from Collected Poems

Hirato Renkichi


MINIMUM_MAXIMUM

My hand is one
My breath is one
My heart is one

However         tonight
Forever
My hand will expand
My breath will pound
My heart will break open

Why?
The moon comes out
The line between land and sky
The border between object and heart
The here and there, the far and near
Folds inside a soft, slender hand

Return to nature—says the philosopher
When dreaming of return—sings the poet

My hand will reach the clouds
(..........Abruptness of a handshake!)

My breath will dissolve with everything else
And my heart
Finally a heart of everything

And thus         now
My hand is infinite
My breath is infinite
My heart is infinite





Migration

Dry ocean
On the copper sun
A giant shadow
Stretching into the desert

NOTHING

Garment-less
Thoughtless
Sunless
Coming in flocks
(Seen in naked form is the refracted and inscribed determination of the four limbs
                                                                                    making an elastic leap!)
Only the leap—

                            To the window
AN UNKNOWN LIGHT



               A TORCHLIGHT PASSING THROUGH EVERY CENTURY

Bituminous candelabrum
Brandishing
Line
Forever
The field shines
Unprecedented wind
Flame                  Dances
(The tramping seen at Caesar's procession of a triumphant return)
Reverberation from afar—close
Now
The line between the past and present and future, in ecstasy

LIGHT

To the far end of the field
Swayed by the activities of the youth's four limbs
Dyes the faces of the crowd sitting in rows between the cylinder
Forward
The pioneer
Shall follow the torchlight moving to the far end of the field!
The deep shadow will be buried behind. 





Creation

I aspire to a particular shape—
In order to hold on to the ideal object
I dive into the flow of crimson magma
Ksana,
I borrow the appearance of an exceptionally pious believer
Pulled in by that truly honest heart.
Bit by bit with an urgent rhythm
I advance towards what I believe in
As I trace a centripetal garden
And I guide an ingenious harmony
Formed by a singular cohesion.
Ksana,
I become a merry maiko apprentice there and dance
In a row lined up in front of you people
In addition, dancing (what is thought to be) a strange performance. 





Self-Portrait

               Into an empty pot
               My tears drop
Like my dead friend's words
Like the heart of a good poem
Like the stars of a solemn daybreak
                              After a blinking wick
The sunflowers scorch me
The phoenix flutters
The storm passes
I send my lover
Into akasha seeing
What?
               Classicism!
               Romanticism!
Rupture—rupture—rupture
Inside akasha
Something unfamiliar awaits us 





Contact

The smell of clove
The smell of gunpowder
The smell of Eau de Cologne
Of skin
The smell of a small animal
３３３３３３３３３
             １５９６０３
２３２５６＝＝＝＝００００３
V r r r r r r r ＋＋××＝×＝ ０
＋＋＋－＋∀rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr＋××
＋×××＋Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr＋××
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ ・ 
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
                                              Tokio, Le 11 fevrier 1922
                                                       ma bien-aimée
O—n—y—o—u—r—m—i—r—r—o—r—a—d—e—e—r—f—l—y—
R—e—s—t—s—
The flower of a tulip is anxious in the greenhouse
The December sky is fast
The January sky is cold
The February sky is fruitless
The March sky is
Waiting still—
So far away


translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita

Read the original in Japanese

Listen to "Contact" read in the original Japanese by Sho Sugita:

All loanwords—romanized words and kana transliterations—are italicized and kept in their original French, Italian, English, or German. I have sometimes used Sanskrit for Buddhist terminology used by the author. Capitalized letters emphasize the experimentation with enlarged texts (with romanization of enlarged texts, Hirato often used capped letters). When Hirato Renkichi plays with parataxis in his line breaks to open up their polysemic capacities, the grammatical constructions are sometimes "flipped" in the English translation in order to maintain proximity to the original's noun-verb relations and the pressures of its line breaks. To the best of my ability, I have approximated sound repetitions and patterns in order to retain their "performability," at times marginally sacrificing a strict semantic interpretation of the author's work. I have also kept, to a large extent, the original punctuation marks from the Japanese; however, in select places, I have added or deleted punctuation marks implied by Japanese particles. Although Japanese grammatical constructions tend to be slightly more "elastic" than that of English, I have kept disjunctions whenever I felt the original Japanese language constructions were unconventional. Lastly, I have capitalized the beginning of lines to differentiate them from prose blocks.

Hirato Renkichi was born Kawakata Shoichi on December 9, 1893 in Osaka. He attended Sophia University in Tokyo for three years before dropping out and attending Gyosei Gakko to study Italian. He started writing poetry in 1912, later publishing Japanese Futurist poetry and manifestos in numerous coterie journals from 1916 to 1922. A tuberculosis patient, he often failed to make ends meet for his common-law wife and child, passing away on July 20, 1922. He was twenty-nine years old.

Sho Sugita writes and translates poetry in Matsumoto, Japan. He is the translator of Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems of Hirato Renkichi (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and author of Native Genius (The Elephants, 2018), a chapbook of poems-on-translation.