Monday, 28 September 2015

Inuhiko Yomota: from MY PURGATORY




Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato

[For many years now Hiroaki Sato has brought the work of a range of Japanese experimental modernists into English, the latest of whom is Inuhiko Yomota, whose book My Purgatory has just been published by Red Moon Press in Virginia.  Sato describes Yomota, a prolific writer in many areas, as follows: �Inuhiko Yomota (b. 1953) aptly calls himself a tuttologista. One of the most prolific Japanese writers on a wide variety of subjects and the most internationally encompassing, Yomota has published more than 100 books covering Japanese film, Asian film, literary criticism, autobiography, arts, music, city theory, cooking, and manga, among other things.�  And Geoffrey O�Brien of My Purgatory�s amazing breadth & scope: �Inuhiko Yomota � has written in My Purgatory a somber, passionate, highly colored cycle of poems, imbued with intimations of ancient suffering and modern-day apocalyptic terror, and candidly confronting the prospect of personal annihilation.  The book�s tragic themes are offset by a bracing and defiant bravura, inhabiting different eras and identities, passing ghostlike through Carthage and Harbin and archaic Thrace, and conjuring with awed detachment the bloody and inextricable histories embedded in millennia of continually resonating language.�  The following is an indication of Yomota�s & Sato�s latterday gift to us. (J.R.)]

But who may abide the day of his coming?
and who shall stand when he appeareth?
for he is like a refiner's fire,
and like fullers� soap.
�The Book of Malachi, 3:2

A BOAT [1]

People in a small boat,
do not follow my boat any longer,
because from now I must cross those cruel seas
where no one has left wakes;
because I must face the dark expanse
where there are no ropes I�m used to, there�s no celestial body at the northern peak,
where no seagulls scattering goodwill playfully come near me.

So do not follow farther into the offing any more.
I�m going on alone now,
my draft low, my soiled hair wet with briny water,
ignoring various monsters inhabiting the sea,
into the darkness that remains after the star, the divine sign, has fallen,
I turn my cracked keel, unbeknownst to anyone.
Just people,[2] do not follow me further.
Return to the bay and spend your days looking at the quiet waters.

You ask
what lies beyond the dangerous seas,
whether cattle and treasures to be plundered, women to be enslaved, are waiting.
There is nothing, except for what I reach after riding over dozens of nights
will be miserable hidden rocks.
Whenever waves wash over them, seaweeds around the rocks waver a little,
boulders full of holes, the seashore where there are no creatures�
you ask why I�m heading toward the end of such a world.
No, the truth is not even that, because there are
not even hidden rocks, or seaweeds or splashes of waves any more.
There I will continue to wait,
for the length of time equal to my life,
I will continue to stay, utterly inactive.
What will I wait for under the dark canopy?

So never even dream of following me.
No matter how loudly you may call out,
no matter how beautifully you may sing,
in no time
I�ll go where I won�t hear your voice,
beyond the bend of the round earth,
I�ll go out of the outside of time where there are no more seagulls, no more sounds of waves.
When the aim of waiting is known, waiting should be half over,
but I depend only on the cracked keel and sail
and am not permitted to know what on earth I�m waiting for.

THE EYES

stone . . . . .
. . . . . shout . . . .
. . . . hammer . . . .
what a craggy name
whom does it intend to threaten
fading memory
name I cannot remember
crushed eyes

under the collapsing cloudy sky
I feel
the eyes crushed with a stone
the eyes repeatedly flattened, trampled upon
the eyes that continue to stare at me as they I face death

the one staring at me
what is he looking at
with blood accumulating in the eye sockets
what is he looking at
dregs of wax clinging to the candlestick


COW-DUNG [3]

I want you to cover my body with cow-dung.
I want you to cover my skull, my sunken eyes,
use both hands to put dung over them like clay.
I want you to plaster my bloated belly, my legs grown as thin as bones,
my scrotum between my legs, like withered bulbs,
with the black and ruddy mix that�s in the storing tubs.
Because I am someone soon heading for death,
someone trying to awaken from the silly dream called the present world.

I want you to cover my body with cow-dung.
I want you to blanket with dung not just my body
but also my soul, my memories I�m tired of supporting,
leaving out nothing.
I want you to smear smelly clay
into every one of the innumerable slits that have grown inside my memories.
Because I am now tired of supporting my encephalon,
because my soul has gotten humid and lost its vitality.

