきの酒うつくしき
—与謝野晶子