For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut

I was lucky enough to read Takashi Hiraide's For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut in manuscript form a couple of months ago. It's a revelation in how to write small prose poems in beautiful language that interconnects into a larger poem with concrete themes that burst out into grander themes when read together. There's the regular commuter rails, minute observations of insect life, the wonder of fruit, rain falling into larger pools of water, the wonder of the universe encapsulated in each microcosm of living. A small bit of the book:

# 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 each 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.

Oh, and please admire the beautiful bilingual book design: recto English translation (trans. by Sawako Nakayasu), verso Japanese original.

Kenneth Rexroth's translations

I've been perusing through various volumes of Kenneth Rexroth's translations from the Chinese and the Japanese; I have six volumes of these mostly brief love poems that capture so quickly the essence of longing or the erotic. More than the romantic ones, I love the ones where the writing is so sharp that it's as though the moment has coalesced in a few brief lines.

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.

The Japanese transliteration:
Suma no ama no
Shio yaki ginu no
Narenaba ka
Hito hi mo kimi wo
Wasurete omowamu
(Akahito)

You say, "I will come."
And you do not come.
Now you say, "I will not come."
So I shall expect you.
Have I learned to understand you?

Japanese transliteration:
Komu to yu mo
Konu toki aru wo
Koji to yu wo
Komu to wa mataji
Koji to yu mono wo
(Lady Otomo No Sakanoe)

Even though I don't know Japanese, in looking at the transliteration, I assume that the word play in the poem by Lady Otomo No Sakanoe must be quite something. As it is, I will have to merely enjoy the way the sounds bounce off each other in that brief bit of a poem. What a sharp lady she must have been!