Mir’s Reviews > Miyazawa Kenji: Selections (Poets for the Millennium) > Status Update

A ashiki bokko is a an adolescent-looking household guardian. The household thrives as long as they remain, and declines if they leave.

I don't think I've read any poems before describing so specifically what it feels like to be dying slowly from something, with no allusions to God, the afterlife, philosophy, etc.

None of these things seems mine anymore
except it's me who manages to think like this
damn it! thinking's just thinking
how the hell do you know it's you?
well then do you mean I don't exist...
of shit! don't start that now

You must make music out of it.
While others live in town or waste their time,
you alone will reap the grass in the stone field.
With that loneliness you must make music.
You must take all the insults and poverty, and sing.

Today, too, there will be no rain.

I prefer Snyder's translation of "Some Views Concerning the Proposed Site of a National Park" to Sato's

EXCURSION PERMIT

Can you tell the random trails of wild horses
from the real paths?You say, plantains, sainfoins,
but do you know what they really look like?
Can you pass by identical yellow hills
keeping track of them all?

Look at the firelines on your map.
How can you tell them from the ones made later?
Do you know what the underground stream is like
in peat strata?

THE SEA-ERODED TABLELAND

After the sun enters the final sextant,
the sky grows totally dull,the tableland hazy, like the sea of boundless desire...
The sea the color of illusion
sadly yet nostalgically
bites into the chest of the spring of continence...
[cont.]

Ah reason tries to persuade me again and again
but my loneliness remains uncured.
A different space that I do not feel
reflects a phenomenon, which was with me until now.
That's what makes me lonely.
(We call that loneliness death.)

--excerpt from "Volcano Bay: A Nocturne" (one of the several poems he wrote shortly after his sister's death.)

...
Because, as we perceive our senses,
landscapes, and personalities,
just as we all merely perceive them,
so the records and histories, or the history of the earth,
together with their various data,
(under the temporal, spatial restrictions of karma)
are no more than what we perceive.
[cont.]