日付変更線 International Date Line

D・ショスタコーヴィチ：交響曲第１４番第５楽章（ギヨーム・アポリネール・詩）

Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14, 5th movement (Guillaume Apollinaire, Poem)
Neeme Järvi, conductor; Berliner Philharmoniker; Olga Mykytenko, soprano

Here is a translation of this powerful anti-war poem, as found on another version of the text on Youtube.

Les Attentives I - Guillaume Apollinaire

He who will die in the trenches tonight
Is a little soldier whose indifferent eye
Gazes all day on the concrete defenses
Where last night’s glorious trophies are impaled.
He who will die in the trenches tonight
Is a little soldier my brother and my lover

And since he must die I want to be beautiful
I want my naked breasts to light the torches
I want my bi eyes to melt the frozen lake
And I want my thighs to become tombs
For since he must die I want to be beautiful
In incest and death the two acts of such beauty

Cows at sunset chew up all their roses
The bluebird’s wing softly brushes me
This is the hour of Love’s ardent neuroses
This is the hour of Death and of the last promise
He who will perish as the roses die
Is a little soldier my brother and my lover

In honor of National Poetry Month

TADA Chimako 多田智満子 “After Half a Century”「半世紀が過ぎて」

TADA Chimako (1930-2003) was one of Japan’s most brilliant and incisive poets of the mid- to late twentieth century, admired for her combination of intelligence and sensitivity. This posthumously published poem seems to represent her act of protest against the direction that contemporary society had taken in the era of advanced capitalism. I read this poem in New York City at the time of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and it received thunderous applause.

多田智満子 (1930-2003)は二十世紀中期と後期の最も知的で繊細な日本の詩人の一人であった。作品は想像上の世界をよく描写するが、「半世紀を過ぎて」は、二十世紀後半における資本主義の発展について批判的な立場を取り、現代社会への緊急なメッセージとして読める。ウォール街デモのとき、私はこの詩をニューヨークで朗読したことがあるが、朗読が終わったら万雷の拍手が起きた。

After Half a Century

Finally after half a century, a clearly observable law has been found:
For mankind, all matters proceed
Along geometric lines

(If you put one grain of rice on the first intersection of a game board, two grains of rice on the second, four grains of rice on the third, and continue along these lines, what vast quantities will you have by the time the board is covered? When the ancient king was told the answer, how surprised he was … )

By the time I realized what was happening, I was clinging to the earth
So I would not be shaken off as it spun with ever greater speed
My hair, dyed in two parts with night and day, had come loose
(Yet still I toyed with dice in one hand)

As it turns, it is stripped page by page like a calendar pad growing thin
A cabbage growing small, shorn of leaves before our eyes
Once, this planet had plenty of moisture
(But that was in the days when those things that now belong to dead languages –
Things such as dawn, looks, and smiles – were still portents of things to come)
That’s right, for mankind, all matters proceed along geometric lines

Four and a half more centuries into the future
The shriveled brain that revolves
Rattling in the cranium’s hollow will grow still
Like the pale eye of a hurricane

All will see its resolution in those moments
As the rolling dice tumble, turning up their black eyes
Then finally coming to a halt

Reprinted from The Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako, translated by Jeffrey Angles (University of California Press, 2010).

半世紀が過ぎて

半世紀もかかってようやく見えてきた明晰な法則がある
つまり人生においては何事も
等比級数的に進行するということ

（碁盤の一つの目に一粒の米　二つ目に二粒　三つ目に四粒　順次倍の米粒を置いてゆけば　全部でどれほど莫大な量になるか　知らされたときのあの王様の愕(おどろ)き……）

気がつくとわたしは振り落されまいとして
回転を速める地球にしっかりしがみついていた
夜と昼に染め分けられた髪をふりみだして
（そのくせ片手で賽をもてあそんで）

ころがりながら日めくりのようにめくられて
みるみるやせてゆくキャベツ
かつてはこの星もたっぷり水気を含んでいた
（今では死語に属するすべてのもの　たとえば　あけぼの
まなざし　ほほえみ　が未だ徴候であったころには）
さよう　何事も等比級数的に進行するのです

そしてさらに四半世紀
カラカラと音たててまわる頭蓋の中空(ちゅうくう)に
収縮しきった脳髄が静止するだろう
真白い台風の眼のように

すべては結着をみるだろう　振られた賽が
ころかって　黒目をむいて
立ちどまるまでのあいだに

　　　多田智満子『封を切ると』（書肆山田、2008）より

In honor of National Poetry Month 2012

新井高子「月が昇と」と「Wheels」
ARAI Takako reading “When the Moon Rises” and “Wheels”
第２回東京ポエトリーフェスティバルでの朗読
2nd Tokyo Poetry Festival

ARAI Takako was born in 1966 in Kiryū City, Gunma Prefecture (Japan) to a family engaged in textile manufacturing, a traditional industry in Kiryū. Her second collection, Tamashii Dance (Soul Dance) was published in 2007 and awarded the 41st Oguma Hideo Prize. Many of the poems in this collection describe the continuing economic troubles in her hometown. She is currently working on a collection of poems documenting the lives of the young women who worked in her father’s factory.

