1 Shade Tree
In any case, joy lives inside this day
as in the heart of the new sun—
and in dining tables, and in guns,
and even in gods, though they remain oblivious.
In the tree’s shade, human hearts return
to embrace the day’s humility.
Freely, in this place,
one stands for a moment
to read the sky,
to sing the clouds’ song,
to pray, simply because it is time to summon pleasure.
I must forget
that which is beyond forgetting.
The sun glares. The trees glare back.
2 Yearning
In the shadow of the June sun, I accept my fate.
I’ve become alienated even from my own desires.
My yearning dashes about
vainly, with no time to look back.
I’ve made the mistake of loving without conviction.
All the while, just this charming exterior—
flattery without the knowledge of who flatters.
Fields and clouds are such simple things.
Soon, around my small grave,
only people, rocks, and sky will remain. And yet—
what immortal soul remembers tomorrow?
I’ve made the mistake of forgetting the gods.
Without life, how on earth can anything happen?
In the obscure early summer sun, my fate casts a shadow.
3 Homecoming
This was an alien land.
Through the side entrance of this miserable planet,
I was drawn to the darkness of its innermost part
by the profound, mysterious shapes of its rooms.
Who am I?
I have no means to return,
and will continue writing these dispatches
as long as I am here.
I have ceased yearning for other planets.
There is more amusement here than in eternity,
and yet someday, as a postscript, I’ll return.
Most likely, I’ll be called back unexpectedly
from this intimate, foreign land —
My own homecoming, and yet I will not be there.
10 Unknown Person
The car spoke.
The pencil spoke.
Chemistry, itself, spoke.
“You have made us,” they said. “You human.”
I wonder, what would Tanuki think of this?
What would the stars think?
What might the gods think
of this overflowing of passion, this foolish arrogance?
We move toward death, all in a line,
beginning with he who has forgotten how to be alone,
until the unknown person, here, is erased.
The wind blows over the earth at dusk and again over an unknown star.
The gods walk the earth at dusk, the earth which belongs to dusk.
Even over the unknown stars, they walk.
from 62 Sonnets
Shuntaro Tanikawa
translated from the Japanese by Martin Rock
Why, when there are so many exceptional books of contemporary Japanese poetry published each year, am I choosing to translate Shuntaro Tanikawa’s 1953 book, 62 Sonnets? First, I believe this is an important book that deserves an updated translation and a wider English-language readership. And second, I’m not alone in thinking that Tanikawa’s name and works should be as familiar to English-language readers as those of Miłosz, Celan, or Tranströmer; this book feels like a good first contribution to celebrate his work and legacy.
In these translations I’ve tried to align to Goethe’s third “epoch,” “in which the translator identifies so strongly with the original that he more or less gives up the uniqueness of his own nation.” What I mean by this is that I have tried to maintain both the precision and crispness of Tanikawa’s language and images while also embodying the defamiliarizing and even destabilizing experience of becoming enmeshed into another language and another culture.
I believe part of the depth and resonance of these poems relies on Tanikawa’s masterful ability to lean into the ambiguity inherent in the Japanese language. I have also tried to maintain this balance of precision and ambiguity to emphasize the potential for personhood and animism in nonhumans—to enact the competing and coexisting energies of materialism and metaphor. I believe this layered opening of consciousness and act of orphic empathy to be both one component of the Japanese ethos and part of Tanikawa’s project more broadly.
Indeed, in the face of the ongoing climate crisis and several geopolitical conflicts, I believe we need this book of poems at this moment, not only to help us grapple with the certainty of immense and imminent change, but to help us manifest this change in a way that might enable us to navigate toward openness, ecological integration, and ontological reconciliation with our fellow humans and to nonhumans alike. Tanikawa’s ability to marry a philosophy of the quotidian to a sense of radical empathy, I believe, can help to prepare us for a more inclusive, and hopefully a much more strange, relationship with our planet and to each other.
In these translations I’ve tried to align to Goethe’s third “epoch,” “in which the translator identifies so strongly with the original that he more or less gives up the uniqueness of his own nation.” What I mean by this is that I have tried to maintain both the precision and crispness of Tanikawa’s language and images while also embodying the defamiliarizing and even destabilizing experience of becoming enmeshed into another language and another culture.
I believe part of the depth and resonance of these poems relies on Tanikawa’s masterful ability to lean into the ambiguity inherent in the Japanese language. I have also tried to maintain this balance of precision and ambiguity to emphasize the potential for personhood and animism in nonhumans—to enact the competing and coexisting energies of materialism and metaphor. I believe this layered opening of consciousness and act of orphic empathy to be both one component of the Japanese ethos and part of Tanikawa’s project more broadly.
Indeed, in the face of the ongoing climate crisis and several geopolitical conflicts, I believe we need this book of poems at this moment, not only to help us grapple with the certainty of immense and imminent change, but to help us manifest this change in a way that might enable us to navigate toward openness, ecological integration, and ontological reconciliation with our fellow humans and to nonhumans alike. Tanikawa’s ability to marry a philosophy of the quotidian to a sense of radical empathy, I believe, can help to prepare us for a more inclusive, and hopefully a much more strange, relationship with our planet and to each other.
Shuntaro Tanikawa is one of Japan’s most prolific and celebrated living poets. Born in Tokyo in 1931, he published his first collection of poems, 二十億光年の孤独 (Two Billion Light Years of Solitude; Sogensha, 1952). Tanikawa has won numerous awards and publications, including the fourth Japan Record Award for Best Lyricist for 月火水木金土日の歌 (Songs of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) in 1962, the Japan Translation Culture Award for マザー・グースのうた (Mother Goose Songs) in 1975, the thirty-fourth Yomiuri Prize for Literature for 日々の地図 (Map of Days; Shueisha, 1982), and the first Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize for 世間知ラズ (The Naif; Shichosha, 1993) In addition to poetry, he has published a wide range of works, including picture books, essays, translations, scripts, and lyrics.
Martin Rock is the author of the poetry collections Residuum (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016) and Dear Mark (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013); with Kevin Prufer and Martha Collins he co-edited Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Works of an American Master (Unsung Masters, 2015). His work appears in Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Conduit, Waxwing, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. A poet, editor, publisher, and educator, Martin’s experimental translations of Nenten Tsubouchi’s haiku have been featured in Asymptote. Winner of the Barthelme Prize in Poetry and recipient of multiple writing fellowships, Martin holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Houston. He teaches writing and climate justice at University of California San Diego and is co-director of the Unsung Masters book series, which recently published Tom Postell: On the Life and Work of an American Master. He is co-editor of an anthology of great but little-known poets, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press, titled Other Legacies.
