This Translation Tuesday, we deliver distinctive poetry from Hagiwara Sakutaro. In simple, colloquial free verse, sensitively preserved by translator John Newton Webb, Death of a frog and Sad moonlight capture the ominous tonality and unsettling imagery that pervade this singular writer’s repertoire. Tread forward for an introduction to Sakutaro’s dark world then turn back for an insightful special feature from the Spring 2014 issue.
Death of a frog
A frog was killed,
the children circled round and raised their hands,
all of them together,
they raised their adorable,
blood-caked hands,
the moon came out;
a person is standing on the top of a hill.
Under his hat, a face.
Sad moonlight
A wretched thieving dog
is howling at the decaying wharf’s moon.
A soul strains its ears—
yellow girls with dreary voices
are singing together,
singing together.
At the wharf’s dark stone fence.
Hey, dog,
why am I always like this?
Answer me, you miserable sickly dog.
Translated from the Japanese by John Newton Webb.
Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942) shook the Japanese poetry world with his first collection, Howling at the Moon (1917), which integrated colloquial and literary language, focused intensely on emotion, and is replete with astounding images. He went onto publish another 5 collections of poetry, various critical works and books of aphorisms. He remains a huge influence today. He wrote that “a poem is a living, working psychology.”
John Newton Webb is the author of a number of plays, and his poetry is widely published. His translations of poems from Japanese have been recently published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote and The Massachusetts Review. You can read some of his work and mini-essays on modern Japanese poetry at johnnewtonwebb.blogspot.com. He is British and lives in Sapporo, Japan, where he is the pastor of a church.
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Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:
Translation Tuesday: “Earth Mounds” by Ahmed Amran
Translation Tuesday: “Zinc” by Róger Lindo
Translation Tuesday: “Summer” by Cvetka Lipuš