Translating Contemporary Japanese Poetry

Australian Poetry Journal

Volume 6 Issue 2

Publishing Information

Illustrations & reproductions

Australian Poetry Journal 2016 Volume 6, Number 2 apj.australianpoetry.org A publication of Australian Poetry Ltd

Cover: Julia Castiglioni Bradshaw. Green and Yellow. 2015. Acrylic on Canvas, 1450 × 900mm.

Editor: Michael Sharkey Designer: Stuart Geddes Australian Poetry (AP) is the sole national representative body for poetry in this country. It is an independent non-profit organisation, supported by federal, state and local government arts funding programs, patrons and its subscription base. We represent Australian poetry and its poets, nationally and internationally. The Australian Poetry Journal is published biannually. Address editorial correspondence to Level 3 The Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000 or by email to [email protected] Australian Poetry Ltd attains worldwide first publication rights in both printed and digital form for the distribution and promotion of the Australian Poetry Journal and organisation as a whole. Copyright 2016 by Australian Poetry Ltd. ISSN 2203-7519 Subscription to the Australian Poetry Journal is available online: australianpoetry.org/support Individual copies of the journal (including back issues) can be purchased directly from Australian Poetry Ltd: [email protected]

p5: Printing industry, linotype operator at work at Ramsay Ware Publishing Pty Ltd, North Melbourne, Vic. Dennis Mayor collection of Photographs. State Library of Victoria – H95.74/118 p8: Ralph Wessman. Photograph courtesy of Jane Williams. p38: Hirata Toshiko. Photograph courtesy of Carol Hayes & Hirata Toshiko p70: Kent MacCarter. Photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey. p94: Khalid Kaki. Photograph courtesy of Zeina Issa & Khalid Kaki p119: Printing industry, linotype operator at work at Ramsay Ware Publishing Pty Ltd, North Melbourne, Vic. Dennis Mayor collection of Photographs. State Library of Victoria – H95.74/115 Support

Contents 8

Essay Chris Ringrose

21 22 23 24 27 28 33 34 36

Poems Jane Williams Adrienne Eberhard Caroline Gerrish Graeme Hetherington Molly Guy Carol Jenkins BN Oakman Mia Slater Les Murray

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Essay Carol Hayes

58 59 60 61 62 64 65 66 67 68 69

Poems Lucas Smith Ron Pretty Rachael Guy Earl Livings Gina Mercer Tim Thorne Saxby Pridmore Lesley Carnus Michael Bourke Mario Inglese Emilia Maggio

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Essay Greg McLaren

Walleah Press Show and tell Cockle Creek Cataracts Aspects of Van Diemen’s Land A History of Zero Il Gattino di Roma 1992 A Streetlamp in the Rain The Scores Translating Contemporary Japanese Poetry Crawling Down Wombat Holes Parks & Wildlife Cape Barren Island There, Still There A Charm of Words Buddha and Wind Farm, South Australia Budapest Sunrise By Brickmakers Creek Jesus’ Dog I left the budding roses A whiff of gunpowder

83 84 85 86 88 89 90 91 92 93

Poems Jessica Yin Jane Frank Jules Leigh Koch Ion Corcos Audrey Patterson Gisela Sophia Nittel Laurence Levy-Atkinson Christopher Konrad Judy Annear Amelia Theodorakis

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Essay Zeina Issa

105 106 107 108 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Poems Rose Hunter Mike Hopkins Kristen Lang Catherine Vidler Emily Andersen Paul Dawson Josh Keogh EA Gleeson Allis Hamilton Sarah Day Anne Kellas

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Reviews Vrasidas Karalis

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Petra White

Farewell Nostalgia: Monastery Eating With Two Forks On the rocks Interrogating the dead A beach and a late sun Canto LXXIV.7 (War Canto) when I look How to show them you don’t care Translating Khalid Kaki snow The Art of Boozing Modern cave art Deferral Mark Five Lines Can Say Only The Sorrow Early morning trip to the crematorium For the Birds Sea Ice bird ‘Dreams of the light of Mount Tabor’: N.N. Trakakis: Appearance and Reality ‘Edgy Expatriate of Yes’: Jan Owen’s The Offhand Angel: New and Selected Poems

