POETRY IN LOCKDOWN: 3

Late 20th and 21st century Japanese culture is known only in glimpses in Europe. There is awareness of what manga is, and some public interest in novels by Mishima or Murakami, art by Yoko Ono or Yayoi Kusama, the films of  Osu and Kurasawa. Japanese Poetry is almost unknown except for awareness of the haiku form and there cannot be many readers in Britain able to name a single Japanese poet from the last 50 years.

I guess not many have been translated into English. I have a book in my shelves, 3 Contemporary Japanese Poets published by London Magazine Editions in 1972. The translations are by Graeme Wilson and Atsume Ikuko and I find them very good. Not that I know Japanese; I mean they are good in the sense that they work pretty well as English poems, including some deft rhyming.

Here is one from that book. The poet is abroad — America I suspect — writing a postcard home. But he finds himself in a becalmed mental state, unable to feel, consider or report on, let alone relish the atmosphere of the place he is in. Instead he is captured by more interior feelings — he feels the power of existence, of "being here", and at the same time "a curious sense of absence".  But is this absence from him, or is he the absent one?

Travel 1

by Tanikawa Shuntaro

On this beautiful picture postcard
I have nothing to say:
Simply this is where I am.

The iced coffee tastes O.K.
The strawberry cakes are also good.

I have not noted down
The name of the river which, o so slow,
Sidles through the town.

It’s just that I’m here, that my being here
Is so intensely real
That a curious sense of absence
Is all that I can feel.

Later on, remembering,
Then I’ll have things to say:
But here and now my only words
Are that I’m here today.