In celebration of National Poetry Month 2013, I wanted to share a site showing a number of poems in the original handwriting of the poets.  Although we all have all seen Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, I realized while looking at this page that I had never seen Virginia Clemm Poe’s deliberate, calligraphic handwriting, or the childlike, big writing of Anne Sexton.  Somehow a poem comes alive in such a different way when written in the author’s own hand.  Check the photos of the manuscripts out by clicking here. 

三好達治 MIYOSHI Tatsuji (1900-1964)
「家庭」Household

Household

家庭

息子が学校へ上るので
親父は毎日詩(うた)を書いた
詩は帽子やランドセルや
教科書やクレイヨンや
小さな蝙蝠傘になった
四月一日
桜の花の咲く町を
息子は母親につれられて
古いお城の中にある
国民学校第一年の
入学式に出かけていった
静かになった家の中で
親父は年とつた女中と二人
久しぶりできくやうに
鵯どりのなくのをきいてゐた
海の鳴るのをきいてゐた

From YOTSUMOTO Yasuhiro’s introduction for Poetry International Web

To many Japanese baby-boomers who were born within a decade or so after the end of World War II, Tatsuji Miyoshi was the national poet, and his works appeared in their textbooks almost every school year. Those poems were perfect for classroom teaching: short and handsome, simple yet profound…

　　　Those were the days shortly after the poet’s death in 1964 at the age of 64. Nowadays, unfortunately, Tatsuji Miyoshi is not heard about so often, although his collected poems are still in print in several editions and there is even a poetry award commemorating his work. Most contemporary poets seem to consider him a poet of the past, whose poems might have played fine emotional tunes at the time, but lacked social and historical awareness. The fact that, during the war, Miyoshi wrote poems in moral support of the soldiers on the frontlines, if not for the regime itself, must have been partly responsible for such a view.

　　　But if you set aside the ideological judgments and appreciate the landscapes of Tatsuji Miyoshi’s poetry as they are, you will find an extraordinarily wide range of styles and extremely sophisticated techniques, which few poets today can match…

　　　The reader of his work feels as though they had known him personally, and it is his compassion more than anything else that is so touching. Tatsuji Miyoshi is a poet of attachment as opposed to detachment: he reduces the distance between himself and his object, whether it be a human being or nature, until they become one. His songs are born in that moment of togetherness. And yet, “being a poet”, as he wrote in ‘The Shore of the Sky’, he is also a traveller at heart: he moves on, trying to see beyond, “blinking it eyes at the scent of the tides, chasing after clouds that fly away” (from ‘The Lamb’). Tatsuji Miyoshi travelled rather hastily through the most violent and tragic period in the Japanese history. But he has left behind him the songs which are to stay with us for a long time.

Today is Poem Your Pocket Day
Thursday, April 26, 2012 

From the Academy of American Poets

The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends. You can also share your poem selection on Twitter by using the hashtag #pocketpoem.

Poems from pockets will be unfolded throughout the day with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores. Create your own Poem In Your Pocket Day event using ideas below or let us know how your plans, projects, and suggestions for Poem In Your Pocket Day by emailing npm@poets.org.

About this video

Each year on national Poem in Your Pocket Day, the town of Charlottesville, Virginia unites in a day-long celebration of poetry. The project is spear-headed by Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, whose staff recruit members of the community — students, senior citizens, local business owners, neighbors, and friends — to distribute poem scrolls throughout Charlottesville.

スリリング！古代英語で読まれる『ベオウルフ』の序文
The thrilling opening of Beowulf in Old English, performed by Benjamin Bagby

ベオウルフは、英文学最古の伝承のひとつで、英雄ベオウルフ（ベーオウルフ）の冒険を語る叙事詩である。約3000行と古英語文献のなかで最も長大な部類に属することから、言語学上も貴重な文献である。

デネ（デンマーク）を舞台とし、主人公である勇士ベオウルフが夜な夜なヘオロットの城を襲う巨人のグレンデルや炎を吐くドラゴンを退治するという英雄譚である。

ウィキペディアより

In celebration of National Poetry Month

腹語術

Ventriloquy

I walk into the wrong room
And miss my own wedding.
Through the only hole in the wall I see
All proceeding perfectly: The groom in white
The bride with flowers in her hand, the rites
The vows, the kiss
Turning my back on it: fate, the ventriloquy
I’ve worked so long and hard at
(tongue, that warm aquatic creature,
squirms domestic in its tank)
And the creature says: I do.