Essay

Translating Contemporary Japanese Poetry Carol Hayes

Volume 6.2 In July this year, I found myself stepping onto the stage of the old Otsu City Hall in Shiga Prefecture Japan, a city on the shores of Lake Biwa not far from the Osaka–Kyoto area. Built in the 9th year of Showa (1934), the old building is a solid three storey square block, and the atmosphere of a modernising pre-war Japan still pervades the old hall and wooden-banistered staircase. But the atmosphere created by the assembled poets was far from old fashioned. I was participating in a contemporary women’s poetry event and was sharing the stage with five of Japan’s greatest contemporary women poets and three academic translators. This event Poetry Reading in Translation: Listening to Women’s Voices presented a distinguished line up of free-style poets: Itō Hiromi, Hirata Toshiko and Arai Takako; tanka poets Kawano Satoko and Tanaka Noriko and translators, Jeffrey Angles, Kikuchi Rina and myself (note I am following the Japanese practice of listing the Japanese names with the surname first). Fortuitously, the poetry reading event coincided with the publication of Jeffrey Angles’ translations of three of the poets; Poems of Hiromi Itō, Toshiko Hirata and Takako Arai, published by Vagabond Press. Before going any further, I need to clarify something of the complexity that surrounds the Japanese word for ‘poet’: there is no one word for ‘poet’. Poets are defined by their chosen genre as tanka poets (kajin: 歌人), haiku poets (haijin: 俳 人) or free-style poets (shijin: 詩人), and most commonly write in only one style. Tanka poetry, also termed ‘waka’ (Japanese song: 和歌) or ‘uta’ (歌), is a 31 syllable poem written in a single line of verse following a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic pattern. This poetic form is essentially the foundation of all Japanese poetry and dates back to the very early Japanese classical texts of the Manyōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, compiled 759) and the Kokinshū (Collection of Early and Modern Poetry, compiled 914). The 5-7-5 of the 17 syllable Haiku form was born of the ‘renga’ or linked uta form. Renga was a classical poetry game or event in which the first poet would compose the first half (5-7-5) of the tanka, and then the next would add a following 7-7. This alternation would then progress through the assembled poets. In time, the first 5-7-5 ‘hokku’ element broke away as an independent poetry genre, renamed Haiku. But I digress, like the Sentimental Bloke, ‘wot was this I starts to say … I’m off me beat’. My focus here is on the contemporary free-style poetry of three of Japan’s finest living poets: Itō Hiromi, Hirata Toshiko and Arai Takako. All three are socially engaged poets whose focus on the women’s experience and bold experiments with style and content make their work a fascinating study. Free-style Japanese poetry was born in response to the influx of translations of Western literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tired of the restrictions of the tanka form, its brevity, emphasis on the assonance embedded in the Japanese phonetic syllabary, the use of ellipsis and compression and overall the heavy weight of convention both in terms of syntax and imagery, the new free-style poets began to experiment with various poetic styles. They created longer poems in free rhythm, moving away from the familiar 5-7-5 patterning and began to harness colloquial idiom. All three poets tend to longer works and so most of the poems I have quoted below are only shown in extract. With her shock of long wild waving hair shot through with grey, Itō Hiromi reminds me of the yamanba or mountain witches I first read about at university:

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Australian Poetry Journal wild shaman women who could change their form into young beautiful maidens or kindly older women would snare lone travellers and then devour them. Though demonised, yamanba wild women have their origins in the pre-Buddhist indigenous Japanese matriarchal belief system. Itō Hiromi strikes me as a contemporary yamanba wise women, black clad, edgy, wild, expansive but deeply wise. Her fascination with the Japanese diaspora abroad, with language patterns that sit outside the norm and with intergenerational connections between women all feed into this image. Hirata Toshiko is much quieter; with a fringed bob of straight dark hair and a more reserved dress sense, she cuts an intensely private figure. Her eyes, hidden behind glasses, see deeply into the quirks of human relationships. With a perfectly straight face, her quiet voice filled the hall firstly with wicked black humour, exposing the irritation, the acrimony and the pain hidden in the ordinary, and secondly with clever wit as she read a poem written in Kansai dialect to the audience, mostly from Western Japan. Arai Takako is a petite woman full of only barely suppressed energy. With a quirky dress sense, vivacious and energetic, she presented her poems with passionate drama. I will begin, as we did at the Otsu poetry reading, with the youngest of the three poets, Arai Takako. Born in 1966, Arai is a masterful raconteur. She favours a rehearsed reading, that allows us (her translators) and her to speak in an integrated performance, sometimes swinging between the Japanese and English after each phrase, sometimes after a longer sentence, and sometimes after only a single word. The result is a vibrant performance piece, which allows her as the poet to control the audience’s reception of rhythm, pace and emphasis. She began her recitation with ‘Supplements’, a poem translated by Jeffrey Angles and included in her second collection, Tamashii dansu (Soul Dance, 2007). This poem demonstrates her love of the rhythm and sound as she builds and repeats the names of many, many vitamins, herbal remedies and tablets until we are overwhelmed by the sheer weight of all the supplements we use to try and make ourselves younger, healthier and more virile. In the original Japanese, Arai’s skilfully used alliteration lists nouns upon nouns that start and end with the same syllable; it is however, difficult to maintain this alliteration linking the translation. Each time I hear Arai Takako and Jeffrey perform this poem, I am impressed by the sheer force and pace of the seemingly numberless supplements, as she and Jeffrey speak faster and faster, before finally she quietens and slows for the more deliberate conclusion. Supplements Vitamins A, B, C, D, E, F, G Lipoic acid and malic acid, picolinic acid and pyruvic acid Coenzymes and chondrotins, selenium and andrographis Anthocyanin, alpha-carotine, isoflavone, gingko extract A whole bowlful of supplements Instead of the morning meal Vitamins H, I, J, K, L, M, N … … A second bowlful of supplements And still nothing for my skin

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Placenta, pueraria, collagen, squalene And then there’s those menstrual cramps Progesterone, pasque flower, chasteberry, evening primrose And if they’ll rev me up there’s the men’s meds Zinc, selenium, arginine, ginseng and viagara too! ….. …. I will not get caught I will not get caught no matter how long it takes I am a slippery, smooth pill Sliding slickly down the throat The supplement is I α, β, γ, δ Hiragana, katakana, kanji, Romanization Alliteration at the beginning, rhymes as the end The words tangle together The words tangle turning So rhythmic they bring tears to the eyes A heavy rhythm within a light-hearted one Here within this poem * Did it dissolve? Is the mystery solved? What you have swallowed is language itself.

