from Seven Poems

Shuzo Takiguchi


Salvador Dalí

The scream of long stripes
awakens the downy pebbles.
A pockmarked void
is a woman's moon face
like a butterfly in uniform
sadly perching tonight
on a headless face.
Clocks
on a sleepless bench
were amphibians out of lake water.
Now the globe
suffers from severe nostalgia,
and the space, filled with terrifying desire,
shudders stiffly like a triangle.
In the historic glow of a sunset
humans embrace one another.
A flock of starved, timid sparrows
flies down
in the big spectacle of terrifying twentieth-century objects.
It is the container and content of the universe.
The fascinating complex
of pure infants.
An enormous fastener-bag grand piano
is a mask with a gaping mouth.
Along the word Dalí
lies a mysterious ruined seashore.
Dalí—the chilling sound of the waves.





Max Ernst

A night traveler
devours
night's cryptic handcuffs
like a piece of meat.

At voiceless midnight
a letter of mimicry arrives
in care of the Gobi desert.

A can of words
is mistaken for a piece of meat
by starved, eternal birds.

One night
a human gift
was burning like a flower. 





Pablo Picasso

The sad eyes
of flying birds
are hammered into our blood
like songs.
Pupils and lips in water speak
to ears and a forehead in the ground.
Love in the wind
raises a gentle voice
and opens the petals of windows.
A white chair bends its black leg
and stabs a breast
like a sword.

At moonrise
a woman drops her eyes to her bare skin.
A map smeared with blood
spreads its blue.
The wings of waterbirds
hide the ocean.
The color of milk slightly
hides the color of blood.


translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tanaka and Mary Jo Bang

Read the original in Japanese

Listen to "Salvador Dalí" read in the original Japanese by Yuki Tanaka:

Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979) was a poet, painter, art critic, and one of the most prominent Surrealists in Japan. He introduced and actively promoted the works of André Breton, Max Ernst, and other European Surrealists through translation and criticism. He also helped revive the avant-garde scene in postwar Japan by spearheading an interdisciplinary art group called Jikken Kobo ("Experimental Workshop") which was active from 1951 to 1957. His first collection of poems, The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927–1937, was published in 1967. In the late sixties and seventies he collaborated with Joan Miró on two books of poems and paintings. His fourteen-volume collected works was published between 1991 and 1998.

Yuki Tanaka was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six books of poems, including Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translation of Dante's Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf Press in 2012. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.