Notes Introduction 1. The important work of H. G. Henderson and R. H. Blyth was addressed to a more specialized readership. 2. Seamus Heaney in Ohno 2002: 20. 3. Eavan Boland in Ohno 2002: 18. 4. Michael Longley in Ohno 2002: 21. 5. Seamus Heaney in Ohno 2002: 20. 1 Petals on Sandymount Strand: Seamus Heaney 1. Heaney first visited Japan in the summer of 1987. He then returned there in 1990, on the occasion of the IASIL World Conference, and finally in the autumn of 1998. I owe this information to Mitsuko Ohno. 2. From now on, I will refer to Heaney’s 2000 Lafcadio Hearn Lecture as LHL. 3. Since the publication of Heaney’s own abridged version in the anthology Our Shared Japan (2007), co-edited by Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods, this lecture has reached a wider public than the original audience. Though it does not present special knots to be untied by literary criticism, it still provides a masterly introduction to the subject of this volume. 4. Heaney’s 2000 Lafcadio Hearn Lecture was published in the review Gendaishi-techo. 5. This and the following quotations from the LHL refer to the unpublished integral version, which Heaney entrusted to me for my PhD dissertation. 6. Yone Noguchi, born Yonejiro Noguchi (1875–1947), was an influential writer of poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. 7. The phrase ‘Japanese effect’ goes back to Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying (1891), where the author made a distinction between a Japan belonging to life and another one, created by art, which can be found without going to Tokyo, but simply strolling down Piccadilly in the right mood. 8. In haiku poetry, ‘blossoms’ are always cherry blossoms (Henderson 1958: 4). 9. Kaneiji temple at Ueno, Senso¯ji temple at Asakusa (Henderson 1958: 4). 10. Ohno 2002: 18. 11. Ohno 2002: 19. 12. Ohno 2002: 21. 13. Ohno 2002: 21. 14. Ohno 2002: 27. 15. Personal interview with Andrew Fitzsimons in July 2004. Henceforth referred to as PI F. 16. Michio Ito helped W. B. Yeats in his Plays for Dancers, inspired by the Japanese No¯ theatre. 159 160 Notes to Chapter 2 17. Ungaretti 1974: 95, English translation mine. ‘La guerra improvvisamente mi rivela il linguaggio. Cioè io dovevo dire in fretta perché il tempo poteva man- care, e nel modo più tragico […] in fretta dire quello che sentivo e quindi se dovevo dirlo in fretta lo dovevo dire con poche parole, e se lo dovevo dire con poche parole lo dovevo dire con parole che avessero un’intensità straordinaria di significato.’ 18. Translation by Andrew Fitzsimons, unpublished. 19. In the proceedings of the international conference on Ungaretti (Suga 1981), Suga explains that Marone and Shimoi translated Japanese tanka by five poets: Akiko Yosano, Suikei Maeta, Tekkan Yosano, Nobutsuna Sasaki and Isamu Yoshii. Tanka are very different from haiku, both formally and at the content level. They are more descriptive, while haiku are more concise and philo- sophical. Suga also says that the translations of tanka in Marone’s collection were extremely free and more prosaic than the original, to which they also added a title. For this reason he dismisses the hypothesis that Ungaretti came across haiku poetry. 20. Miłosz died in 2004, four years after Heaney delivered his lecture. To him Heaney dedicated the poem ‘Out of This World’, in his collection District and Circle (2006: 47–9). 21. On the death of one child, Issa wrote the following haiku: The world a dewdrop? The world a dewdrop lasting as it disappears. The first line is taken from a Buddhist sutra comparing the impermanence of life to that of dew. The poem is not a general meditation, but refers to Issa’s suffering on the death of his child. ‘A “Dew-World” though it is,’ Henderson says, ‘it is no world for dewdrops. They will not stay in it, and, much as he tries, he can find no solace in the scripture’ (1958: 124). 22. The poem has been reproduced with a double spacing between the two lines according to the author’s following indications: ‘I always intended [‘For Bernard and Jane McCabe’] to consist of two one-line stanzas, so if it ever appeared as a couplet, without the double spacing between the lines, that was a misprint’ (Letter to the author, 2007). 23. This calls to mind the wind of ‘Had I Not Awoken’, the first poem in Heaney’s collection Human Chain (2010: 3). 24. In his volume District and Circle, Heaney published ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ (2006: 55). 2 Snow Was General All Over Japan: Derek Mahon 1. The work was first translated into English in 1966. 