(Translated by Jeffrey Angles)

Arai is very socially conscious, both as a women and as a poet. She has written a substantial amount of work that engages with the natural and man-made disasters that Japan, and the world as a whole, has had to face over the last few decades: the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami; the subsequent Fukushima nuclear plant disaster and the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake. She is angered by what she sees as Japan’s tendency to always put economics first, ignoring the human cost. Each time I meet Arai she talks about the impact of days and days of media reports that follow so soon after such a disaster. Of the devastation and numbering of the dead that fills her screens day after day, hour after hour. Her poem ‘Galapagos’ explores Japan ongoing anxiety about the official response to the Fukushima disaster, and the tendency of the Japanese populace to put their head in the sand. Some internal commentators within Japan compare their country sarcastically to the Galapagos islands, isolated, unique, mutating in strange directions. In 2011, assaulted by images of the Fukushima reactor on television day after day, Arai was struck by the sexualisation of the graphics, as the erect fission rods thrust into the womblike coolant vessel of the reactor. These images led her to examine the passive, de-individualised response of the Japanese population to the disaster and the very controlled post-disaster official media coverage. She also, as noted by Jeffrey Angles, ‘pokes fun at the discriminatory idea circulated in the popular media and on blogs, that young people from the polluted areas ought to

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Australian Poetry Journal consider using condoms rather than having unprotected sex for fear that radiation’ affect their progeny (Angles, Poems of HI, TH and TA, 135). 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 I can withstand high waves Up to six meters tall No …. …. 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 ….

(Translated by Jeffrey Angles)

Another important feature of Arai’s poetry draws on her past life as the daughter of a small textile factory owner in Kiryū. Kiryū has a long history in textile manufacturing, and Arai’s family has for generations been involved in the manufacture of high end silk obi for kimono. Since the Meiji era, riding the wave of modern

Volume 6.2 industrialisation, Kiryū became the home to many female textile factory workers. However, economic recession and changing market tastes has meant that this once strong local industry has, during Arai’s lifetime, fallen into rapid decline. Factories started to close down leaving nothing but empty lots. Few even remember what had once stood there. In her work ‘The Healds’, Arai shines a magic lantern on the interior of the factory and the world of these women loom workers, so much a part of Arai’s childhood. A heald frame is the part of a weaving loom that works to lift and separate the warp threads so that the shuttle can pass through with the weft thread. The metal healds are attached vertically to the frame, and thread is passed through their eyeholes to form the warp. This threading process required strength and so was done by the male warp threader during the night to then allow the female workers to continue to weave the weft thread in and out during the day. In Arai’s poem, the night factory comes alive as the frames transform into female marionettes, ready to receive the male warp-threader’s attention. All factory girls know they must accommodate the threader, despite any pain, if they are to continue to work in this industry. Yet these women are no shrinking violets, they revel in their sexuality demanding his attention. The Healds The clatter and chatter of the looms and the women had faded into the dusk, There I was, still in the thread storeroom Leaning on the spools of thread, the stiffness in my neck has disappeared A tang of sulphur, the silk spits out the night air, forming A magic lantern Alone, a single bulb glows Peering through the hole in the wooden door, the factory transforms into A magic lantern Cold fingers About to touch the healds of the loom Just at night, when the looms are at rest, he appears, the man The warp threader About to push through, the thread Into the healds, glittering in a draft of dry wind Under the filament of the bulb Into their tiny, tiny eyes Forbidden to blink Vacant eyes, Because the looms Before they are hands Are the transformations of numberless, nameless eyes Because they are such eyeballs that Watch every single threaded intersection The hanging healds can be called the artificial eyes of the factory girls The night man

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Australian Poetry Journal First one, then the next Lightly moistening each with his tongue Must push it through It will hurt The man’s back too is trembling hard Grimacing, the healds Will look away Through the window grating towards the new moon

Are the looms Perhaps marionettes? At this textile factory If they don’t let it in they can’t work If they let it in, they can get moving eyes, the healds Towards the man With a clack Fold their necks Releasing a pale breath, along the needle A spreading blur This ruby red blood gives them vision Hung up, one beside the other From the ceiling, The sneaking whirlwind catches This thread Then that All entangled Arms lift in banzai, legs kicking Leaning forwards, embracing shoulders, holding bellies, laughing jaws The man Races over, desperate to untangle them Each demanding more attention More more, penetrate me Make me come! Slyly exposing their breasts The feminine wiles of the marionette factory girls When their coaxing gaze Returns to the moon Running down both cheeks Sweat drips from the man’s temples Just about now The real flesh and blood bodies of the factory girls Taking their baths at home, boarding houses or public bathhouses or watching the sleeping faces of their daughters, or just about to hang up their phones

