Reflections of a Man's Heart

Received several new books from Amazon. This time they are poetry books, all dedicated to japanese poets.

 

Decided to get them after reading the incredibly beautiful translations of Heian era women poets by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, in The Ink Dark Moon.

 

The first one is Ariake: poems of love and longing by the women courtiers of ancient japan.

 

Learnt that ariake means 'the waning moon at dawn'. Amazing! We don't have words for such things around here ^^

 

In the foreword, they explain that ". . . the waning moon at dawn was an image associated foremost with love in the ancient courts of Japan. Two lovers, absorbed in their passion, knew that when the dawn moon floated toward the western hills, they would soon have to part . . ."

 

". . . The most renowned poets of the era were women. Not the passive object of desire characteristic of Western courtly love, these women were passionate and demonstrative, writing poetry about their lovers and themselves in brief, intense outbursts of image and rhythm'"

 

Have to say that the book is really beautiful. Not only because of the poems, but because of the paintings that accompany each and every poem.

 

If you have somebody who loves poetry and is important to you, you can do worse than buying that book as a gift for him/her . . .

 

Here is a poem:

 

The white drops of dew

That glisten in the evening sun

There in my garden

Fade no more quickly from the grass

Than I faint from desire.

 

- Lady Kasa

 

. . .

 

The second book is Women poets of Japan. This one covers women poets from the 7th century to this day.

 

Read some poems written by Izumi Shikibu and Komachi. The translations are veeery different to those by Hirshfield and Aratani. Apparently, Rexroth, the main translator, is an authority in the field.

 

Well, ok. For me, Hirshfield/Aratani translations are unsurpassed. Must be me!

 

A lovely detail: the name of each poet is written by Machi Shunso, a famous woman calligrapher in Japan . . .

 

. . .

 

The third book is River of Stars: selected poems of Yosano Akiko. Skimmed through it. Looks good.

Here is a sample:

 

Friends, please don't ask

whatever remains of love.

And don't preach to me.

Let our poetry endure.

It is the cross we bear.

 

- Yosano Akiko

 

Some time ago I found a nice poem written by Algernon Charles Swinburne, a guy I didn't know about.

 

I liked it so much that decided to order Poetry Classics: Algernon Charles Swinburne in Amazon. It arrived two weeks ago, just the day after I started my vacation, so today is the first day I have had time to take a look at it.

 

What I read looks promising! Here is just the first poem, from Atalanta in Calydon...

 

When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
  The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
  With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces.
  The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
  Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
  With a clamour of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
  Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
  Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?
O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her,
  Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
  And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
  And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
  The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remember’d is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
  Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

The full streams feed on flower of rushes,
  Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot,
The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
  From leaf to flower and flower to fruit;
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,
And the oat is heard above the lyre,
And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes
  The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root.

And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
  Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
  The Mænad and the Bassarid;
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
  The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

The ivy falls with the Bacchanal’s hair
  Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare
  Her bright breast shortening into sighs;
The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves,
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare
  The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies.

 

Last week several new poetry books arrived, all of them written or edited by Jane Hirshfield.

The first book is "The lives of the heart", poems written by J. H. While I didn't like it as much as "Of gravity & angels" (yum!), I am enjoying it.

This is one of the poems.

Not-Yet
Morning of buttered toast;
of coffeee, sweetened, with milk.

Out the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of checkadees, feeding them gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch -
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-.

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little close to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

This one I like a lot too ^^

Late Prayer
Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby -
all the heaven and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

And I already posted Lion and Angel Dividing the Mapple Between Them.

The second book is "Women in praise of the sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women", a selection of poems written by women during the last 4300 years. I didn't know what to expect about the book, just trusted Jane H. (the editor)...

Having just skimmed through it, I'm not sure if I would recommend it. Hmm.

Anyway, here is just one short poem:

The madness of love
The madness of love
Is a blessed fate;
And if we understood this
We would seek no other:
It brings into unity
What was divided,
And this is the truth:
Bitterness it makes sweet,
It makes the stranger a neighbor,
And what was lowly it raises on high.

- Hadewijch of Antwerp, 13th c.

The last book is "Nine gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry", a collection of essays written by J.H. too. She writes about subjects such as originality, the problems of translation, indirection, concentration, etc.

The essay on translation, in which she talks about the problems of translating some of Izumi Shikibu's poems is illuminating -and shows how much she loves her work.

Have to confess that I have just skimmed *veeery* quickly through the book, though.

Whatever, just the poems and some of the comments about them she writes to illustrate her ideas make the book worthwile. For example:

Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Isn't it really *powerful* that "You must change your life"?

