THE SAINT ANN'S REVIEW

TWO BY SHURI KIDO
translated by Forrest Gander
and Tomoyuki Endo

TOWARD TEMPLE RISSHAKU

(Toward Temple Risshaku. . .
For now, swallow back down whatever your throat coughs up.
The ascetic pilgrimage, crossing the boundary to the sacred place
and wavering there—
your life has been lived among the stony mountains
of voices,
getting your tasks done ((or failing to)),
trembling as the gong resounds through a forest of bones,
meandering,
As scarlet flowers breathe shallowly.)

***

THE PORTRAYAL OF WHITE

Noon came and it was
as though the clouds caught fire.
The sky piling into its zenith,
and now, it might be dispelled in an instant.
On this earth,
wild rumors quietly take off
like brush fires,
and they scorch us like strong alkaline.
It could be you’d prefer to watch the sky
turning into a cobalt conflagration.
And if “a piece of bone” were hung there,
its whiteness would make your eyes ache.
Cupping your own shoulders as you might cup an egg,
you shudder, imagining a loneliness beyond your imagination.
A torn, jagged idea, like a thunderbolt,
sourced in the cloud of our species.
Measuring the depth of the emotion,
“time” fans out like summer grass.
Holding your head, drinking heavily,
holding your knees, curling into a ball,
the human emotions “agony” or “anguish”
are metaphors for “time,”
the shadows folding, the darkness dissolving into the body.
Then, praise for “the bone’s” whiteness
which never quite fades into the surrounding dark.
If we associate blue with “bone-scattering” rituals,
is the whiteness of bone a metaphor for “time”
or a compelling mimicry of what only adheres to the “surface”?
This noon,
even more deeply than on the seventh day,
a small creature sleeps like “ashes”
dreaming of something that never happens,
turning its body.
Cauliflowers, or Cabbage Flowers bloom, though no one observes them.
When clouds are colored with the same pale rose seen on the Japanese ibis’ wings,
“time” holds, filling with that “white” light
in which all colors in the visible spectrum are contained. 

***

Shuri Kido, known as the “far north poet,” has published several poetry books and essays and is one of the most important poets on the front line of contemporary poetry in Japan. He has translated many English poems into Japanese and has introduced works by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot to Japan. Kido has been a critic and columnist for various magazines and newspapers and has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture.

Tomoyuki Endo is an assistant professor at Wako University in Tokyo, teaching modernists and post-modernists such as Ezra Pound, W. C. Williams, T. S. Eliot, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Junzaburo Nishiwaki, Katsue Kitasono, and Kazuko Shiraishi, along with literary pop artists including Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and others. He has collaborated with Forrest Gander on the translation of three poems from Shiraishi’s My Floating Mother, City (New Directions). He was also the supervisor of English subtitles for Gozo Yoshimasu’s movies Thousands of Islands and The Reality behind What We See which won more than ten awards from international movie festivals.

Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator and cross-genre writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, and United States Artists Foundations.