Volume 6.2 No, No, Combing their locks Their rich hair, tangles in the wind At precisely eleven o’clock They try to force the comb through their hair, the reflection Is caught in the mirror Leaning forwards, arms around shoulders, hands on bellies, jaws falling open The marionettes are tangled in threads The healds are No, we are Being manipulated, allowing ourselves to be manipulated, manipulating him to manipulate us As the man rolls up the warp beam All pulled up The roots of our hair, the pores of our skin How good does that feel! Delicately First one strand, then the next, weaving them together Hoisting them up, the man works on The multicoloured thread, our hair, How alluring it looks! The night factory, the night factory girls, the night coiffeur All a magic lantern The single light bulb Like a pendulum Swinging Suddenly Vanishes With the warp threader Before the sound of the motor bike delivering the bottled milk The morning light Makes the marionettes Look like looms But you know About that wooden comb the man leaves behind If you’re a factory girl, that is. (Translated by Carol Hayes and Kikuchi Rina) This poem, from Arai’s third collection Beddo to Shokki (Beds and Looms, 2013), was first published in 2008 in Mi’Te, the poetry and criticism magazine edited by Arai.

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Australian Poetry Journal Rina Kikuchi and I work together on our translations, a native speaker of Japanese and a native speaker of English, usually sitting side by side in front of a computer screen with various dictionaries spread around us, although sometimes online using chat and cloud documents to share the screen when she is in Japan and I am in Australia. It is not a case of one of us translating from Japanese into English and then the other checking that work (which is the more common practice) but rather a jointly shared process. Arai is fascinated by word play and likes to challenge accepted language patterns by mixing word order, punctuation and grammar to evoke a certain dislocation in her work, a fact that presents a challenge to her translators. Often the placement of her lines of poetry deliberately breaks with accepted linear syntax. As translators, Rina and I have tried (as far as possible) to maintain this fragmentation, this sense of dislocation. Arai is also fascinated by dialect, drawing on her own childhood dialect of Kiryū and more recently the dialect of Fukushima and northern Japan. She creates her own peculiar dialect, which, although recognisable as a type of regional colloquial dialect, is in fact an imagined dialect, the language of her own poetic space. While it is possible to maintain speech levels in translation, to indicate politeness or bald rudeness, dialectal verb endings and short explanatory particles that add regional flavour to the end of sentences are virtually impossible to portray. A translator could choose to use a particular English dialect to portray a particular region of Japan, such as ‘rural’ Australian for Western Japan as compared to ‘urban’ Australian for Tokyo; however, such translation would clearly be fraught as each dialect carries its own socio/cultural baggage and prejudices. Although we try to maintain the linguistic intricacy of the original, in the end we privilege meaning over structure, for if the whole fabric of the meaning—the illusions, the layers, the metaphors—does not transfer across into the translation then it has already failed to evoke the original in another tongue. § The second poet I would like to discuss is Hirata Toshiko. Born in 1955, Hirata is a versatile artist, writing not only free-style poetry, but also haiku, plays, short stories and essays. Like Arai, Hirata is famous for her use of wordplay, which she raises to an even more inspired level with her layered imagery and embedded humour. It was the humour of her work and her deep sense of privacy that made the strongest impression on me, meeting her for the first time in July. As she began to read her work, it was hard to tell when her introductory commentary ended and her poem began, as she wove in and out of her written work with sharp witty commentary. She began with a poem about an annoying passenger who sat beside the poet on a train, who insisted on taking up too much room, on eating loudly and generally invading her space. After much laughter at his expense (we can all imagine just such a fellow passenger), she moved on to a poem she had written quite a long time ago in the Kansai (western) dialect. She said that she had little opportunity to read this poem aloud but that as she was here today in the western Kansai region of Japan, she would make an exception. This is just one

