Japan has ream upon ream of exquisite poems about spring and autumn; by contrast, there are comparatively few about summer, possibly because the prevailing feeling during that season in most of the archipelago (“how the hell am I going to keep from dying in this heat?!”) does not exactly lend itself to sublimeness of expression. However, one of the early summer tropes–and summer according to the lunar calendar begins during the first week of May–is the return of the cuckoo as certain seasonal flowers begin to bloom.

夏草は茂りにけれど郭公などわが宿に一声もせぬ

延喜御歌

natsu kusa ha/shigerinikeredo/hototogisu/nado waga yado ni/hitokoe mo senu

engi no oon’uta

The summer grasses
have come up in abundance,
but why, O cuckoo,
do you not favor my home
with even a single cry?

Engi no Oon’uta

Ick. That translation came out very precious. On the bright side, I was able to go pretty much line by line without having to shuffle things around much; the Japanese for “cuckoo” is five syllables in and of itself, so in a 5-7-5-7-7 verse it takes up a lot of real estate and tends to force you to use filler if you want to try to adhere to the original as much as you can when translating.

The return of the cuckoo when the grasses grow lush and the orange blossoms and deutzia bloom is considered very moving. The poet sees the thickened grass and purports to wonder whether the cuckoo is somehow shunning him. (If it has any sense, it’s probably just decided to summer in Alaska this year.)

Spring according to the lunar calendar adopted by Japan from China begins in the first week of February.

春といへばかすみにけりな昨日まで波間に見えし淡路島山

俊恵法師

haru to ieba/kasumi ni keri na/kinou made/namima ni mieshi/awadjishimayama

shun’e houshi

They say spring is here.
There is a shroud of mist
where just yesterday
I saw it between the waves–
Awaji Island peak

The Priest Shun’e

Winter air is cold and clear; with spring comes warmer, moister air, bringing haze and lower visibility. Shun’e the poet draws a pat distinction between yesterday, when Awaji Island was clearly visible some distance from the shoreline, and today, the first day of spring, when mist has risen around it. The poignancy of the poem comes from the unstated recognition, by Shun’e the person and by us, that things don’t actually change quite that cleanly. Today’s mist would have no meaning if yesterday’s clear weather didn’t linger in his mind. And even in literal terms, the cold winter air is probably not gone for the year yet.

Added later: In completely unrelated news, Inauguration Day may not have changed as many things as it first seemed, either.

Well, I was all set to post a translation of an autumn poem; then I did a search on a hunch and–naturally–I’d already posted it a few years ago. Darn. Guess I’ll just have to hunt high and low for some other Japanese poem about autumn.

Okay, I’ve put up a bunch of poems by Saigyō, but I don’t think I’ve gotten around to this one. When I was in grad school and we got to this one, Donald Keene (whose Shinkokin-shu seminar I was fortunate enough to be able to take) broke into a broad, frank grin: “It’s rare and moving to see Saigyō write a poem with such warmth and humor.”

小山田の庵近く鳴く鹿の音におどろかされておどろかすかな

西行法師

oyamada no/iho chikaku naku/shika no ne ni/odorokasarete/odorokasu kana

saigyou houshi

Just outside my hut
nestled in a mountain field
the cry of a deer
has jolted me right awake
I think I’ll jolt him right back

The Priest Saigyō

“See how he likes it!” the sleepy Saigyō seems to say. The notes from my edition say that his plan is likely to use a clapper or noisemaker, rather than to lean out the door and tell the deer to shut up already so decent folk can get some sleep. Deer make disconsolate noises that are considered fundamental to the lonely, aching beauty of autumn.

Added on 25 October: I think I’m a moron, but (unusually) it’s not entirely certain. I took 小山田 as a place name and had in some shadowy, inaccessible synapse a memory of having been instructed to render it thus twelve years ago; however, the edition I use almost invariably gives a note for each place referred to that tells where it would be in contemporary Japan, and there’s nothing like that here. Also, 山田 can just mean “mountain paddy,” anyway. So I’m playing Ministry of Truth (真実省? But at this point it probably would have merged with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in the 2001 restructuring, so maybe…okay, focus, Sean) and changing it above.

The picture is from a few weeks ago and thus (major sin in Japan) is no longer really seasonal, but Atsushi and I used to see the irises in bloom every June at the Meiji Shrine, and he was sweet enough to send me a few shots from when he went. Note the woman holding photographic equipment in the background, which is a component of just about every natural scene nowadays:

I always forget my camera when I go to the park or gardens, so I don’t have any snaps of my own from New York to post; however, it occurs to me that I haven’t posted any poems in a good, long while.

The one that first came to mind, it turns out, I’d written about a few summers ago. Darn.