The soul is fire,
the soul is fire that flares up airily.
But my body has received too much water,
has gotten as bloated as an oyster�s body,
droops,
is ready to wait for a putrefying arrival,
has lost the power of flying up airily.

I want you to cover my body with cow-dung.
Children, I plead with you,
I want you to scoop up the cow-dung in the tub with your 
     clumsy fingers
plaster it into every hole of mine, every dent of mine,
I want you to turn me into cow-dung itself.

When everything that�s smeared dries up,
cracks, and peels away from my skin,
my soul, released from humidity,
will restore its innate cheerfulness.
Now I lie by a Parthenon, fulfilled, splattered with cow-dung
when, children, you�re tired of playing with mud
and think of a new game to play, your unstained souls intact.

END NOTES

1  Alludes to Dante, Paradiso, Canto II, which, in the Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed translation, begins: �O ye who in your little skiff longing to hear, have followed on my keel that singeth on its way, / turn to revisit your own shores; commit you not to the open sea; for perchance, losing me, ye would be left astray.�
    
2  Romans I: 1:17, �The just shall live by faith.�

3  Reference to Heraclitus (c535-c475?), a �dark,� �weeping,� i.e., misanthropic philosopher. According to The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, Tr. C. D. Yonge, Heraclitus either �shut himself up in a stable for oxen, and covered himself with cow-dung, hoping to cause the wet to evaporate from him, by the warmth that this produced,� and died, or �he placed himself in the sun, and ordered his servants to plaster him over with cow-dung; and being stretched out in that way, on the second day he died, and was buried in the market-place.� Another story says that �as he could not tear off the cow-dung, he remained there, and on account of the alteration in his appearance, he was not discovered, and so was devoured by the dogs.�

Monday, 21 September 2015

In Praise of Steve Clay and Granary, for "The Book Undone: Thirty Years of Granary Books"

                       

[The grand exhibition of Granary Books at Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library began on September 16 with a panel of readers & talkers, for which the following was my own contribution & tribute. (J.R.)]

The history of poetry in our time has also been a history of those who provide conduits & vehicles, containers & wrappers, for the physical presentation of poetry: publishers, typographers, printers, designers, or those artists-as-such who are often the collaborators in making poetry a visible, even a visual, art.  For this the book has remained the principal vehicle � the material book, like the material poem, still active in the age of virtuality.  In the true history of American poetry, which I have long threatened to write & never will, Granary Books, as a press & resource, is exemplary of how poets & related artists in the post-World War Two era were able to establish shadow institutions that operated, nearly successfully, outside the frame of any & all self-proclaimed poetic mainstreams.
 

If Steve Clay & Granary Books were not the first participants in this history, they have played a major role in it, both as makers of books & as chroniclers of poets� & artists� books � their own & others�.  What�s on view in this exhibition is a display of works by many of these artists, working alone or, typically, in collaboration.  The books as such come in different shapes & sizes, & the production methods involved vary as well � from standard letterpress & offset to incredibly fine printing & graphics, plus a degree of handwork in the more limited editions.   The flood of work links both to what had come before & what continued to be conceived & realized contemporaneously.  This linkage shows up as well in a series of bigger books � anthologies & histories � that made Granary the principal purveyor � both artistic & critical � of what was a virtual renaissance of American poetry & book making.  Of such works two by Johanna Drucker set the standard for a historicizing of this movement in the arts: The Century of Artists� Books and Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics.  These were followed by Ren�e & Judd Hubert�s The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists� Books, & my own attempts by way of anthology, The Book, Spiritual Instrumentand A Book of the Book, the latter in collaboration with Steve Clay. 



To speak of myself, then, with relation to Steve Clay and to Granary Books, the anthologies played as always a major role, though there were other books as well, before and after: Pictures of the Crucifixion & Other Poems, with drawings by David Rathman and typography by Philip Gallo, in 1996; A Flower Like a Raven, translations from Kurt Schwitters in an artist�s book edition by Barbara Fahrner, also in 1996;The Case for Memory, & Other Poems, a collaboration with Ian Tyson, in  2001; The Burning Babe & Other Poems, with Susan Bee, in 2005; and the Introduction to A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, published by The New York Public Library and Granary Books in 1998.  But beyond all these, A Book of the Book, co-edited with Steve Clay, remains the crown jewel of the books produced between us.