Volume 6.2 example of her fascination with language, how it is written, how it is spoken, how place, gender and age impinge on the words we use. Written Japanese allows for a particular style of linguistic word play. The written form is made up of Chinese characters and two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana. To generalise, nouns and verb/adjective stems are written in characters and the sentence final conjugations and the grammatical glue linking words is written in hiragana syllabary. It is common practice to write the phonetic reading of difficult character compounds か in hiragana superscript (‘rubi’ or ‘furigana’ in Japanese) above the character (蚊): ‘ka’, mosquito). As a result, a writer can choose to place a superscript ‘rubi’ word written in hiragana above another, two words for the price of one. They could even use katakana, the phonetic script used for foreign loan words, and add a layer of French or Russian. Hirata enjoys playing with this kind of syntactical layering. She argues that the density of many strokes in Chinese characters carries a sort of heaviness, while the more fluid curves of hiragana evoke a lighter response in her readers. Hirata is also fascinated by words that are pronounced in the same way but have a number of completely different meanings. Like the word ‘ka’. This can be a question particle at the end of a sentence (か), or the word for ‘mosquito’ (蚊) . In fact, she has a whole series of mosquito poems, she hates them so much it took her a few poems to get it out of her system. The prose poem ‘Mosquito’ begins; ‘Err, it’s still July today isn’t it. Yesterday was July too. Tomorrow’s July. Just how long will July go on? …’. July in Japan is mid-summer and unbearably hot. She gets to the 10th of July and it is still July and still hot. In Japanese, the word for July 10th is ‘shichi-gattsu tōka’ and that final syllable, the ‘ka’ of ‘tōka’ (the 10th) makes her continue, … This ‘ka’ is a strange word too isn’t it. Just a single syllable, but stick it on the behind, and a declarative statement is transformed into a question. Transformed–ka–is it? Transformed. Just a single insect, a mosquito landing on the behind, and the lexical meaning is transformed. One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, four sheep, they say counting sheep makes you sleepy but, one mozzie, two mozzies, three mozzies …. that definitely makes it impossible to sleep. Impossible–ka–is it? Impossible. … (Translated by Carol Hayes and Kikuchi Rina) The poem is a long discursive dialogue with her reader, and the sound or character used for one word links in her mind to another and off she goes into another word play. Hirata then took us into more unsettling territory, reading the poem, ‘Camera’. It begins in gentle private domesticity, but soon plunges into the hidden horror of domestic violence and manipulation. After hearing her read this poem, I got more of a sense of why Hirata is so angered by the world of social media and our all too ready acceptance of displaying photographs around the net, with or without permission:

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Australian Poetry Journal Camera You take my sweet sleeping face You take my innocent smile You take my large breasts Even though I asked you not to You take the mole on my shoulder You take the blouse I have taken off You take my dirty room Even though I asked you not to You take me when I am angry You take me when I get hit You take me when I get kicked across the room Even though I do not know you have done it You take my house when it is burning You take my younger brother when he is falling You take my younger sister when she is collapsing You take my older brother when he burns to death You take my older sister when she kills herself You take my mother as she is weeping Is that because I didn’t tell you not to take them? You take the dry skin on my arms and legs You take my swollen face You take my crooked spine You take my hair that has fallen out I no longer have the strength to tell you no This one’s no good, this one’s good This one’s no good, this one’s good As you look at the monitor You choose the photos The versions of me that survive The versions of me that are erased … … You took me And erased me … … You took lots of me You erased lots of me More of me than what you took Disappeared with the work of a single finger

(Translated by Jeffrey Angles)

Volume 6.2 Hirata began publishing poetry in high school and continues to achieve great success as a poet, as her many awards attest. However, this early success brought with it a wave of spiteful criticism. One respected male critic went so far as to suggest that she was only successful because she was so well known. This almost made Hirata decide to give up writing poetry, but fortuitously at just that moment she was asked by the influential poetry journal Gendai-shi Techo (Contemporary Poetry Notebook) to write a regular series of poems. So Hirata made the seventh day of every month into ‘poetry writing day’. She went on to publish two years of these monthly poems in her collection Shi-nanoka. This title can translate as ‘A poem on the Seventh Day’ and also as ‘Is this poetry?’ This rhetorical question is central to the collection, in which Hirata explores what it is to write poetry and what makes a poem a poem. In the first of the poems, ‘The Seventh of the First Month’, Hirata challenges the gendering of language, asking herself why the ‘pink’ of the ubiquitous women’s advertising that fills the carriages fails to speak to her in any way. She decides she must have become a man. The reader can almost hear the clatter of the train and feel it sway from station to station. The surrealist tone of her work creeps up on you with the image of a dog’s torso and the final transformation of the passengers into these limbless half-dogs. The Seventh of the First Month I’ll go on a journey I’ll go on a journey just to write poetry I’d made my decision, but I failed from the very first step It’s early evening on the Marunouchi line I sit without a shred of guilt Hanging adverts from women’s magazines The pink horizontal letters catch my eye They mean nothing to me Staring at them I feel I’ve become a man I’ll become a man then If it’s so hard to leave on a journey I’ll become a man just so I can write poetry Just as I decided, I heard a delicate voice ‘I was so lonely I bought a dog’s torso’ So that’s it when they’re lonely women buy torsos then they embrace the torso they’ve bought when they sleep a torso = the soft clay trunk of the body independent of the neck or limbs (Kōjien dictionary) So buying a thing like that gives them pleasure! Men’s bodies women’s bodies The Marunouchi line carries all equally But how each body feels the rocking Is individual Is subtly different

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Australian Poetry Journal Man Station Woman Station Man Station Woman Station The train stops in turn Man Station Woman Station Man Station Woman Station The carriages gradually become tinged with red Man Station Woman Station Man Station Woman Station All unnoticed, the passengers are dogs’ torsos (Translated by Carol Hayes and Kikuchi Rina) The final poem of the collection, ‘The Seventh of the Twenty-Four Month’, also describes a journey, but this time the poet is on a bus, holding a goldfish in a bowl, desperate to keep both the water and the fish in her bowl. She draws on the concept of ‘michiyuki’, which means both a ‘journey’ (travelling along a road), and the love suicide forced upon two star-crossed lovers (often featured in Kabuki theatre). So her journey in this swaying bus with a goldfish called Michiyuki becomes a surreal exploration of life and death and the bruising that comes in between. The Seventh of the Twenty-Four Month ‘There will now be some bumpiness, please take care’ The calm voice swam through the bus That will be a problem, driver I’m holding a washing basin In the basin is a goldfish…. … To tell the truth I suffer from motion sickness ‘There will now be some vomiting, please take care’ … This goldfish is called Michiyuki too, you know. Look, his mouth is popping open and shut What’s he saying, do you think? To die? Not to die? Not to die? To die? That’s what it sounds like to me That’s right, me, I’ve been asked on a michiyuki? ‘There will now be some bumpiness, please take care’ The goldfish leaps out of the washing basin I leap out of the bus window