Luckily, there are more where that came from. It’s been something of a hot summer, so even though this isn’t one of Saigyo’s most arresting poems, it seems appropriate:

よられつる野もせの草のかげろひて涼しく曇る夕立の空

西行法師

yoraretsuru / nomosenokusano / kagerohite / suzushikukumoru / yuudachinosora

Saigyō Hōshi

Enervated grass
over the expanse of field
is receiving shade
as clouds slide coolly over
the sky while dusk approaches

The Priest Saigyo

Saigyo seems to sense the grass’s own relief as the glaring sun begins to set and clouds roll in to block its light.

We’re getting toward the second half of summer, though it’s been rainy and relatively cool in Tokyo over the last week and a half or so. When the sun begins beating down mercilessly again, we’ll all feel like Saigyo:

道のべに清水流るる柳かげしばしとてこそ立ちどまりつれ

西行法師

michinobe ni / shimidzu nagaruru / yanagi kage / shibashitote koso / tachitomaritsure

Saigyou houshi

Just off the pathway,
spring water flowing through the
shade of the willows–
if only for a short while
I will pause and rest

The priest Saigyo

This is one of those poems that people scratch their heads when Japanophiles go ga-ga over. While the Japanese (not unjustifiably) have a reputation for aestheticizing obliqueness, if not downright obscurantism, some of their best art is fearlessly limpid. That’s especially true of the poetry of Saigyo, who favored concrete images with a direct appeal to the senses.

Part of the impact is in the burbling consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel quality of sentences composed entirely of native Japanese words. (Sinitic compounds tend to break up the flow with rounded, drawn-out syllables.) The sibilant shes and hard-aspirated ts can be harsh in some contexts, but in the final two lines of the above waka, there are so many of them that they have a lulling effect–like a brook being channeled through a pile of rocks, or like those unidentifiable gentle snapping sounds you hear around you in the dry grass in late summer. Saigyo gets in both the heat and the respite from it. More poetic, if less effective, than just scooting indoors and turning on the air conditioner.

The proprietor of this site, clearly a lady of rare discernment, pronounced my blog “beautiful” in the process of linking to a cherry blossom poem I translated last year. (Yes, I’m a sucker for flattery, but her blog is a good read, too, with lots of interesting comments about offbeat Tokyo stuff without that look-how-weird-Japan-is tone that can get tedious. And if she doesn’t have a serious posse of gay friends, she needs to get one pronto. Lines such as “Love shoes made from reptiles [my shoe closet looks like a zoo]” are wasted on any audience that doesn’t include a healthy contingent of uproariously approving fags.)

Anyway, the poem was here, and now that the cherry blossoms are just beginning to shed their petals, it’s nice to reproduce:

ねがはくば花の下にて春しなんその如月の望月のころ

西行法師

negawakuba/hana no moto nite/haru shinan/sono kisaragi no/mochidzuki no koro

Saigyō Hōshi

If I have my wish,
I will die beneath the boughs
laden with blossoms–
Spring, the night of the full moon,
second moon of the new year.

The Priest Saigyo

See, if you die beneath the boughs while the petals are still on them, looking gorgeous, you don’t have to be disillusioned by the sight, a week later, of them all lying on the ground in a dingy, grey, gutter-choking paste.

The Japan Meteorological Agency has announced that the cherry blossoms are probably going to open early this year–prepare for falling-down-drunkness and inescapable karaoke in t – 6 days:

The JMA announced the dates that cherry (Prunus serrulata) blossoms are expected to open from Kyushu through the Tohoku region on 15 March. For the first time, this year’s blossoms are predicted to open between 1 and 4 days earlier than the average in Tohoku.

…

The projected date for blossoms to open in Tokyo and Yokohama is 22 March.

There are scores of classic poems about cherry blossoms–in the seasonal-devotion sense. But of course, they’re so woven into Japanese culture in March and April that they can become aesthetic placeholders for poems with other themes.

The following is the first poem I ever read and understood (at least lexically) in Japanese:

レモン哀歌

そんなにもあなたはレモンを待つてゐた
かなしく白いあかるい死の床で
私の手からとつた一つのレモンを
あなたのきれいな歯ががりりと噛んだ
トパアズいろの香気が立つ
その数滴の天のものなるレモンの汁は
ぱつとあなたの意識を正常にした
あなたの青く澄んだ眼がかすかに笑ふ
わたしの手を握るあなたの力の健康さよ
あなたの咽喉に嵐はあるが
かういふ命の瀬戸ぎはに
智恵子はもとの智恵子となり
生涯の愛を一瞬にかたむけた
それからひと時
昔山巓でしたやうな深呼吸を一つして
あなたの機関ははそれなり止まつた
写真の前に挿した桜の花かげに
すずしく光るレモンを今日も置かう

高村光太郎

*******

Lemon Elegy

You had waited so for the lemon.
In your sad, white, bright deathbed,
you took from my hand a single lemon
and plunged your pretty teeth into it.
Those few drops of heaven-sent lemon juice
from which a topaz-colored fragrance rose
snapped your consciousness back to normal.
Your blue, unclouded eyes laughed a bit
Your power so robust as you grasped my hand.
There was a storm in your throat,
and just at last possible second,
Chieko became the old Chieko,
and the love of a lifetime tipped into a single moment.
And in the next instant,
you took a deep breath as you had long ago at the top of a mountain,
and with that your machinery shut down.
In the shadow of the cherry sprig standing in front of your photograph,
I will put a cool, glistening lemon today.