^^

And, here are some of Hirshfield's comments:

"To look closely with the attention of quesitoning changes everything. It is , if undertaken fully, revolutionary...

Do not think it is an accident that it is Apollo, patron god of poetry, at whose figure Rilke looks. The activity of poetry is to tell us we must change our lives. It does this by posing again and again a question that cannot be answered except with our whole being -body, speech and mind. What is the nature of this moment? poetry asks, and we have no rest until the question is answered. Then it is asked again..."

Have to confess that reading this makes me feel good ^^

Just received Given Sugar, Given Salt, other book from Jane Hirshfield.

Still reading her Of Gravity & Angels, but got a glimpse of the poems. Looks good...

Here are two poems I liked:

"Nothing Lasts"

"Nothing lasts" -
how bitterly the thought attends each loss.

"Nothing lasts" -
a promise also of consolation.

Grief and hope
the skipping rope's two ends,
twin daughters of impatience.

One wears a dress of wool, the other cotton.

"Mathematics" (fragment)

...
Does a poem enlarge the world,
or only our idea of the world?

How do you take one from the other,
I lied, or did not lie,
in answer.

Boy, I am enjoying her Of Gravity & Angels a lot. What a delicious title, by the way ^^

...

Now, I better run if I want to meet F and S and arrive to the cinema on time...

Today I received three new books - Poetry.

Last week, I discovered Izumi Shikibu.

...
this world exists
as a sheen of dew on flowers

Beautiful...

I was so impressed by her that I decided to get whatever she had written.

In the end, the only book I could order was The Ink Dark Moon, with love poems from Izumi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi.

Shikibu is...is...Let me use the words in the introduction:

"intimate, lyrical, and deeply moving...

...illuminates certain areas of human experience with a beauty, truthfulness, and compression unsurpassed in the literature of any other age"

Like that!

I recommend this book wholeheartedly. The precission and compression Shikibu shows are simply unsurpassed, second to none. Really!

It contains probably the most deeply touching love poems I have ever read, perhaps only comparable to those of Emily Dickinson.

Maybe only Neruda can approach both women, and only in the original spanish... English translations just don't get it. Must be really difficult to translate this guy

...

I was so touched by Shikibu's poems, that I wanted to know who the translator was...

It happens to be Jane Hirshfeld. Knowing how difficult it is to translate poetry, I thought that it would be interesting to investigate further about the translator ^^

Well, Hirshfeld happens to write poetry too...

..and this takes me to the second book, Of Gravity & Angels.

While I havent' completely read it yet, I have to say that I liked some of the poems there.

Looks promising ^^

...

The third book, A Long Rainy Season, is about contemporary japanese women's poetry. Tankas and Haikus.

After a quick look, I don't like it as much as the other two.

Anyway, there are some interesting poems there:

First calligraph of the year -
too much force
in my brushstroke.

The first laugh
of a baby's life,
made without sound.

- Teiko Inahata

All the butterflies in the field
I hide
in my breast.

Wheat -
with such certainty
we assume death completely yellow.

- Kiyoko Uda

I have to confess that, right now, most tankas and haikus are a bit impenetrable to me.

...

All said and done, everybody should run, not walk, to Amazon, and buy The Ink Dark Moon... now.

^^

Today I received a copy of "Home was the land of morning calm: a saga of a Korean-American Family".

Since my girlfriend happened to be from such a distant place, I was concerned with the very different cultures and environments to which we belong.

So, first thing I did was to buy some books highlighting cultural differences.

This biographical book is written by a korean woman that happened to move to the USA when she was 20 or so, and since then has been living and working both in Korea and USA.

I bought it because I thought that a book written from the perspective of a korean inmigrant in a western country would highlight lots of cultural differences in everyday life, that other more academic books would just ignore.

The book is not only entertaining, but the writer happens to be a very interesting woman whose heart is divided between the US and Korea, half and half.

She does not spare any criticism, while at the same time having an affection for both countries: she happens to talk about most subjects, from mating, to the transition to democracy, feminism, the differences at the workplace, etc.

The book rings true all the time.

Other really interesting book is "The koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies". I think this might describe current Korea better. Really thought provoking. *Really*.

"Learning to Think Korean" is a good complement, as it might describe Korea as it was 20 years ago better, helping understand what is there now.

These are not the classical for tourist book, but they touch very delicate subjects, especially the first one. Corruption, how business is *really* done, man-woman relationship, transition to democracy... Whatever.

Illuminating, to say the least. I have to confess that I learnt a lot.

I found that we westerners don't know a damn about countries with a confucianist cultural background - or any other, at that.

Yes, I knew about that before...in my mind.