Alvin Pang: “Candles”
アルヴィン・パン「蝋燭」（シンガポール英語での朗読）
Alvin recorded this reading at Worlds 2012 in Norwich, where he shared a number of poems from his new collection When the Barbarians Arrive (Arc Publications, 2012). The cadences and grammar of the Singlish (Singaporean English) have borrowed an incredible amount from Chinese, making listening to this poem a real treat.
The Japan Times published an article earlier this year about Hiromi Itō, the brilliant writer who is one of my greatest muses and the subject of my work as a translator. (In 2009, Action Books published my book of translations Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō, and little by little, I am working on a translation of her long work, Wild Grass on the Riverbank『河原荒草』. ) The entire article can be found by clicking the link above, but here is one highlight.
“When I was in my 20s or early 30s, I really didn’t like being called a feminist,” she said. “People were trying to categorize me, classify me as a feminist poet and I hated it. I wanted to be a poet, not a woman poet. I was really against the way men tried to push us aside and not let us into the mainstream of poetry.”
That she has misgivings about the term “feminism” — because she thinks it goes without saying that she’s just as capable as a man — is an irony that is not lost on Ito. When explaining that she tweaked her 2001 translation into Japanese of Dr. Seuss’ “The Cat in The Hat” to make it appear to Japanese readers that the cat is giving equal attention to the girl while addressing the brother-sister duo, she quipped good-naturedly, “See, I’m a feminist.”
The online poetry journal Big Bridge has in its May 2012 issue a special selection, edited by Jane Nakagawa-Joritz, of contemporary Japanese poetry. Among them are a number of Japan’s most interesting, avant-garde poets. Among them are two of expatriate poets living in Japan (Phillip Rowland and Jane Joritz-Nakagawa) and two Japanese poets (Yoko Danno and Goro Takano) who live in Japan but write and publish exclusively in English.
Arai Takako 新井高子, trans. Jeffrey Angles
Danno Yōko 團野葉子
Sekiguchi Ryōko 関口涼子, trans. Eric Selland
Takagai Hiroya 高貝弘也, trans. Eric Selland
Takano Gorō 高野吾郎
Tanaka Atsusuke 田中宏輔, trans. Jeffrey Angles
Torii Shōzō 鳥居昌三, trans. Taylor Mignon
Tsukagoshi Yūka 塚越裕佳, trans. the author and Judy Halebsky
Philip Rowland
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Thanks to the folks at Big Bridge for bringing more work from Japan into English.
三好達治 MIYOSHI Tatsuji (1900-1964)
「家庭」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.
腹語術VentriloquyI 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.
Jacob Clemens non Papa (c. 1510/15-1555/56), “Ego flos campi”
Performed by Stile Antico
Stile Antico is one of the most brilliant and sensitive early music vocal groups performing today. Based in England, they perform frequently throughout Europe and North America.
This stunningly lovely song, sung in Latin, has this as the text.
I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valley;
As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters:
A fountain of gardens, and the well of living waters;
and streams from Lebanon.
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
アメリカの現代詩の母、エミリー・ディキンソンの『植物標本集』より
ディキンソンは 生前は全く無名であったが、1700篇以上残した作品はアメリカの現代詩の出発点とされている。詩を封筒や屑紙に書くことが毎日の戯れだったが、その他に 自分の庭に植物を育つことが熱心だった。『植物標本集』にそれぞれの植物を集めたので、十九世紀のアメリカの植物を研究するために、貴重な資料になってい る。
From Emily Dickinson: Herbarium
In honor of National Poetry Month 2012
Courtesy Boston Public Library and poetsorg
世界最古ラブポエム
World’s oldest love poem
Bridegroom, dear to my heart, Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet… . Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.
That’s the sexy start to the oldest love poem in the world, on special display this month at the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient in Turkey. Scholars discovered the poem over a hundred years ago, buried in the ancient sands of Iraq, but they’re hoping to draw new attention to it now.
The poem’s verses are in cuneiform, one of the first writing systems people developed after people developed writing around 3500 BC. Sometime around 2030 BC, a Sumerian scribe from the city of Ur pressed the poem into wet clay using a reed stylus, then baked the tablet, preserving the passion of the moment for 40 centuries.
The passion, scholars say, was ritual—part of a Mesopotamian festival of fertility and power called Sacred Marriage. Every new year (for the Sumerians, around the spring equinox), the Sumerian king “married” the Sumerian goddess of love and war, Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar), to renew the land’s fertility and affirm his own potency. In Summer, or several days, the king’s people got the Sumerian equivalent of Mardi Gras. At the festival’s peak, the king got Inanna’s high priestess, playing the part of Inanna. Woed by his offerings, the priestess would accept the king into her bed, with a poem addressed to him. This one, addressed to the Sumerian king Shu-Sin, is the oldest love poem we know:
Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,
Lion, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.
You have captivated me,
Let me stand tremblingly before you.
Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,
You have captivated me,
Let me stand tremblingly before you.
Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.
Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey.
Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me,
Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies,
My father, he will give you gifts.
Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,
Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,
Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,
Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.
You, because you love me,
Give me pray of your caresses,
My lord god, my lord protector,
My Shu-Sin, who gladdens Enlil’s heart,
Give my pray of your caresses.
Your place goodly as honey, pray lay your hand on it,
Bring your hand over like a gishban-garment,
Cup your hand over it like a gishban-sikin-garment.
…Michael Himick
www.artknowledgenews.com/?q=node/1412
In honor of National Poetry Month 2012
アメリカの現代詩の母、エミリー・ディキンソンの『植物標本集』より
ディキンソンは生前は全く無名であったが、1700篇以上残した作品はアメリカの現代詩の出発点とされている。詩を封筒や屑紙に書くことが毎日の戯れだったが、その他に自分の庭に植物を育つことが熱心だった。『植物標本集』にそれぞれの植物を集めたので、十九世紀のアメリカの植物を研究するために、貴重な資料になっている。
From Emily Dickinson: Herbarium
In honor of National Poetry Month 2012
Courtesy Boston Public Library and poetsorg
In commemoration of National Poetry Month 2012, I will be posting some poetry-related content, including photos, videos, sound files, and poems each day. Please follow or click here!
2012 Poster for National Poetry Month from the Academy of American Poets
Design: Chin-Yee Lai
The 2012 poster features the line “…wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life” from U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine’s poem “Our Valley.”
Each April, the Academy of American Poets creates and distributes—for free—almost 200,000 copies of the current National Poetry Month posters to U.S. schools, libraries, bookstores, and community centers to help promote the month-long celebration and to increase poetry awareness. Click on the image for a larger and more detailed version.
伊藤比呂美とのディスカッション
（２０１２年２月２２日、在ウェスタン・ミシガン大学）
詩人の伊藤比呂美は英語での朗読する感覚と、アメリカに渡る経験と、フェミニズム文学に初めて出会った体験などについて話します。
This film shows the Japanese poet Ito Hiromi talking about her work at Western Michigan University on February 22, 2012. She talks about reading in English, collaborating with translators, migrating to America, encountering feminist writing, and incorporating feminist ideas and language in her work.
In this film, she appears with Jeffrey Angles, the translator of her collection _Killing Kanoko_ (Action Books, 2009). For more info, see http://tiny.cc/itokillingkanoko.