Dick Davis (1945- ): “The Translator’s Nightmare”
ディック・デービス「翻訳家の悪夢」

Born in Portsmouth, England, Dick Davis is one of the most brilliant and witty poets working in formal verse today.  For links to several of his other poems, including one of my favorites, “Iran, Twenty Years Ago,” click here. 

In addition to writing his own poetry, he is also the most prominent translator of Persian medieval verse, having translated the great Persian epic, the Shahnameh; an early version of the Tristan and Isolde legend from Persia called Vis and Ramin, and many other great works of Persian literature.  Davis now teaches at The Ohio State University. 

It was while I was a graduate student there that he taught me much of what I know about translation, and it was in his class that I did one of my first translations, Hagiwara Sakutarō’s “The Town of Cats,” which was published several years later.  It was in large part thanks to him that I started down the path to becoming a translator.  I still owe an enormous debt of gratitude to him.   

ディック・デービスはイギリスで生まれの詩人だが、長くアメリカに在住している。韻と律を踏む詩人の中で、最もユーモラスでウィットに富んだ一人である。その他に、中世ペルシア文学の最も有名な翻訳家にもなっている。ペルシアの偉大な叙事詩シャナメーと、トリスタンとイゾルデの伝説の原型とされているヴィスとラミンの他に、ペルシア文学の英訳が多い。現在デービスはオハイオ州立大学で教えている。

大学院生の頃、私はデービス先生の翻訳講座を取ったが、その講座で翻訳の理論と実践を初めて味わえた。振り返ってみると、その講座は翻訳家になる切っ掛けだったというのは、決して大げさではない。その講座の期末プロジェクトのために、萩原朔太郎の「猫町」を翻訳して、数年後にその英訳を本の形で出版した。十五年が経った今でも、デービス先生に心から感謝している。

In honor of National Poetry Month

MIYAZAWA Kenji 宮沢賢治 (1896-1933)
“Strong in the Rain” 「雨ニモマケズ」

This poem is probably the most well known, most often memorized poem in contemporary Japan.  It was discovered in the notebook of the great and wildly imaginative poet and writer MIYAZAWA Kenji upon his death.  Although there are relatively few translations of his work into English, he is currently one of the most beloved authors of early twentieth-century Japan. 

Miyazawa was from Iwate 岩手, one of the regions most devastated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake.  This film was created after the earthquake as a way of encouraging Japan in its recovery.  Reading the poem is the actor WATANABE Ken 渡辺謙.  Although the Chinese viewer who added the translation did not acknowledge the translator in the film, this appears to be Rodger Pulver’s translation. 

In celebration of National Poetry Month 2012

TANAKA Atsusuke 田中宏輔 is a Japanese poet, born and raised in the ancient capital of Kyoto, where he still lives and works as a high school mathematics teacher.  Tanaka has published seven volumes of poetry in Japanese, including an ongoing experimental series of postmodern poems called The Wasteless Land, which draws inspiration and quotations from wide array of sources ranging from pop music to classical Western and Japanese literature.

Sadness


1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + …… ＝ 1 

1 ＝ 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + …… 

1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + …… ＝ 1 

1 ＝ 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + …… 

Half+half of a half+half of a half of a half+half of a half of a half of a half+…… ＝1 

1＝half+half of a half+half of a half of a half+half of a half of a half of a half+……
Half+half of a half+half of a half of a half+half of a half of a half of a half+…… ＝1 

1＝half+half of a half+half of a half of a half+half of a half of a half of a half+……
Therefore, take half of sadness and treat it not as sadness.

