どこでもない都
佐藤文香
この流域での営みには
いちいち橋が必要である
鋏でひらいた桔梗数輪と
蔓の植物のこまめな花
茄子畑に咲くオクラの花
通学路同士合流するところ
のろく歩いているのに
秋風は昼の船出のように
扁平の声を胸椎におさめ
くらがりで毛並を整えて
歩くとは蹄に思考させること
辛子色のトラックに
裏向きに乗せられた猫車
貧しい土が乾かずにある
自分の名前のスナックと
刻まれた布を扱うおばあさん
話すのを善だとは思わない
どこでもない都
反り腰の浪人たちが
芋を抱えて集まってくる
旅空を暮しの空へ秋の風
両足は我を運びぬ古都の秋
深草は川面ぬめらとございます
雨の日に雨の絵画を見て帰る鳥居の貫のやうなあなたと
まはらない水車にふれてゐる楓あをさの透かす夕暮にゐた
As translators who appreciate one another’s bilingual poetic output (both of us work in both Japanese and English), Hiro and I collaborated fluidly, almost unconsciously, when faced with the daunting task of translating the crystalline poetry of Ayaka Satō. The underlying confidence and lucidity of the poems—a quality difficult to apprehend in isolation, lying as it does across the poems—is paradoxically a heavy task for translation, since the efficient mechanics of such poetry means that so many interdependent parts must be maintained in translation. This was our task, and so, we never found ourselves asking one another how we might better make our drafts conform to modes of English-language haiku or tanka present today, or how to make certain Japan-specific elements more explicit in English. Instead, the drafts were approached as contemporary poems by a poet whose indomitable self-presence spans the variety of forms she works in. Satō’s apparent lack of anxiety about crossing lanes, if you like, from so-called traditional modes and the tropes they bear, to contemporary ones, has given the translators in turn the confidence to commit most of all to the language.
Satō-san’s meticulous and probing commentary during the production of these English translations meant that the poet’s subjectivity, a radical component of much contemporary free-verse Japanese poetry, easily assumed the role of diligent auditor of the translations’ production. Thus the poet stands large here, if unobtrusively in that paradoxical lyric poetry way, with all of the elusiveness, self-awareness, emotiveness and wit this entails.
Now, the reader is, in one way or another, absent from Satō’s autumnal Kyoto found across these works of distinct poetic form. The transposition of Satō’s situation-embedded, context-driven, always implicatory style—a trait typical of haiku that can also be found in her free-verse poems—was our primary focus. As it happens, Satō-san is an eager runner, and the animated runner’s eye seems to coruscate within the observant, mobile poetry generated. We sought to render that coordinated balancing act the poems engender between the minutiae of a memory-infused but highly detailed “unseen Kyoto” that Satō-san vividly charts, and the more immediate percepts of the real, a kind of hovering between the lucid and the turbid that required fairly committed redrafting between us and, later, with the poet.
Satō-san’s advice often proved clarifying. For example, she asked that the implied Kyoto of miyako in the title of “The Unseen Kyoto” be made explicit in the English version. The obviousness of the implication was not evident in one of our drafts’ choice of “The Unseen Capital”. Overall, the poet might be said to have sought greater lucidity where we the translators had leant on the “unseen” dimensions of the poems. The poet evidently understood better than anyone else the stakes of that impossible balancing act the poems perform. The advice from Satō-san was highly consequential and a significant learning experience in understanding how poets may make work translated into a second language their own. Honouring the poet’s urge that the reader be adequately coordinated such that the gravity of particular words and observations were sustained in translation, the directionality of implied addresser and addressee preserved, and so on, became for Hiro and me the central assignment to respond to. In the end, we are proud to say that in readings for the prestigious Kyoto Writers Residency the poet made the English translations very much her own before a multilingual audience.
We might look to Satō and her generation for a new trend of permissiveness, clarity, and immediacy, developed toward a poetics transcending genre divisions between haiku, tanka, and contemporary free verse, and a new personalization of the place of these genres in an artist’s lifeworld. Such a trend carries an implicit endorsement in that confident, witty, and eagle-eyed poetic mode of Ayaka Satō found here.
Ayaka Satō is a key representative of new directions in contemporary poetry adopted by a younger generation of haiku specialists in Japan. Born in Hyōgo Prefecture, Satō has worked predominantly in haiku, debuting in 2006 with a Yasuko Tsushima Prize at the Fukio Shiba Haiku Debut Competition. Her first collection, Kaisō-Hyōhon (Specimina Algarum; Furansudō, 2008), won the 2008 Sō Sakon Haiku Grand Prize. Her numerous publications include the anthology Amanogawa Ginga Hatsudensho: Born after 1968 Gendai Haiku Gaidobukku (Milky Way Galaxy Power Plant: Contemporary Haiku Poets Born after 1968; Sayūsha, 2017), the story collection Sonna Koto yori Kisu Datta (It Was a Kiss, Above All; Sayūsha, 2018), and the haiku collection Kiku wa Yuki (Chrysanthemums Like Snow; Sayūsha, 2021). Her first free-verse collection, Watasu Te (Reaching Out), was released by Shichosha in November 2023.
Corey Wakeling is a writer, scholar, and translator living in Tokyo. Corey was born in the UK and raised in Australia. In 2013, he was granted a PhD in English and theatre studies at the University of Melbourne. Since 2015, Corey has lived in Japan, where he is now an associate professor of English literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. His research concerns textuality and performance in the history of modernity. Corey is also an active poet: he is the author of three collections, the most recent of which is The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo, 2018), with a fourth, Debts of the Robots, appearing with Cordite in 2024.
Hiromitsu Koiso is a Japanese literary translator and poet based in Tokyo. He has completed MAs in literary translation and creative writing (poetry), both at the University of East Anglia. Writing in English and Japanese, Hiromitsu has published poems in journals such as Poetry and Gendaishitecho. He has translated works by Anne Carson, Teju Cole, Grayson Perry, and Ocean Vuong into Japanese. He was co-guest editor for Wasafiri issue 102, which featured Japanese literature.