“Aomori Elegy III”—Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)

I did this translation almost a decade ago, as part of my final for an upper-level undergraduate course called Readings in Modern Japanese II. If I were doing this translation today it would probably be significantly different, but I am preserving the way I initially did it.

Miyazawa wrote several versions of “Aomori Elegy” (青森挽歌 Aomori banka), most much longer than this one. It is a Modernist poem that in some versions has pronounced Buddhist themes; in all of its forms, it represents Miyazawa’s efforts to come to term with the early death of his younger sister Toshiko.

This particular version has never had a translation published before and is in the public domain in Japan, whose copyright regime is the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. I’m electing to put this translation under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on this translation only if they attribute the translation to both Miyazawa Kenji and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

Aomori Elegy III

In the remaining mist of the thawed silicate siesta[1]

through the icy glass of the windows

the scent of apples drawing unto dawn

becoming a transparent cord flows in.

And outside monads of nephrite and silver

as they are full of gas emitted from the half-moon

into the guts of cirrocumulus

the moonbeams piercing through

make a weirder fluorescent plate

exude the weirder and weirder scent or light

that comes through the very smooth hard glass.

❦

It is not that it is because it is Aomori

but that it is more or less a phenomenon that always occurs

when the moon enters the cirrocumulus

that appears like this near to the dawn

or remains melting in the blue sky.

When I stand up in this berth by night

more or less everybody is sleeping.

In the seats in the midst of the right-hand side

pale opened peacock feathers

the child nursing a soft grass-colored dream

Toshiko, they look like you.

❦

“Sometimes in life we see our perfect double

at the Hōryūji depot

in some other steam train

a child exactly the same.”

On some morning so Father said.

And it seems it was me

in the December after that person died

as if it was yeast the fine snow

the most severe driving snowstorm

came down as I ran down the slope from school.

Before the pure white glass of Yanagisawa Clothiers

within the smoke of that indigo evening cloud

I met a woman in a black cloak.

Her eyes were hidden in her head-covering

her jaw was white and her teeth clean

and she looked at me as if to laugh a little.

(Naturally this pertained to the refractive index of the wind and the clouds.)

I nearly screamed.

(What, you, saying some plausible thing

like “you died”?

Yet here you are now walking around.)

Still surely I so screamed.

But since it was in that kind of tempestuous snowstorm

that voice was lost in the wind

having disintegrated into the wind I am bereft[2].

❦

“In the great house that commands such a view of the ocean

when I slept with my face upturned

with a hello-hello-hello-hello

over and over again the policeman awoke me.”

Those wrinkled loose white clothes

in the evening, one night, under that kind of electric light of yours

the senior-high-school teacher who sat down there

when he arrived in Aomori

did he say to eat an apple?

The sea is shining all around

and around now there are no crimson apples.

If it was fresh green apples he meant

those are certainly ready now.

[1] Neologism; compound; meaning is unclear; both words are now obscure.

[2] Literally “have lost a part”.

“Hakata Lullaby”—Japanese popular song, Late 19th or Early 20th Century

“Hakata Lullaby” (博多子守歌 Hakata komoriuta) is a comic folk song (with a dark twist at the end) written by an anonymous nursemaid (子守 komori), probably a teenage girl, in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Japan. These nursemaids did not necessarily work in the grand households that might have had domestic servants in the West; often they worked for other working-class people, whose luck had simply not been as hard as their own. However, the master and mistress of this particular song might have had upper-class pretensions, since the mistress is described as 渋う shibuu, which has a double meaning of “astringent, bitter” and “austere, understated, tasteful”; I have translated it “elegant, but dour.”

The first stanza contains a lurking allusion to the sex trade by way of the word “willow” (柳 yanagi). An alternate reading of the character for “willow” was (and still is) used to describe geisha, who do not sell sex as an integral part of their profession but in many cases do so on the side. The reference to the “willow” that is the nursemaid’s own body in particular draws attention to the fact that, for many former nursemaids, the sex trade was their only viable future option. “Yanagimachi,” the “willow district” of the city of Hakata (now a neighborhood of Fukuoka in southwestern Japan), was known as a red light district in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’m indebted to Franklin Odo’s magnificent book Voices from the Canefield: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai’i for alerting me to this song’s arresting, disturbing final stanza, which led to my decision to translate the whole song.

The decision to use the singsongy 7.6.7.6. meter in English (technically, ballad meter with hypometric tetrameters for the longer lines and an XAXA rhyme scheme) was taken because the poetic form in Japanese is nominally intended to be sung to children (although I can’t imagine any child in their right mind enjoying this particular lullaby). A literal translation of the Japanese text that I am using, which I ran across in certain old books and musical recordings, appears below the metrical translation.

Hakata Lullaby

In Hakata’s “Willow District”

No trees have lately swayed.

The willow-withy there is

The figure of a maid.

The Mistress of this household

Is bad-persimmon-sour:

A lovely treat to look at,

Elegant, but dour.

The Master of this household

Is of a high estate;

And as to what is meant here—

As a drinker, he’s first-rate.

O Mistress, listen closely.

And Master, listen, you.

If you abuse the nursemaid

Then baby gets it too.

In Yanagimachi, Hakata, there are no willows. A girl’s figure is the body of the willow.

The mistress of the house is like a bad persimmon. She’s lovely to look at, but austere to the point of bitterness.

The master of the house is of a high station in life. What kind of station is this? A grade of sake.

Listen well, Mistress; you listen too, Master. If you do evil to the nursemaid, she’ll take it out on the child.

博多柳町　柳はないが

むすめ姿が　柳腰

うちの御 寮さんな　がらがら柿よ

見かきゃよけれど　渋うござる

うちのお父つあんな　位がござる

なーんの位か　酒くらい

御寮よく聞け　旦那も聞けよ

守りに悪すりゃ　子にあたる