Names and Rivers - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Shuri Kido, known as the “far north poet,” is one of the most important poets in Japan. He has translated many English poems into Japanese and has introduced works by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot to Japan. Kido has been a critic and columnist for various magazines and newspapers and has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture.

Tomoyuki Endo is an assistant professor at Wako University in Tokyo. He has collaborated with Forrest Gander on the translation of poems from Shiraishi’s My Floating Mother, City (New Directions), and was the supervisor of English subtitles for Gozo Yoshimasu’s movies Thousands of Islands and The Reality behind What We See.

Forrest Gander is a translator, cross-genre writer, and former professor at Brown University. He is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, and United States Artists Foundations. 

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Nonferrous

NOT NONFERROUS,

all colors mixed to render

the color “gray".

The river bites into the land and

“geological memories" surface.

Plants with a grayish tint,

Tillandsia, or remnant snow.

Nothing swaying,

nothing wavering,

not a thing too complex to grasp.

Grayish prosaic phenomena,

afloat at the horizon, a cipher, a viper

raises its head.

In what country's language does the word “subject"

hold two opposite meanings: “subject OF an action,"

and “subject TO an action"?

There's no such limbo in human memories.

Still, "particles of iron" course through the blood

and all the color drawn from everything

mixes into a “gray"

that from nowhere

stirs up emotions.

The Portrayal of White

Noon came and it was

as though the clouds caught fire.

The sky piling into its zenith,

and now, it might be dispelled in an instant.

On this earth,

wild rumors quietly take off

like brush fires,

and they scorch us like strong alkaline.

It could be you'd prefer to watch the sky

turning into a cobalt conflagration.

And if “a piece of bone" were hung there,

its whiteness would make your eyes ache.

Cupping your own shoulders as you might cup an egg,

you shudder, imagining a loneliness beyond your imagination.

A torn, jagged idea, like a thunderbolt,

sourced in the cloud of our species.

Measuring the depth of the emotion,

“time" fans out like summer grass.

Holding your head, drinking heavily,

holding your knees, curling into a ball,

the human emotions “agony" or “anguish"

are metaphors for “time,"

the shadows folding, the darkness dissolving into the body.

Then, praise for “the bone's" whiteness

which never quite fades into the surrounding dark.

If we associate blue with “bone-scattering" rituals,

is the whiteness of bone a metaphor for “time"

or a compelling mimicry of what only adheres to the “surface"?

This noon,

even more deeply than on the seventh day,

a small creature sleeps like “ashes"

dreaming of something that never happens,

turning its body.

Cauliflowers, or Cabbage Flowers bloom, though no one observes them.

When clouds are colored with the same pale rose seen on the Japanese ibis'

wings,

“time" holds, filling with that “white" light

in which all colors in the visible spectrum are contained.

A Thousand Vowels

A long slope.

The strong sun dipped, and finally sank.

No matter how long I walked, I stayed in “the middle of the road."

The name torn into pieces.

Just keeping on, climbing higher and higher,

I'd completely forgotten the name.

The west wind shifts the typhoon's course,

the world, for a few hours, is thrown into confusion.

You might name one thing after another,

but each loses its name in that same moment.

Into what we call “nature."

I stood in the middle of nature.

And something was missing, the natural was

draped in a thin shroud.

Vowels scattered,

the name went missing.

When once more the name “nature" was applied

to the desolate-as-ever landscape,

immediately, the name began to weather away.

What is still losing its name,

and what has already lost its name,

those two strands entwine

around the true name.

Those who have wings stay put,

howling out their condition over and over,

“How fragile we are!"

though no one hears them.

Thousands of ripples tell

a story of benthic anguish.

The ripples beach themselves

on the name of each anguish,

vowels scatter by the thousands

over the earth.

The Inertia of Anxiety

The only thing I can talk about may be

the pain,

the sound of the soul shattering into pieces,

and how quietly, or how sluggishly it happens,

that may be the only thing.

The moon wet and silvered.

Being lonely

was such an easy thing.

But I wasn't even lonely.

Around this time, a huge squid

was circulating in the Chatham Island deeps.

Feeding on plankton, small fish,

and on its solitude, tearing apart larger fish,

putting on size.

It was so lonely in the deep sea

that the squid became less and less transparent

as ammonia collected in its system,

that and loneliness.

By now, I recognize

the word, the term that is so close to me.

“Being lonely" was imaginable enough,

though calling it “despair"

simplifies it too much.

I was fighting against this simplification.

Whispering, softly, this term,

the implication of loneliness and despair

automatically begins,

and the story automatically

completes itself.

In this critical age, the year of crisis,

I slept without dreaming;

instead, I tried to live my dreams.

I wasn't even lonely.

Beyond such matters,

the true plateau stretched out.

Rejected by Water

At dusk.

The subtle vibrations only your breath registers.

Seeking such vibrations

for these last decades,

you come to know, from the soles of your feet upward, how much moisture

the soil of each place holds.

But why are riverbanks so dry?

Being rejected by water,

being rejected by the river,

you idle away your life,

and in the blink of an eye,

you've already arrived into your late years.

Thinking that you're remaining in place,

and reflecting on yourself

in your own native land,

you stay removed from your own origin.

In such moments,

the emotion you associate with “my native country"

is born without a...