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Ishihara Yoshirō
Four Poems
Translated from the
Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
Fact
What is there
is there
as is.
Look,
a hand is there,
a foot is there,
it’s even snickering.
If you’ve seen it,
say you’ve seen it.
Each time with a clatter
you step on a cup, crushing it,
push open the door,
and hurry off, placed
flat on your back of countless
humiliations
a thick palm.
Where are you running to?
Even if every one of them
disappears,
it’s there,
it is there as is.
Like a criminal whose punishment is forgotten,
look,
a foot is there,
a hand is there,
and
it’s even snickering.
Horse and Riot
When inside us
two horses run
in the crack between the two
another horse runs.
When we set out to riot
we run with that
one horse.
It’s this one horse that sets out
with us to riot
not the two horses
on its flanks.
Therefore when we stop walking
what runs off
from us
is the one horse
not the two horses
on its flanks.
When inside us
two bandits run
in the crack between the two
another bandit runs.
When inside us
two hollows run
in the crack between the two
still another hollow runs.
What sets out with us to riot
is this last bandit
and this last hollow.
Gethsemane
To the height of a human’s ears
they set his ears,
to the height of shoulders they set his shoulders.
In the space in which iron and fig drip
night’s depth that defines him
is up to the mouths, empty cups, standing like trees.
The namable darkness has given him,
like a soldier,
an excellent posture.
From evening to daybreak
the plates continue to be precisely distributed,
and the night ponderously
loaded on them.
Be it wine or blood
that is loaded,
what is loaded there
must be himself.
In the great silence
like the back of a bull
he crouched,
again rose to his feet,
and struck fire nails on the certain four corners.
From one nail
he hung a whip,
from one nail
he hung prayers,
from one nail
he hung himself,
from one nail
he hung the last moment,
and left the world to bear
the night with only a chair and a table.
This is recorded in the darkness
and all presences
are sniffed out there.
It is correct to call this night
the only time.
But when completion and misery
are equally a blessing,
no night should be like this night
any longer.
Funeral Train
What station we started from
no one remembers any longer.
Through a strange land where it’s always
midday on the right and midnight on the left
the train keeps running.
Each time it arrives at a station, invariably
a red lamp peers in the window
and along with soiled wooden legs and torn boots
black lumps are thrown in.
Every one of them is alive,
and even while the train runs,
every one of them remains alive;
nonetheless the whole train
everywhere is filled with the smell of corpses.
To be sure, I am there myself.
Everyone already a half-ghost,
they hang onto one another,
they huddle together,
they still eat and drink
bits and pieces,
but some are already transparent around their asses,
about to fade away.
Yes, to be sure, I am there myself.
Leaning resentfully against the window,
sometimes one of us
begins to chew on a rotten apple,
myself, my ghost.
So all the time we
overlap with our own ghosts,
separate ourselves from them,
waiting for the train to arrive at
the unbearable, remote future.
Who is in the locomotive?
Each time we cross a huge black iron bridge,
the girders rumble ponderously,
and many ghosts, for a second,
stop their eating hands.
They are tying to remember
what station they started from.
_________
Four months after Japan's surrender in 1945, Ishihara Yoshirō while awaiting repatriation in Harbin was taken prisoner and detained by Soviets (one of more that 600,000 Japanese in Northeast Asia). He was indicted for anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. He served most of 1950 working with Romanian, German and Russian "criminals" in forest-clearing along the Baikal-Amur Railroad. In 1950 he was moved to Khabarovsk, and in 1953, upon Stalin's death, was released. Ishihara's first book of poetry, Sancho Pansa no Kikyō (Sancho Panza's Homecoming) appeared in 1963, and during the rest of his life published a total of sixteen books of poems and essays. Green Integer will publish a selection of Ishihara's poetry in 2007.
Copyright ©2006 by Hiroaki Sato and Green Integer.