Treat the half of the sadness that remains as something else.  

The half of the half of the sadness that remains is something else yet again.
Repeat this, and sadness becomes something else again, ad infinitum.

Yet even so, the thing that remains is the same as at the start,

The same single sadness from which it all began.

        — Translation by Jeffrey Angles

        Published in Inventory, No. 2 (2011)

悲しみ



1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + …… ＝ 1 

1 ＝ 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + …… 

1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + …… ＝ 1
１ ＝ 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64 + ……
半分+半分の半分+半分の半分の半分+半分の半分の半分の半分+…… ＝ １ 

１＝半分+半分の半分+半分の半分の半分+半分の半分の半分の半分+…… 

半分+半分の半分+半分の半分の半分+半分の半分の半分の半分+…… ＝ １ 

１＝半分+半分の半分+半分の半分の半分+半分の半分の半分の半分+…… 

だから、悲しみの半分を悲しみではないものにする。 

残った半分の悲しみの半分をほかのものにする。

さらに残った半分の半分の悲しみの半分をほかのものにする。 

これを繰り返して、悲しみを限りなくほかのものにする。 

それなのに、残ったものは、最初にあったものと同じもの、 

同じひとつの悲しみであった。

      「The Wastleless Land VI」(2011)より

In celebration of National Poetry Month 2012

ケイ・ライアン「ホーム・ツー・ルースト」（朗読）
Kay Ryan reading “Home to Roost”

About Ryan’s work, J. D. McClatchy has said: “Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost” (Quoted here).

ケイ・ライアン（１９４５年生まれ）は２００８年にアメリカの議会堂図書館に国の桂冠詩人に指定された。ライアンの詩は、ユーモアに溢れていながら、エミリー・ディキンソンのように繊細な世界を引き出す。

In celebration of National Poetry Month

The newest issue of Asymptote, one of the very best and innovative online journals of international fiction, includes an excerpt from my translation of TAKAHASHI Mutsuo’s memoirs Twelve Views from the Distance. Takahashi is one of Japan’s most prominent poets, known for his bold explorations of homoeroticism as well as for his philosophical and erudite writing. 

Asymptote includes an English translation, the original text, and an MP3 of a reading of the text in the original language.  The reading in this issue is by OKAMOTO Sayuri, one of the editors, and with her quiet, intimate voice, she brings the original Japanese alive in a beautiful way. 

The entire book is scheduled to be published in fall 2012 by University of Minnesota Press. The illustration above is by Hugo Muecke.

In honor of National Poetry Month 2012

In celebration of National Poetry Month
Reblogged from evolutionstopshere

ロビンソン・ジェファーズ (1887-1962) はアメリカの天才的な詩人と言われ、環境保護主義者として知られている。作品はカリフォルニアの海岸の美しさを唱えながら、社会の発展に対して批判的な立場をよく取る。

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

Jeffers brought enormous learning in literature, religion, philosophy, languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. One of his favorite themes was the intense, rugged beauty of the landscape in opposition to the degraded and introverted condition of modern man. Strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s concepts of individualism, Jeffers believed that human beings had developed an insanely self-centered view of the world, and felt passionately that we must learn to have greater respect for the rest of creation. (From the Academy of American Poets’ biography of Jeffers)

Carmel Point   by Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things! 
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

In honor of National Poetry Month 2012

TANAKA Yōsuke (1969- ) is a research scientist specializing in molecular cell biology at the University of Tokyo.  He is also the author of two books of poetry, A Day When the Mountains are Visible 『山が見える日に、』 (1999) and Sweet Ultramarine Dreams 『スウィートな群青の夢』(2008), which display an unique poetic voice, rich in stylistic diversity, humor, and poetic resonance.  YOTSUMOTO Yasuhiro wrote on Poetry International Web, that Tanaka “casually introduces elements from the past or from other poetic forms such as tanka, combining them with a 21st-century sensitivity to create something extraordinary which is simultaneously old and new, traditional and experimental, lyrical and critical.”

