FACE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD     three poems by     HAGIWARA SAKUTARO (1886-1942)   translated by Graeme Wilson & Anthony Weir

 

 

DAWN

From pain of long disease
the face is spider-webbed.
Below the waist, the ebbed
flesh has contracted to
thin shadow-shapes, and these
shaped shadows peter out
in nothings, in grey dream...

Above the waist there sprout
things bushy, things that seem
like thin thickets of bamboo.
The rotted hands are thin
and every piece and part -
lips, knees and nails and heart,
are smashed and battered in.

The moon is up today.
The day-moon in the sky
with sickly feeble ray,
dim as an unlit candle.
And somewhere far away,
lifting its muzzle high
a great white dog gives tongue...

From desolation wrung
its desolation flows
along the empty road,
cry upon anguished cry.

 

 

 

 

DEATH OF AN ALCOHOLIC

From the dead body of the alcoholic
lying on his back - slack mouth, sharp nose -
around the region of the dead white stomach
something unimaginable flows.

Congealed with blood, translucent,
the bluish, bulbous heart;
maggots crawling and indecent,
intestines rotting green, impart
their ooze to the environment.
The ground is sticky, bright.

The grass is sharp as shattered glass
and everything is shining
with phosphorescent light.

Landscape of despair,
landscape with moon declining.

Ah, in such a lonely place
The pale murderer's flapping face
laughs like a shimmer in the grass.

 

 

 

 

FACE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD

Face at the bottom of the world:
a sick, a lonely face -
one invalided out
of every inner place.
Yet slowly there uncurled,
green in the gloom
the grasses sprout.

And, as a rat's nest stirs
its million tangled hairs
one queasy quivering,
thinnest of winterers,
the bamboo shoot prepares
its green grope to the Spring.

Sad in the ailing earth,
tongue-tender with despair,
green moves through grief's grimace;
and, sick and lonely, there
in Stygian gloom and dearth,
at the bottom of the world: a face.

 

 

 

combatting normality

 

 

 

POSTSCRIPT:
TWO TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE

 

 

ANONYMOUS
202 BC

Dew on chives
how soon it dries
yet falls to gleam again
at sun's next rise.

But Man once gone, is gone.
When he dies,
he dies.

 

 

KUAN HAN-QING
13th century

With whom, behind green silk
screening their skins from shame,
does he 'make love', and, with drink,
play out his lust's short game ?

I've forgotten my bitter words
- even his bloody name!