So �


As the twentieth-century faded into the twenty-first, I republished through Granary Books an issue of my magazine, New Wilderness Letter, titled after St�phane Mallarm� The Book Spiritual Instrument and co-edited with David Guss, one of my earlier companions in writing and editing.  And in the immediate aftermath of that I embarked with Steve Clay on another anthology project which we called A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing:  a wide-ranging book of writings on �the book,� taken in some sense as an extension of what The Book, Spritual Instrument was attempting with those materials that were then immediately to hand.  (This is the difference, then, between a magazine & an anthology.)  It was in this context that we hoped to explore more fully the points at which a poetics & an ethnopoetics of the book & writing come together or illuminate each other.  And we wanted at the same time to expose the material bases (ink & paper, manufacture & dissemination) of those ends to which the work of Mallarm� (among other predecessors) was leading us. 


With Steve Clay as publisher as well as co-author, there were no limits here to what we might include - of books that had been made & books that had still to be imagined.  I believe in this regard that there is also a future of the book as an extended & self-contained compendium of (visible) language & that the emergence of new technologies -- new cyberworks I meant to say -- is not a threat to our identity as poets & book people but a new aspect of it that can & will enhance all that  poesis is or ever has been.  In much the same way, I no longer believe, if I ever did, that the book or writing had -- in some earlier time  -- destroyed orality or made the human voice obsolete.  The book isas old as fire & water, & thought is made in the mouth as it is also in the hands & lungs & with the inner body.   If that was our condition at the beginning, it will be also in the end.


The role of Steve Clay and Granary in all of this remains of utmost importance to me. so that having worked so closely with him before and being able to say some words today in his praise, fills me with the greatest pleasure.


To conclude, then, is to say that here as elsewhere there is no conclusion.  �Of the making of books there is no end,� as the old scriptural saw once put it (while reifying a single book as the unalterable word-of-god), and Mallarm� in his modernist d�tournement: �Everything in the world exists in order to be turned into a book.�  It is my sense � at least in our common work as poets � that the movement, the dialectic (to use a once fashionable word) is between book and voice, between the poets (present) in their speaking & the poets (absent) in their writing.  That is to say, we are (up to & past our limits) full & sentient beings, & free, as Rimbaud once told us, to possess truth in one soul & one body.  For myself [as for many others here present] the return to the book is the step now needed to make the work complete.

Monday, 14 September 2015

Richard Dauenhauer: 22 Koyukon Riddle-Poems

 
 Translated & arranged by Richard Dauenhauer after Father Julius Jett�, S.J. 

[The riddle in verbal culture is part of the stock-in-trade of academic folklore, but its relation to the poetic image has rarely been explored until recently.  The workings presented here were originally published in The Riddle and Poetry Handbook, developed by Richard Dauenhauer (1942-2014) as a project of the Alaska Native Education Board in Anchorage, Alaska.  With Nora Dauenhauer, a native Tlingit speaker, Dauenhauer was engaged for many years in translation projects (Tlingit into English, English into Tlingit) aimed at Tlingit-speaking audiences.
            In working with Father Julius Jett�s 1913 notes Dauenhauer set the riddles up as two-part antiphonal texts, the initial image or utterance clarified or deepened by the utterance that followed.  Of the mind at work here, as well as its endangerment, Dauenhauer wrote further: �The riddle in Jett� exemplify the poetic use of everyday language and the imaginative juxtaposition of everydayimages, of seeing something in terms of something else, and verbalizing that picture through manipulation of the wonderful and indefinite potential of language.  With suppression and eradication of Native Alaskan intellectual traditions, and with the diminished possibilities of transmitting oral tradition because of language loss among the younger generations, a situation has developed in which even the average fluent speaker of Koyukon � through no fault of his or her own � is no longer familiar with riddles and riddle style.�
            The situation, since Dauenhauer wrote this in the late 1970s, may still be open to question. (J.R.)] 

A selection of the riddle-poems, as first published by Dennis Tedlock and myself in Alcheringa and scheduled for publication in the expanded Technicians of the Sacred, follows.
 
****

Like a spruce tree
lying on the ground:
the back-hand
of the bear.
 
. 

I drag my shovel
on the trail:
a beaver. 

. 

Water dripping
from an ice-spear tip:
water dripping
from the beaver's nose. 