Volume 6.2 Can this be called a michiyuki too? The cause of death is excessive bruising To die? Not to die? Not to die? To die? What a spirited love-journey to death! ‘There will now be no bumpiness, please take care’ ‘There will now be some death, please take care’ ‘There will now be no death, please take care’ (Translated by Carol Hayes and Kikuchi Rina) The third and final poet I would like to share with you is Itō Hiromi, who stepped onto the Otsu stage as the final poet and swept us off our feet. She and Jeffrey Angles have performed her poetry many times, and they make it seems so effortless. Her delivery changes from loud to soft, from slow to fast, sometimes all but speaking over Jeffrey as he rushes to get the English out. Like Hirata she draws on very ‘normal’ everyday life to draw us into a deeper contemplation of life and death, family, gender and identity. Throughout her long and successful career, she has, as Jeffrey notes, shocked her readers with her ‘willingness to deal with touchy subjects such as post-partum depression, infanticide, and sexual desire’ (Angles, Poems of HI, TH and TA, 9). Together with Hirata, Ito was one of the premier poets in the so-called ‘women’s boom’ in the 1980s, although she continues to challenge the label that she is a ‘woman’ poet rather than just a poet. Itō began her recitation with an extract from an early poem ‘Killing Kanoko’ which explores her imagined killing of her own baby daughter in a fit of postpartum depression. She told us that she had been unable to read this poem in public for years, but that now, a grandmother watching Kanoko with her own children, she feels able to revisit this work, in all its anger, guilt and violence. Killing Kanoko ‘Look, a leg. To figure out the size of a fetus, it’s best to look at one of the limbs. Here, it’s about fifteen weeks.’ It’s about three inches big – a wrenched-off thigh, knee, calf, and foot crowned with five toes. ‘Twice a week, one of them comes out alive. Here on this floor, all of the women are trying to deal somehow with their feelings about getting an abortion, and then we hear the crying of a baby.’

I was reading this in a book when my little sister said The other day I disposed of that little brat That’s what she said Her own words Disposed of that little brat That little brat was disposed of Congratulations Kanoko was not disposed of ….

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Australian Poetry Journal … Aborted an embryo that must have looked just like Kanoko The embryo that must have looked just like Kanoko would have grown I might have had a fetus that looked just like Kanoko But it would not have been her Congratulations on your destruction Congratulations on your destruction Congratulations on your destruction …

… Before I knew it, I lost my temper And smashed Kanoko (six months) Over the head with nearby alarm clock Kanoko went limp And would not respond If I called her, shook her, or hit her I thought I’ve killed her I’ve done something horrible And I got frightened So I put her down And left the place When I came back about two hours later Black ants were crawling all over her…

… I have had a radical hysterectomy I have had a child I have had induced labor because of sluggish contractions I have had an episiotomy I have had a pleasant pregnancy My uterus filled up My body filled with blood … … After six months Kanoko’s teeth come in She bites my nipples, wants to bite my nipples off She is always looking for just the right moment to do so

Kanoko eats my time Kanoko pilfers my nutrients Kanoko threatens my appetite Kanoko pulls out my hair Kanoko forces me to deal with all her shit I want to get rid of Kanoko I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples

… Congratulations on your destruction Congratulations congratulations Everyone celebrates for me …. Thank you thank you Happy Kanoko Bites off my nipples Congratulations congratulations Gleefully I would like To get rid of Kanoko Without melancholy, without guilt I want to get rid of Kanoko in Tokyo…

Teruko-chan Congratulations on your abortion Mihoko-chan Congratulations on your abortion Kumiko-san Congratulations on your abortion Congratulations on killing Tomo-kun….

…Congratulations on your destruction Congratulations on your destruction

Congratulations on your destruction ….