2. Basho¯’s travelogue inspired not only ‘The Snow Party’, but also the haiku- like sequence ‘Light Music’ (1977) and ‘Basho¯ in Kinsale’ (2005). From now onwards I shall refer to ‘The Snow Party’ as ‘SP’, while I shall indicate the collection as SP. Notes to Chapter 2 161 3. ‘Leaves’ is also the title of another poem in the same collection, where Mahon speculates on regrets and unfulfilment: Somewhere there is an afterlife Of dead leaves, A stadium filled with an infinite Rustling and sighing. Somewhere in the heaven Of lost futures The lives we might have led Have found their own fulfilment. (1999: 60) 4. A similar metaphor is also central to another poem in the same collection, ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’, where the poet-King, inheritor of the Celtic tra- dition, invokes the day when mankind shall be released from ‘the ancient curse’ of ‘the barbarous cycle’ (1975: 9). 5. From ‘Death and the Sun’ (Mahon 1999: 60). 6. In ‘Roman Script’ (1999: 273–7) Mahon reflects on the representation of violence through what he calls the ‘art-historical sublime’. 7. ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’ also echoes MacNeice’s ‘Brother Fire’, which sub- verts St Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures with its apocalyptic images of the London bombing. 8. A reference to Stevens’s ‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’, to which Mahon refers in his poem in memoriam ‘The Man Who Built His City in Snow’. 9. This complex genetic dossier consists of 16 MS and TS folios which are undated and unnumbered: Derek Mahon Papers, Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. 10. The American journalist John Hersey was sent to Hiroshima nine months after the end of the Second World War to investigate the tragic outcome of the bomb. The result was published in a historic issue of The New Yorker, published on 31 August 1946, which escaped censorship. From now onwards I will refer to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1972. 11. Chapter I of Hersey’s book is titled ‘The Noiseless Flash’. 12. a dozen Air-raid wardens crouch at their stations, blind Mahon reworks this passage twice on the same page, where a horrific image gradually takes shape: a dozen crouching men at an ack-ack gaze up with empty sockets, blind and wet-faced, having cried their eyes out as they died 13. Mahon reworked this verse on the second page, whitening out several words which have thus become illegible. What remains reads as follows: Everything tinkles and roars cinders 162 Notes to Chapter 2 thunders, A hard rain, on the roof-tiles. 14. This line remains unaltered throughout the changes made to the rest of the poem. 15. Mahon attempts two variants on the same image, in both of which he leaves the initial enjambment but eliminates the window, probably in an attempt to simplify the scene: The inhabitants <Of Hiroshima> stumble in road and field Or sit in a daze. This intermediate version is then reduced to the following few words: <T> the inhabitants Of the zapped nuked city stumble in road and field in darkness; blown Wreckage flames on exposed Of the nuked city wander in darkness. 16. The version which most satisfied Mahon was probably the first one, a first explosion of the imagination, as can be seen by the relative absence of cor- rections. 17. Mahon transposes this moment as such: ‘Blown’ ‘Burning’ While flaming wreckage falls on the town, [...] Blazing on <stoves & wires> hot plates and live wires. [...] While the second draft of this image is substantially a fair copy of this first ‘rough’ draft, in the reworking of page 5 Mahon hesitates over the verb (emphasis added): [...] blown Wreckage flames on exposed [...] Blown Wreckage falls on exposed wires and blazes [.] 18. In an effort to improve these lines, Mahon finds an assonance which he then adds to the second draft: Basho¯’s ghost / patrols the dust This new-found assonance seems to bear no reference to silence, but the idea lingers in Mahon’s mind. An MS note on the first page shows that he was searching for a rhyme with August, which initially suggested the idea of the ‘turbulent tower of dust’ (Mahon Papers). Notes to Chapter 2 163 19. After the explosion, survivors did not realize what had happened: there were naive rumours about ‘gasoline sprinkled from an aeroplane, maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of parachutists’ (Hersey 1972: 71). If it is true that Mahon started working on the unfin- ished ‘Hiroshima’ in the 1970s, the 1973 Irish admission to the European Economic Community (EEC) coincided with the go-ahead to construct a nuclear power station in Ireland, a project which generated great fear and dissent among the population. Since the 1950s, in fact, Northern Ireland’s keenness on keeping up with the British nuclear programme was related to the Unionists’ desire to show their integration with Britain (McDermott 2008: 121).