. 

Like bones
piled up in the stream bed:
sticks
the beaver gnaws.
 
. 

Flying upward,
ringing bells in silence:
the butterfly. 

. 

Muddy-light
dark-fresh
like two streams merging:
eagle feet.

.

At the tip it's
dipping in ashes:
ermine tail.

. 

Faraway, a
fire flaring up:
red fox tail.

. 

Small dots
on the skyline:
when the birds return.
 
. 

As if the stream bed
were hacked up with a knife:
footprints of the swans
and geese. 

. 

Someone's throwing
sparks in the air: 
plucking the reddish feathers
of the grouse. 

. 

It scatters little wood crumbs
from the trees:
a roosting grouse, eating. 

.

It looks like a flint:
the louse.  

. 

Round and shiny 
at the end of my spruce bough:
Lynx feet
or the great gray owl. 

.

It really snowed hard
in opposite directions
on my head:
a mountain sheep. 

. 

At the water hole
the ice-spear
trembles in the current:
a swimming otter's tail.
 
. 

Like forest branches
fluffing in the wind:
the great gray
owl ears. 

. 

Ptarmigan bills:
like bits of charcoal
scattered on the snow. 

. 

We come upstream
in red canoes:
the salmon. 

.

Like a water plant:
floating salmon guts. 

.

Smoke-like
it spreads out in the water:
butchered salmon blood. 

. 

The hilltop trail
running close beside me:
a thing on which
the wolf has peed.

Sunday, 6 September 2015

Jerome Rothenberg Readings & Launches: Barbaric Vast & Wild, and More (a final listing)

In line with publication of Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present (Poems for the Millennium, volume 5), co-edited with John Bloomberg-Rissman, I�ll be engaged this autumn in the following launches & readings, along with several other talks & solo  or group performances: 

Reading of poems & launch of Barbaric Vast & Wild, Kelly House, University of Pennsylvania, 6:00 p.m., September 10, 2015. 

Panelist, �The Book Undone: Thirty Years of Granary Books,� exhibition in  Butler Library Room 203, Columbia University, 6:30-7:30 p.m., September 16, 2015. 

Reading & talk, �Outside & Subterranean Poetry, from Technicians of the Sacred to Barbaric Vast & Wild,� Poets House, New York, 7:00 p.m., October 1, 2015.

Reading, with Ariel Resnikoff, Bowery Poetry Club Fantasy Reading Series, 6:30 p.m., October 4, 2015.

Poetry reading & visit, Coordinate Literary Reading Series, Olean Public Library, Olean, New York, October 6, 2015.

Workshop: �Translations & Transcreations, from English & Other Foreign Languages,� at Poets House, New York, 12:00-4:00 p.m., October 10 and 11, 2015.

Reading & launch of Barbaric Vast & Wild, with John Bloomberg-Rissman, Jennifer Bartlett, Charles Bernstein, Gary Sullivan, Cecilia Vicu�a, & Anne Waldman, St Marks Poetry Project, New York, 8:00 p.m., October 14, 2015.

Reading, University of ArizonaPoetry Center, Tucson,
October 27, 2015. 

Panel, �Translating Verse Without Fluency in the Source Language: Assessments of and Strategies for an Old Tradition at the Crossroads,� ALTA annual conference, Tucson, 2:00 p.m., October 28, 2015. 

Keynote speaker, ALTA annual conference, Tucson, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Crowder Hall (University of Arizona), October 30, 2015. 

Book launch & reading for Barbaric Vast & Wild, with John Bloomberg-Rissman, Jack & Adelle Foley, Lyn Hejinian, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, & Julie Rogers, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 7:00 p.m., November 5, 2015.

Book launch & reading for Barbaric Vast & Wild, with John Bloomberg-Rissman, Will Alexander, Douglas Messerli, & Christine Wertheim, Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles, 7:30, November 8, 2015. 

Reading & launch for Barbaric Vast & Wild, 4:30, New Writing Series, UCSD, November 11, 2015.

A Final Note.   For those of you for whom it may be of interest, there remains a real need for reviews of these & other books of mine, particularly for a discussion of the premeditated contemporaneity of Barbaric Vast & Wild and its relation to other books in the project that began for me with Technicians of the Sacred and has continued through Poems for the Millennium.  I am also open to readings like those listed here in other areas of the country.