Was the fetus a boy or a girl?... …Let’s all get rid of them together All of the daughters All of the sons Who rattle their teeth Wanting to bite off our nipples (Translated by Jeffrey Angles)

Volume 6.2 Itō then told us something of her life as a first generation Japanese-American living in California, of what it was like for a poet to go and live in another country, to try and live in a foreign language, but to continue to write and publish in her mother tongue. Her poem, ‘Yakisoba’, draws on this double heritage. Yakisoba is the name of a fried noodle dish. Just the smell reminds you of festivals and school events when huge hot plates of noodles are fried with a few vegetables and perhaps some thinly sliced bits of pork and cooked in a sticky sweet soy sauce. Yakisoba One day At a supermarket where all the Japanese-Americans go Someone called out and stopped me in my tracks At the corner of the mall is an izakaya Where they serve simmering kiriboshi daiko and hijiki… …Next to that is the Japanese supermarket An old woman works there in promotion She yells in English with a strong accent Probably in her late sixties, probably born and raised in Japan Came here when she was young, probably lived here longer Never to return She uses only Japanese with her family When she speaks in Japanese Her children and grandchildren respond only in English Today, just now, she yelled And stopped a woman “Chotto okusan yottette! Good sauce ga included yo!” I was the one she stopped My mind spun as I stopped What the heck, who on earth Is her yelling meant to stop?…. … Was I the one who shared The language, gender, age, station in life, interests, financial values This lady was targeting? That was what was going through my mind As took a sample of her yakisoba And tasted it with so much nostalgia I took a bag of yakisoba, thinking “Ara, kore wa rather cheap da wa ne!”…. ….Arigatō, she says Iie, I say Here is a woman Who comes back alive, who comes back dead Who connects with the next woman With tens and hundreds and thousands of women With generations, dozens of generations down the line (Translated by Jeffrey Angles)

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Australian Poetry Journal As she read the poem, Itō made fun of her own rather Japanese accented English, which makes her just the ‘kind of person’ targeted by the old lady who cooked yakisoba to entice shoppers just outside the Japanese supermarket. The mixing of Japanese into her English, (or English into the original Japanese) ‘Ara, kore wa rather cheap da wa ne!’ reflects her dual identity. It is possible to understand the sentence without really understanding the Japanese. Translated directly, it would be ‘Hey, this is rather cheap isn’t it!’; however, Jeffrey has chosen to keep the intermixing of the languages in the translation. Itō is fascinated by the lives of Japanese–Americans, both first and later generations, particularly in their relationship to their homeland. This Japanese supermarket sells all the flavours of home, ‘daikon oroshi’ (grated Chinese radish) and ‘hijiki’ (a type of seaweed, like small dark brown cuttings with the consistency of grated carrot) and of course the yakisoba fried noodles. This poem provides a good example of some of the difficulties of translation. How do we deal with the names of food (sushi, tempura), items of clothing (kimono, obi), cultural practices or concepts (karate, zen) or popular culture references (manga, anime, pokemon)? Some of these Japanese words have already entered into the English language. Most of us would now understand ‘sushi’ and ‘karate’, but I have an old literary text in which ‘sushi’ is translated as ‘vinegared balls of rice topped with raw fish’, which is quite a mouthful. Jeffrey made the decision to leave all the words for Japanese food in this poem in Japanese, which although perhaps unfamiliar to many readers works in a poem that is full of the ‘Japlish’ phrases of the two women. Do such choices add cultural flavour to the poem or do they just make it more opaque? The final poem I will discuss is ‘Eels and Catfish’. Like Hirata, when Itō Hiromi began to talk about this poem it was hard to tell when the actual poem began. She told us that she counts Kumamoto as a second home and feels deep roots to the community there, roots that have deepened since the earthquake. Although originally from Tokyo, Itō moved to Kumamoto for her first husband’s work, and her parents followed suit and resettled in Kumamoto. Even after her first marriage broke up and she moved to California, she often returned Kumamoto to see her aging parents and, after her mother’s illness and death, to look after her father who was then alone. Even now, although her parents have both passed away, she maintains a house in Kumamoto and ‘return’s whenever she is in Japan. ‘Eels and Catfish’ was inspired by the visit of the Japanese-American poet Brandon Shimoda, who travelled to Kumamoto in search of his family roots. After reminding us that grilled eel was a speciality of the Kumamoto region, Itō also told us about an ancient belief about catfish, that the ‘namazu’ or giant catfish is said to cause earthquakes. Living in the mud under the islands of Japan, a giant ‘namazu’ is kept restrained by the God Kashima, who uses a heavy capstone to weigh the catfish down. Sometimes Kashima becomes tired or fails to pay proper attention and ‘namazu’ also known as the ‘earthshaker’ starts to thrash his tail causing tremors and earthquakes. Here was Itō the shaman, fascinated with old, old tales and ancient texts. It is interesting to note that Itō is increasingly occupied translating classical Buddhist tests into modern Japanese with commentary, and is particularly interested in how these old texts engage with connections between the generations, with aging, loss and dying. In ‘Eels and Catfish’, the

