The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho Buson and Issa edited by Robert Hass
(The Ecco Press, 1995)
as well
as the following novels: Snow
Country by Yasunari Kawabata and A Personal Matter and Nip the
Buds, Shoot the Kids, both by
Kenzaburō Ōe
as featured in Beneath the Spanish by Victor Hernández Cruz
(Coffee House Press,
Minneapolis, 2017)
Note: The following prose and poem are from BENEATH
THE SPANISH about which Victor Hernández Cruz says:
Reading Japanese in Morocco
“No
oil to read by
I
am off to bed
But
ah . . .
My
moonlit pillow”
—Bashō
I have always admired Haikus, I compare them to having
little money and you have to enter into a grocery store and get the ingredients
to compose a meal, thus select with the little there is wisely. Robert Hass’s The Essential
Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa has been with me as constant
companion since it came out around the mid 1990s, it was with me in Puerto Rico
for years of morning café, along with the nightly singing of the coquís. Some
of the nights of Bashō, Issa nearby owl mooing sitting on a lonely Guavara tree
or was it a Guayacán árbol of Taino dark wood. My left elbow juncture bone
point has stained itself dark from pressing upon it during my nocturnal bed
reading, a bad habit I just have to live with; here in Morocco Senegal people
in the old Medina sell some good Shea butter which I pick up to rub into the
stain agony of my lectura. Once in New York I picked up three Japanese novels, Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata and A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899 and died
in 1972 supposedly committing suicide
a la Yukio Mishima who was his partner in right-wing politics, something about
a gas stove. His wife denies the whole suicide bit. Blames his death upon some
gas stove malfunction. Whatever happened he is stiff dead, his body that is.
Both of these writers have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kawabata in
1968, making him the first Japanese to obtain this award. Kenzaburō Ōe was born
in Uchiko, an agricultural region. As a child his mother gave him the gift of
the American classic The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, assuring him a lifelong influence from Mark Twain.
Kawabata along with the writer Yukio Mishima signed a petition against the
Maoist Cultural Revolution in China whereas the left wing leaning Kenzaburō
gave it full support, even visiting China. Kenzaburō took influence from the
French philosopher Sartre, existentialism something I could never understand, I
had a copy of that big book Being and
Nothingness in the 60s, but I was not analytical enough to penetrate the
polemic, some people do and well many blessings to them. A friend of mine had
told me to read Snow Country, aware
as he was of my love for the Haiku form, indeed the Novel’s prose is like a
necklace of haikus, a “renga,” as a Japanese critic called it. The scenes pace
themselves slowly, a cadence of paso fino which was translated by Edward G.
Seidensticker, he translated not words but space-air-timing, the Japanese
scholar and translator of many great Japanese works including The Tale of Genji in 1976. Seidensticker
speaking about the translation of Snow
Country: “You translate not just the words but the rhythm as well”; in
other words you translate silence. I would imagine you translate the
temperature as well, turning the pages I felt many whiffs of cold mountain snow
air, even while reading segments in tropical Puerto Rico. The lonely freaky mountainous
isolation zone, a feeling that you are sunken within an immense cold white
stretch of earth scattered hotels, inns, rich lonely men, geisha girls, putas
not exactly though the melody can be played. The character in the novel
Shimamura a cultured man who loved the ballet, refned, making observations, young
girls rattling through snow in kimonos. Komako his geisha vaporizing sake,
dizzy of desire, snow drunk feel the chills evermore even. Like ice cubes the
prose tumbles down into you until you apprehend the tragic avalanche you are
frozen in, a prose precise, ice staring at the mountain snow tips. It shines
cold sun. Slow honey dripping upon frozen chrysanthemums.
Chuchuki
It’s
not guacamole,
Sure
by now
You’ve
found out
This
wasabi shit
Not
hot sauce
Rather
some kind of vapor
It
creates an implosion
Inward
nostril
Tsunami
next
As
Brains spills
Down
your nostrils,
Turns
you insides out
The
first rush
Survive
that
Proceed
with the meal.
I
had some chuchuki
San
Francisco
Red
kimono
She
spoke Spanish.
Books
are paper
Wild
timber tamed
Trees
in your hands,
Wonder
if they have lice
Mealybugs,
termites.
In
the Caribbean books aging
Heat
moisture
Yellow
spots grow
Makes
a stank of mildew.
I
am witness to print
That
moves
Periods
who stride
Meaning
till the comma sleeps,
As
such changing
The
sentence-meanings,
The
pace, apostrophe rests into semicolon
Like
a question mark elaborated,
Minute
creatures persist,
A
particle of dot dust,
An
organism partial to books.
Bamboo
thin of tropic forest
Air.
Cool
winter Maghreb
Paper
holds better
Mediterranean
ether
Reading
the Japanese novel
Kawabata
Snow Country
An
isolated distant cold looms.
Are
there people in town
Or
frighten bones struggling
Toward
hot spa water,
Geisha
serves tea
In
magenta kimono,
Ah
what breast-less
Breathless
beauty,
Buttock
curve like
Shushi
tuna rolls,
Something
is aesthetic happening
Through
the whiteness
The
writer makes you see:
“The
road is frozen. The village
Lay
quiet under the cold sky. . .
The
moon shone like a blade
Frozen
in blue ice.”
How
chuchi can you get,
The
prose throughout
Links
of Haiku pictures,
Slow
peeling strips
Of
apricot, cheek tongue
Labios
blood red
Tumbling
lengua in mouth,
Black
hair silk shines.
Kenzaburō
transmitted
A
delight through my
North
African icy fngers
Hanging
on to: “Nip the buds,
Shoot
the kids”:
“Then
the girl’s small face
Appeared-red
with fever
And
with the down from
Her
cheeks to her ears shining
Golden”
The
no sense is non-logical
Sense
it makes sense Since
In
the cup of tea: it is taste.
Image
rolls flickering
Measured
shape colors,
Bud
growing flowers,
Music
like the
Zen
spells of koto long zither
Meditations,
Bamboo
by the river
Wind
flutes color
Sounds.
I’ve
long trips gone with
Bashō
who is a road
Through
cherry blossom springs,
The
Spanish refrain
“Por
si las moscas”
Mosquitoes/butterflies
Sapo/frogs
The
chance
Knowledge
comes suave
On
a wave of obvious
Invisibility.
Geisha
secret better
Than
the mafa.
A
rose like the
Waves
of a fan
Within
red,
Medina
window view Mountains.
Language
fades
Words
diminish
As
an alphabet
Sticks
upon
Two
little Sapo
Bashō
Frog/Legs.
Splash.
"Reading Japanese in Morocco" and
"Chuchuki” are reprinted by permission from Beneath the
Spanish (Coffee House Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Victor
Hernández Cruz.
*****
Victor Hernández Cruz is the author of several
collections of poetry including, most recently, The Mountain in the Sea and In
the Shadow of Al-Andalus. Featured in Bill Moyers’s The Language of Life series, Cruz’s collection Maraca was a
finalist for the Lenore Marshall and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He divides his time
between Morocco and his native Puerto Rico.
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