This poem appears in the book Soul Dance: Selected Poems of Takako Arai, translated Jeffrey Angles, Sawako Nakayasu, and You Nakai (Mi’Te Press, 2008).

In honor of National Poetry Month

WATANABE Hitomi 渡辺眸
University of Tokyo All-Campus Struggle, 68-69 『東大全共闘 1968-1969』

In searching for some information about Japanese student movements of the 1960s 1970s online, I came across this photo of the radical student movements at the University of Tokyo during the late 1960s. The 1960s were an era of great protest, conflict, and ideological questioning among the youth of Japan. Several students groups took over the University of Tokyo, causing disruptions in the operation of this elite school for a year and transforming it into their own space of protest and questioning. Eventually, police finally dislodged them with tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot gear.

The Japan Society describes the final confrontation on one of their webpages.

For many months students had been protesting Japan’s tolerance of perceived US interference in Japan, including American bases in Japan, US involvement in the Vietnam War and the US occupation of Okinawa. After World War two the Japanese government had given little resistance to the will of the US. This university protest was linked to a world movement of protest that had been happening in response to anti-war and anti-government sentiments. The students represented a growing leftist sentiment against the US and the conservative Japanese government. Police fire[d] tear gas grenades at roofttops of Tokyo University, January 18th, during an 11-hour battle that dislodged the radical students who have paralyzed the campus for almost a year.

Part of me wants to see some parallels to the Occupy Wall Street movements, which is producing new energies in the United States and giving rise to a young, idealistic, generation engaging in sorely needed protest for change. I hope that the recent social movements in the United States will help our society to take a good look at itself and consider its inequalities, moral shortfalls, and dangerous, even toxic apathy.

The photo is reblogged from oldworldwisdom.

Occupy Wall Street, New York
ウォール街デモ・ニューヨーク
2011.10.22

Give Us Morning 朝をください (ARAI Takako 新井高子)

This poem, which appeared in the book Soul Dance: Poems of Takako Arai (Mi’Te Press, 2008), was Arai’s response to Iraq and Afghani Wars, as well as the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, which turned the morning newspapers into a roster of casualties. The original first appeared in the collection Soul Dance 『タマシイ・ダンス』 (Michitani, 2007), which won the 41st Oguma Hideo Prize.

Morning is the time we count the dead
In the newspapers, in the hospitals, on the roads, on the seashores
In the rubble that was once our homes
Possess us all the more, Amenouzume-san
The morning is still not enough
We still cannot count them all
We still cannot carry them all
Dance more for us, Amenouzume-san
Put a green twig in your hair
And call out to them
Give the dead
To morning
Possess them, call out to them

     It’s me, the girl floating here this whole time
     It’s me, Mama’s boy crouched down
     It’s me, the boy with the right arm wrenched off
     I want to see you again, I want to see you again
     A bullet to the temple
     I scratch my throat, it hurts
     Now I’m sinking as far as I can go
     Why? Why was I the boy
     Blown aside by the bomb blast?
     The fingers of flame came in no time
     I struggle but there’s only sand, I struggle but there’s only sand
     One lung was crushed by the ceiling
     Left alone like this, where will I float?
     I wait for an extended hand
     Here I am, here I am
     I want to escape this blood-bathed school
     With my girlish eyes still open wide
     I know this is my last breath
     I am fed up with the roar of the bombs
     The sea has raised its clenched fist

Morning is the time we count the dead
On the TV news, in the embassies, in the community centers
In the rubble that was once our buildings and our mosques
Possess us all the more, Amenouzume-san
The morning is still not enough
The morning is still not enough
The morning is still not enough
Dance for us all the more, Amenouzume-san
Claw the milk from your breast, shake your hair wildly
Pound your feet on the ground
And dance
Spin your arms round, shake off your sweat
Bend back your neck
And dance, dance
More
More
Sway your spine, lift your legs
Shake your hips
More
More
Set your womanly shadow on fire
Open your womanly shadow
And call for them
And dance for them
And possess them
And gather
The dead
To the shadow

Give them to morning
Give us morning
The time we count the corpses

          Translation by Jeffrey Angles

Translator’s Note: Amenouzume is a mythical Japanese goddess associated with dance and performance. Through her dance, she is said to have lured the Sun Goddess Amaterasu out of a rock cave where she had secluded herself, thus plunging the world into darkness. The words “womanly shadow” that appear toward the end of the poem is a euphemism for the vagina.