Kotaro Takamura

Kotaro Takamura and Chieko Naganuma had one of the most famous artistic marriages in Japan in the last century. Kotaro considered himself a sculptor more than a poet; Chieko was a painter. They had twin studios and shared household duties. Chieko had always been unconventional in dress and demeanor, but decade and a half after their marriage, she began to have delusions. She tried to commit suicide in the early 1930s. Of course, artists are famous for their erratic temperaments, but Chieko’s episodes developed into full-blown schizophrenia. Despite her tendency to break out of the house and harangue the neighbors, Kotaro kept her at home and took care of her for three years until it became too flat-out dangerous. She died another three years after he had her hospitalized.

智恵子抄 (Chieko-sho: “Winnowings [of poems about] Chieko”), the book of poetry Kotaro published three years after her death, contains the above poem and others about their life together. I wrote my undergrad senior research project about it. That was the time I was coming out, of course–and though it might not seem like the greatest idea to be studying poetry about such an unstable person right about then, it was something of a kooky comfort to think that you could be completely falling apart and still have someone who would remain so tirelessly devoted to you.

It’s known that many of the poems are idealizations–or rather, that they couldn’t possibly represent what their life was like in day-to-day terms. “Lemon Elegy” was composed in February, weeks before a cherry bough would have had swelling buds, let along blossoms, on it. Kotaro might have put a particularly shapely bare bough in a vase on the Buddhist altar with Chieko’s photograph on it, or he may just have written the poem as a projection into a time later in the spring. (Perhaps there’s some kind of critical consensus on that, but I’ve never seen it in any annotations.)

Added on 17 March: I remembered last night after posting this that my college language partner, who’d returned with her husband to Japan by the time I was coming here in 1996 and let me stay with them my first week here, had a video tape of a television special about Kotaro Takamura. We watched it the first night I ever spent in Japan.

Part of it was a dramatization of certain poems as they were read in voice-over. In the segment for “Lemon Elegy,” when the actress playing Chieko Naganuma died, the lemon dropped from her hand, landed on the floor with a meaningful thud, sat there for one dramatically fleeting second, and then wobbled dolorously away.

I. LAUGHED. SO. HARD. It could hardly have been more campily entertaining if it had been performed in drag.

While television dramas with naturalistic acting have become more common here, it’s non-mimetic theater, of course, that’s traditional. Scenes of emotional intensity are frequently stylized or exaggerated. (When Chieko returned momentarily to sanity, the look that flashed across the actress’s face was, like, Damn! I think I locked my keys in the car!) It’s a credit to Kotaro’s limpid, direct style that despite having those images in my head, I can still take the poems in question seriously.

Getting about time for spring poems to be appropriate again. The Vernal Equinox is still a while off, but not spring according to the traditional lunar calendar. I posted one of my favorites when I first began this blog:

岩間とぢし氷も今朝はとけそめて苔の下水みちもとむらむ

西行法師

Iwama todjishi / koori mo kesa ha / tokesomete / Koke no shita mizu / michi motomuramu

Saigyou-houshi

Even the ice that shackles the rocks has begun to melt this morning–the water under the moss will be seeking a pathway.

the Priest Saigyo

The Japanese are very big on what you might call “the moment before.” As in, the cherry trees are considered most poignantly beautiful immediately before they bloom–when you can see the buds straining to burst open. What Saigyo describes above isn’t the return of spring, exactly–it’s that moment when you get a sense that something is stirring under the remaining cover of winter.

Of course, the Japanese can also poeticize the moment after. Another of my favorite poets, Yosano Akiko, included this among the first poems in her most famous collection:

ゆあみして泉を出でしわがはだにふるるはつらき人の世のきぬ

与謝野晶子

Yu-ami shite / izumi wo ideshi / Waga hada ni / fururu ha tsuraki / hito no yo no kinu

Yosano Akiko

Finishing my bath
and emerging from the spring,
I could hardly bear
their chafing against my skin,
the silks of the world of man

Yosano Akiko

I have a vague memory that the きぬ may have been glossed, in an old annotated version I read years ago, as just meaning “robe,” but if Akiko isn’t going to use kanji, then I’m going to assume she means “silk,” which in any case intensifies the heightened, raw sensitivity she feels. My guess is that the poem is from, if not now, some time in the winter, because that’s when you get out of an open-air hot spring and think, Man, it’s cold! Well, if you’re not a poet, like me. If you’re a poet, like Akiko, you think in tanka.

