On the eve of an endless revolution, the ink of my mind is drenched with dream colours MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION Dream Colours MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION The best of world poetry No. 1 2020 © Modern Poetry in Translation 2019 and contributors issn ( print ) 0969-3572 issn ( online ) 2052-3017 isbn ( print ) 978-1-910485-26-2 Editor: Clare Pollard Managing Editor: Sarah Hesketh Digital Content Editor: Ed Co rell Finance Manager: Deborah De Kock Design by Jenny Flynn Cover art by Yoshino Shigihara Typese ing by Libanus Press Printed and bound in Great Britain by Charlesworth Press, Wakefi eld For submissions and subscriptions please visit www.modernpoetryintranslation.com Modern Poetry in Translation Limited. A Company Limited by Guarantee Registered in England and Wales, Number 5881603 uk Registered Charity Number 1118223 Modern Poetry in Translation gratefully acknowledges the support of The Japan Society and The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translations of Chus Pato by Erin Moure in this issue were supported by the Translation Exchange at Queen’s College Oxford CONTENTS editorial 1 Focus shlomo laufer, ‘Shu ing Down’ 3 Translated by betsy rosenberg sayaka osaki, ‘Dazzled by the Morning Light’ 51 Translated by jeffrey angles bei dao, ‘June’ 5 Translated by kit fan sawako nakayasu, ‘Sink or Swim’ 55 Translated by sawako nakayasu, lynn xu and kyoko yoshida misrak terefe, two poems 7 Translated by yemisrach tassew and chris beckett noriko ibaragi, two poems 58 Translated by peter robinson and andrew houwen durs grünbein, four poems 11 Translated by karen leeder polly barton 61 Hearing Beyond the Darkness chus pato, fi ve poems 14 Translated by erín moure kei okamoto, ‘Our Whereabouts’ 68 Translated by motoyuki shibata and polly barton benjamin fondane, two poems 20 Translated by clarissa aykroyd chūya nakahara, three poems 69 Translated by jeffrey angles laura fusco, three poems 23 Translated by caroline maldonado itsuko ishikawa, ‘For You’ 73 Translated by rina kikuchi and jen crawford efe duyan, ‘The Verbs of a Language are Forgo en First’ 28 Translated by tara skurtu and efe duyan toshiko hirata, two poems 76 Translated by eric e. hyett and spencer thurlow raymond queneau, six poems 30 Translated by philip terry shuzo takiguchi, ‘The Royal Family of Dreams: 81 A Manifesto or Regarding A-priori Dreams’ volha hapeyeva, two poems 37 Translated by mary jo bang and yuki tanaka Translated by annie rutherford takuji ōte, ‘Porcelain Crow’ 91 aleš šteger, two poems 40 Translated by james garza Translated by brian henry shuntaro tanikawa, three poems 92 axel schulze, ‘The Tracklayers’ 43 Translated by william i. elliott and katsumasa nishihara Translated by steph morris hasan alizadeh, ‘Mirror’ 46 Translated by rebecca ruth gould and kayvan tahmasebian EDITORIAL Reviews Like many readers around the world, I have always been a racted to Japanese culture. Whilst my son pores over Pokémon comics, I glance sarah-jean zubair, Innovation and Testimony 95 up at my bookshelves in the next room and can see novels by An anthology of contemporary Rohingya poetry Murakami, Kawabata, Yoshimoto. Two of my favourite novels of the aviva dautch, Necessary Communication 100 last year were Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, translated by Holocaust poetry 75 years a% er the liberation of Auschwitz Ginny Tapley Takemori, and Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, sasha dugdale, Elaine and Marina 105 translated by Stephen Snyder. Remembering Elaine Feinstein’s revolutionary translations And of course, as a poet, how could I not love the haiku? It is perhaps the most beloved form in the world, for its technical precision notes on contributors 109 and brevity; its seasonal feeling; its ability to capture a moment like a photograph or, as Masaoka Shiki called it, a form of ‘verbal sketching’. Basho memorably asked: ‘Is there any good in saying everything?’ and the idea of poetry as ‘the half-said thing’ is one of the most infl uential in the artform’s history. Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (Bloodaxe, 2013) is one of my most beloved books, pressed into the hands of my students, its images imprinted in my memory. I have o% en repeated Issa’s haiku to arachnids: Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually The fi rst winter rain always makes me think of Basho’s monkey who ‘seems to want a raincoat’; the Spring of his cherry blossoms falling ‘in the salads, the soup, everywhere.’ Embarrassingly though, when I began my editorship at Modern Poetry in Translation I realised I knew almost nothing about contemporary Japanese poetry, so decided this was something I needed to remedy with a Japanese focus. My research began when I came across an article on Chika Sagawa, Japan’s fi rst female Modernist poet, who died of stomach cancer in 1936 at the age of only 24. I was editorial 1 SHLOMO LAUFER absolutely blown away by her Collected Poems, translated by Sawako Translated by Betsy Rosenberg Nakayasu (Canarium Books, 2015), which feel both precise and disorientating, with their astonishing opening lines: ‘Insects Shlomo Laufer is a prolific Hebrew poet and novelist, editor and multiplied with the speed of an electric current’; ‘Seasons change their translator. Born in war-torn Lvov in 1940, Laufer arrived in Israel with gloves’; ‘In the morning I see several friends escaping from the his family after a childhood of wandering. window’; ’Dreams are severed fruit’; ‘With all of my ears | I listen’; In ‘Shu ing Down’ Laufer sings out the bewilderment of his ‘Night eats colour’. Sawako Nakayasu is, I have since discovered, also a early years with agonised hilarity. Both in prose and poetry, his thrilling poet in her own right, experimenting with translations and irrepressible voice belies memories of displacement with a startling ‘anti-translations’, who I am very pleased to include in this issue. self-assurance gained perhaps through imagined encounters and My education continued when Vahni Capildeo kindly brought a fl uid interchanges of identity with fi gures like Ka* a, Chekhov, and book back from Australia for us, the landmark anthology Poet to Poet: Bruno Shultz. Laufer’s style is insouciant and endearingly unsenti- Contemporary Women Poets from Japan, edited by Rina Kikuchi and Jen mental, yet it resonates with undertones and overtones of violent Crawford (Recent Work Press, 2018), which Jennifer Lee Tsai reviewed longing. in these pages, and which introduced me to poets such as the extraordinary Hiromi Ito, whose Killing Kanoko/Wild Grass on the Riverbank has just been published by Tilted Axis Press, translated by Jeff rey Angles. Since then we have been given advice and help by Shu ing Down Junko Takekawa at Japan Foundation and translators like Andrew Houwen and Polly Barton, as well as support from the Japan Society I shut the window, then the closet and the door, and The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Many thanks too, of the blinds where a moth course, to all in the translation community who submi ed poems to slipped through, I shut the doghouse, this issue. the mouse hole. So I am very pleased to share with you in these pages a glimpse of some of the very exciting poetry happening in Japan beyond the The old train station haiku – a starting point, I hope, for further explorations (both for our where a mist is rising, readers and myself). In this Olympic year, as the eyes of the world are the mound of a mole, on Japan, we hope its poets will also gain some of the wider visibility a bird’s nest, they deserve. the hollow of a tree shut down. Clare Pollard 2 editorial shlomo laufer 3 BEI DAO I shut the inkwell, Translated by Kit Fan the poem spilling out of it. I shut the dictionary and the word Appearing in June 2019 at the beginning of mass protests in Hong ‘Hope’ in my empty stomach. Kong against the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill, Bei Dao’s ‘June’ captures the uncanny mood of a city in fl ux as the wind I shut the mother-of-pearl, changes its direction seasonally and politically in 2019 in Hong Kong, the eyes, the tears, a small valise as well as 30 years ago in Beijing. Summoning the invisible atmo- of memories. I shut spheric force, the poem speaks, as if through a reported or borrowed museums, speech from the wind, in an unashamedly direct tone akin to legal pharmacies, or political diction. However, line by line the directness is interrupted the harlots’ stalls. by fl ashes of emblematic images that evoke an urban cityscape in crisis (‘the great concrete square’, ‘the le% bank | of the dead’). The I shut Josef K. in the castle halls, poem connects time, geography, and the act of writing and fl ight Freud in the asylum, Van Gogh’s in an unpredictably palpable way, forging a high-pitched counter- sunfl owers, the wound in the scab, balance between the questions of nationhood (‘a fl ag’), fl uidity the water in the well, in the maw of (‘the sea’), and coverage (‘bass speakers’) in a particular month death, volcanoes deep in the earth, of the year burdened with memory. my teeth in a broken jaw. I shut my childhood in a li le urn of ashes. I shut a furrow in the soil June with marble and stone. I shut Plato in the cave, a er Bei Dao I shut Europe, I shut God between the covers of an empty book. Wind is mouthing something in my mortised ear: I shut my passions in a mouldy June cellar, my love in the irons of despair. Shut up, shut up, I shout between sealed lips, June stays blacklisted but it all stays open.