Volume 6.2 God Takeiwatatsu-no-mikoto makes an appearance. Venerated at Aso Shrine on Mt Aso in Kyushu, he was the grandson of Emperor Jimmu, the legendary first emperor of Japan and a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu through her grandson Ninigi. According to legend, Takeiwatatsu-no-mikoto was sent by his grandfather to Mt Aso in search of fertile land. Impressed by the lake at its foot, he decided to drain it for use as farmland, but when he had partly succeeded in draining the lake he found the water flow blocked by a giant catfish, forcing Takeiwatatsu-no-mikoto to cut it to pieces with his sword to allow the remaining water to flow out. In this poem, Itō weaves in and out of the past, the now when these visitors arrive from America, the then when this young Japanese-American’s poet’s grandfather used to live in this area. A strange e-mail arrived Hello to you My name is Shimoda And I’m a poet Writing from Western Maine I am wondering If you might have any Recommendations or suggestions Of places to visit in and around Kumamoto I responded. What do you want of me? … … I imagined this Shimoda fellow was hoping I’d be nice And say, well, why don’t you stay with me? But that is too presumptuous Kumamoto summers are unbearably hot Japanese houses are even hotter and more humid that the horrible weather outside I hated the thought of taking in a complete stranger But there was a day that I too had arrived like that In an unfamiliar land I ate the food people there gave me I squandered the time people there provided I felt like I had to repay my debt So although terribly busy, I went into town in the horrific heat And picked him up But he was not one person but two A young man and a young woman … … The air was full of a delicious scent Neither he nor his wife knew That scent came from the barbequed eels That scent alone makes you want to eat and eat When his grandfather was nine He set out alone for America

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Australian Poetry Journal His family had already gone, the reason He was left behind alone was because he was sick After he recovered, the nine year-old boy Went alone from Kumamoto to Oita, then set sail for Yokohama Changed boats in Yokohama, then arrived in San Francisco All alone In the rice paddies across the way was a cemetery Can we go in there? He asked hesitantly… … There were more than ten gravestones And there I found it, a gravestone marked Shimoda, the same name It must be a relative, a direct one or not, I could not be sure But looking at the wide-open landscape around the rice paddies I could imagine how stubborn society must be I could imagine his had not been the main branch but an offshoot of the family A branch family goes out into the world, it splits off And the descendant of that family Like a nine year-old boy Crosses the Pacific, goes from Yokohama to Oita, then arrives in Kumamoto All alone And stands face to face With the grave where generations of the Shimoda family are buried … … On the far side of the road was Catfish The name of the place was written clear as day on the telephone pole Catfish, Kashima Town, Mashiki County In ancient times, a caldera formed in Aso and collected lots of water A big, big lake formed there, and a big, big catfish lived inside The god Takeiwatatsu-no-mikoto came and ruled over the area He kicked the side of the lake with his feet The water overflowed and ran out, running, running, running all over the place It ran and ran It swallowed everything up Everything perished The native catfish was alive though Takeiwatatsu-no-mikoto killed it by cutting it up He chopped it up Into little pieces The place was covered in blood, but the water washed it away A piece of the catfish was washed to this distant place So this place is called Catfish They call it that even now A tiny, mud-colored frog jumped From the top of the plank bridge down below

Volume 6.2 Tiny, mud-colored frogs jumped in the muddy water The water had retreated but the trees and grasses And vines had grown, covering traces of blood Covering the slaughter A blue heron walked slowly in the green rice paddy When I started the car The Japanese-American turned Looked over this shoulder And waved in the direction of his own past. (Translated by Jeffrey Angles) I hope my discussion has given a taste of the versatility and originality of the poetic voices of these three women: their experimental style, their humour, their word play, their thematic focus. The Otsu poetry event came to an end with all the poets and translators on the stage talking about poetry and translation. As Jeffrey, Rina and I talked about our different approaches to translation and the poets themselves talked about how it felt to have their work translated into English and other languages, I was struck by how much the poetry came alive as it is read aloud. This opportunity to hear the poetry in the original Japanese interwoven with the translations created an event that transcended barriers and has left me hoping to hold this type of event all around the world. Further Reading →

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Takako Arai, ‘Galapagos’, ‘Half a Pair of Shoes’, ‘Specter’. Translated by Jeffrey Angles. Poetry Kanto. http://poetrykanto. com/issues/2012-issue/takako-arai Takako Arai, ‘Flared Skirt’, ‘The Healds’. Translation and Commentary by Carol Hayes & Rina Kikuchi. Transference #3. Michigan: Western Michigan University, 2015. http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/ transference/vol3/iss1/20/ Takako Arai, Featured Poet on in Poetry International Rotterham site. 11 Sept. 2016. http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/ pi/site/poet/item/28098/Takako-Arai Takako Arai, Soul Dance. Translations by Jeffrey Angles, Sawako Nakayasu, and Yō Nakai. Tokyo: Mi’Te Press, 2008. Takako Arai, Four From Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women. Introduction and Translations by Sawako Nakayasu. New York: Litmus Press/Belladonna Books, 2006

For more information on these traditional Japanese poetic forms see Steven Carter’s Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, Stanford University Press, 1991.

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Jeffrey Angles. ‘Building the Space of Poetry: A Conversation with Arai Takako, Winner of the Oguma Hideo Prize for Poetry’. http://fulltilt.ncu.edu. tw/Content.asp?I_No=42&Period=4 Jeffrey Angles (Ed. & Trans.), Poems of Hiromi Itō, Toshiko Hirata & Takako Arai. Vagabond Press, 2016. Toshiko Hirata, ‘The Seventh of the First Month’ , ‘The Seventh of the Thirteenth Month’ &, ‘The Seventh of the Twenty-Fourth Month’. Translation and Commentary by Carol Hayes & Rina Kikuchi. Poetry Kanto. http://poetrykanto. com/2015-issue/toshiko-hirata

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