It is now the Year of the Dog in Japan. Japan follows the Chinese zodiac, but it celebrates the New Year on 1 January of the Western calendar. (The whole thing is very disorienting if you’re studying classical poetry, because you have to keep straight the Western calendar, the solstices, and the traditional lunar calendar by which months and seasons were actually named. Happily, I don’t have to contend with that right now, unless I decide to translate a poem at the end of this post.)

The personality typology you hear discussed the most here is by blood type, but the year of your birth gets a lot of play, too. When Atsushi and I began to date, it was considered very auspicious that he was a Monkey and I was a Rat–no wiseacre comments from the peanut gallery, okay?–two signs that are held to be compatible. (Of course, my last boyfriend had been a Dragon, and our supposed celestial compatibility hadn’t seemed to help all that much.) With its preponderance of snakes, dogs, wild boars, and monkeys, the zodiac can start to sound like an extended lawyer joke, but none of the descriptions is negative in the main, of course.

I was born in March, so I’m a Rat according to both Chinese and Japanese measurements. As with all such things, you read your typology, and some of it is so dead-on it’s kind of spooky…

One of the Rat’s biggest fault is that they try to do too much at once. They often scatter their energies and get nothing accomplished.

…and some of it is so off the mark it makes you laugh.

They are very appealing. They have a bright and happy personality, and this keeps them busy socially. They love parties and other large gatherings.

Yeah, right.

In any case, those who are thinking about having a child may want to hurry things up so it’s born by the end of this year. The traits associated with the Year of the Dog aren’t bad at all:

People born in the Year of the Dog possess the best traits of human nature. They have a deep sense of loyalty, are honest, and inspire other people’s confidence because they know how to keep secrets. But Dog People are somewhat selfish, terribly stubborn, and eccentric. They care little for wealth, yet somehow always seem to have money. They can be cold emotionally and sometimes distant at parties. They can find fault with many things and are noted for their sharp tongues. Dog people make good leaders. They are compatible with those born in the Years of the Horse, Tiger, and Rabbit.

Notice how every sign is described as being eccentric, BTW? And I guess most parents wouldn’t be crazy about that “cold emotionally” part, though given the potential for heartache in life, it might come in handy later on.

If you (1) majored in poetry and (2) are a Madonna fan, life can be very cruel. It’s not just that she sometimes produces lines that could have been written while she was waiting for a bus. (Imagine Madonna waiting for a bus! I’ll wait for your peals of laughter to die down.) I actually don’t mind the sort of time-honored placeholders that rhyme “burning fire” with “my desire” and the like. They’ve become conventions, and every art or craft form needs conventions.

Thing with Madge is, she’s often ten times worse when she actually seems to want to say something of importance. I think my favorite thing on the new album is “Jump,” which is one of her always-charming songs about navigating through life with pluck and determination. There’s one on every Madonna album somewhere, and she always pours feeling into it.

This is the second verse of this year’s model:

We learned our lesson from the start
My sisters and me
The only thing you can depend on
Is your family
Life’s gonna drop you down
Like the limbs of a tree
It sways and it swings and it bends
until it makes you see

The top four lines are fine. Unimaginative, but sincere-sounding.

The bottom four? I just…I don’t…I have this thing, okay? I can’t read a poem or listen to lyrics without trying to interpret them, and I am getting a serious cognitive short circuit here. It sounds as if “life” is what’s supposed to be parallel with “the limbs of a tree,” but it could be “you” instead. Is she comparing you to dead limbs being dropped by the tree? Dead leaves? The latter would be nicely seasonal, but they don’t have a whole lot of the life force she’s obviously trying to project. Maybe she’s telling her fans we’re all fruits (as if we didn’t already know)?

Or maybe we’re supposed to be kitty cats who have climed up the tree and have to take the risk of jumping off even though the…uh…wind is blowing? That would make sense given the chorus–but what would the tree be making you see by swaying, of all things? Does swaying make trees more instructive, somehow? You’d think that would have stuck in the memory during life science class in eighth grade. And how much bending around does the poor tree have to do until you see whatever it is you’re supposed to see? I guess the other possibility is that the verse is supposed to work as a whole, so it’s a family tree we’re dealing with. Do family trees sway? I thought she just said family was the only thing that was stable.

This song is going to be so much easier to handle in a disco while surrounded by cute boys, fueled by a vodka or two, and moving it under seizure-inducing colored lights.