The Station to Spring

I screw up my face against the oncoming wind
Which carries my feet to the left and the right
I climb the slopes to the plateau
Just barely managing to hold back
Everything brimming inside me

I had been dreaming of a partially underground movie theater
Swallowing the audience members like a rectangular mouth
Feathers sprouting from an elevator car
And scattering like dandelions in April

A warm café, I hope for
A café on this street
On the rocks, sir?
A deep sleep.

In the darkness
The orange juice glows.
It seems to shine from within.
The station to spring is near.

——Translation by Jeffrey Angles, reprinted from Poetry International Web 

春の駅

顔がくしゃくしゃになる逆風に
右へ左へと足を取られながら
台地の坂を上がる
内面があふれ出しそうなのを
ようやく圧しとどめて

四角い口のように観客を呑み込んでいく
半地下の映画館
エレベータに羽が生え
四月のタンポポのように飛ぶ夢だった

あたたかなカフェあれ、この
道ばたに一軒のカフェあれかしと願う
ロックでいいですか？
深く眠る。

闇のなかで
オレンジジュースが光る。
自分から光っているように感じられる。
春の駅は近い。

 ――『スウィートな群青の夢』(2008年未知谷)

In celebration of National Poetry Month 2012

The poetry of KIM Hyesoon 김혜순 (金惠順), according to her translator Don Mee Choi,

goes beyond the expectations of established aesthetics and traditional “female poetry” (yŏryusi), which is characterised by its passive, refined language. In her experimental work she explores women’s multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters in the context of Korea’s highly patriarchal society, a nation that is still under neo-colonial rule by the US. Kim’s poetics are rooted in her attempt to resist conventional literary forms and language long defined by men in Korea. According to Kim, “women poets oppose and resist their conditions, using unconventional forms of language because their resistance has led them to a language that is unreal, surreal, and even fantastical. The language of women’s poetry is internal, yet defiant and revolutionary.”

On the seat you left, two beer bottles, a cigarette butt, two pieces of scratch paper.
Why are you screening my calls, my messages? Don’t you have anything else to do?
You are the bourgeoisie of communication. Why am I always afraid of the phone?
When you look at me, I always feel as if I should change into something else.
How about changing myself into a bundle of clothes dumped on the sofa
or a pale pink wad of bubble gum dangling from someone’s lips
like the poor tummies of all the animals that flail about when they are turned over?
Do you know?
Eyesnavel god. Forearmsearflap god.
Sweetpotatokneesappleseed god. Pigstoenailschick god.
Dreamingdivingbeetlesashtree god. Lovelygirlsheelstoenail god.
Antsghostscatseyeball god. Ratholescatsrottingwater god.
Mrsdustingarmselephant god. Salivadropexplodeslikefreongas.
Salivafountainevenmoremortifyingnauseatingthanthesmelloflionsrottenbreath god.
Do you know all the dearest gods that are hanging onto our limbs?
On the seat you left, a wet towel, a wad of gum, a crushed tomato.
Dear blackgarbagebags who thankfully lent each one of their bodies.
Dear foldedarms of the window and concrete and steel under my feet.
How high the armsofthemachinehammers that beat down steadily upon
those foldedarms.
All the pigs of the world unite god. All the cats of the world let’s become a butter god.
Dear wrists escape from the arms god. Heap of curses, mackerel corpses spit out from a soccer player’s mouth god. There are 3 million gods in India. How many people live there?
Dearest multiple gods that have swarmed in from the sky, land, sea.
On the seat you left, I sit like a garbage god, and do you or don’t you know
that I wait for the green truck heading to the landfill like the dearest dirtiest loftiest god
who has long endured till now because of its hunger for humans?
Do you or don’t you know that every day our hair falls and mixes with the melting water of an iceberg in the faraway sea?
Yournostrilssingledropofapricklynosehairearth god!