Contemprary Tanka Poet Mariko Kitakubo. Media coverage.
Poet and Tanka
by Mariko Kitakubo
translated by Amelia Fielden
My father disappeared from our family life when I was a mere eight years old and still seeing the world through a young green mist. It was around when that I came to be invited to an adults only New Year party where ten or so of my relatives gathered together. What I really enjoyed there, were the traditional games and pastimes which followed our New Year feast. It was all rather different from the way I played card games and 'twisters' with girls of my own age. The most fun was the 'five seven five' word game.
I should explain this game: Each participant is given a set of five sheets of notepaper. The sheets are numbered one to five. On sheet one, the player writes whatever she likes in five syllables, on sheet two, something in seven syllables and so on in the order of 5 7 5 7 7 syllables. The leader then collects all these sets, shuffles the sheets, and reads them out five at a time, as if they were tanka. Compiled thus haphazardly, the resulting 'poems' can vary from the absurd to the brilliant. This randomness is what makes the game such fun. Everyone laughs and is companionable.
Even now, many years later, that living room with tree shadows flickering on paper screens, that room where I first played the five seven five word game, recurs like dream in my mind. It was an unhurried era, which seemed to showcase a Japan of abundant leisure hours. Perhaps that is how and why the rhythm of tanka became a delight and a source of healing for me.
I first began writing tanka about my son about sixteen years ago in 1992. It was when Tawara Machi’s Salad Anniversary tanka collection appeared, creating a sensation both on the tanka stage and in society at large. For me personally, the ‘Japanese 5/7 rhythm,’ which had been slumbering in my heart, was aroused by her work. At the time my son was already seven years old, but my mind would back to his birth, and I became absorbed in writing my memories of those early years. And as I watched my son growing day by day, it was somehow natural for me to become interested in, and in turn greatly impressed by, the excellent tanka written by youthful poets like Terayama Shuji. Simulated by such wonderful work, I wrote and published successively three collections of my tanka: I Want to Tell You in the Words of Waves (1999), When the Music Stops (2002) and Will (2005).
Then, in the fulfillment of my long-held desire, Amelia Fielden translated a large selection of the tanka from the tanka from my third collection, Will, and this was published in 2006 as the book On This Same Star.
My web site (https://www.kitakubo.com), which was developed around the same time as On This Same Star appeared, apparently caught the eye of the then editor of Ribbons, an’ya, who kindly invited me to become a member of TSA and also submit tanka in English to its journal. Which I was only too delighted to do.
It has been my unimaginable good fortune to have the door to the mansion of English tanka opened for me in this way by Amelia and an’ya.
In my recent anthology, Cicada Forest, the first chapter is entirely new, in which I try to write about now and future, both in concrete and metaphysical terms:>
we won’t know
if it’s benign
till we operate -
I’m nodding as if
this isn’t about me
it’s myself
a hundred years later
I’m scooping up,
both hands full
of warm sand
In chapter two, from I Want to Tell You in the Words of Waves, I watch a son’s growth through the eyes of mother:
joined together
by his umbilical cord
I hold my son, then
all the stars of heaven
fall down upon me
that uniform
too small in two months…
I’m happy,
I’m sad,
it lies in a drawer
Chapter three is form When the Music Stops， and contains poems with which I write about the anxiety of my own and all animate beings in the present day:
at night
when I try to hear the wind,
the sound of nails
being hammered into my coffin
rings in my ears
I feel the plight
of endangered creatures
on this planet,
like they’re looking at me
with my child’s eyes
After I lost my mother I somehow felt even more strongly the bonds between us, and I tried to express that on in On This Same Star, some of which appears in the final chapter of Cicada Forest:
tonight as I
hull kidney beans
the stone
engraved with her name
is growing cold
day by day
my cracked recollections
whirl up with the wind
on a winter’s day
of mother and child at play
My earnest wish now is too see tanka, Japan’s ancient and traditional fixed from poetry, become familiar and appreciated world-wide. I feel my responsibility as a Japanese tankaist is to continue writing and propagating our lyric verse of the best of my ability.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Modern English Tanka, Autumn 2008, BOOK REVIEW
Cicada Forest: An Anthology of Tanka
by Mariko Kitakubo
translated by Amelia Fielden
Review by Denis M. Garrison
Cicada Forest: An Anthology of Tanka by Mariko Kitakubo, translated by Amelia Fielden. Tokyo, Japan: Kadokawa Shoten, 2008. ISBN 978-4-04-652019-7 C0092. Trade paperback, 5¼" by 8", perfect bound, 192 pages. $15.00 USD. ¥1800E. Cover design by Yoko Hasegawa; cover calligraphy by Hiroshi Hurugoori.
Cicada Forestis a collection of Mariko Kitakubo’s tanka in Japanese accompanied by fine English translations by the renowned Amelia Fielden. In addition to the bilingual text, the book includes a preface by Michael McClintock that supplies an educated vantage point from which to regard the verses themselves and the poet in the context of her art at this moment in time. A charming “Greeting from the Poet” follows the preface.
Cicada Forestis an anthology of Kitakubo’s recent work plus selections from her previous collections, I Want to Tell You in the Words of Waves , When the Music Stops , and On This Same Star (which also is bilingual). The presentation throughout is usually four (sometimes, three) poems to the page, English on the left and Japanese on the right. It is a judicious design, allowing the tanka to be very readable. Likewise judicious is the selection of tanka and their arrangement which presents them to advantage. There is a natural flow to the entire collection that does not happen by chance.
I have read Cicada Forestover and over. It engages me as few such collections can. Here we have the poet’s fully realized voice, even in translation, coming through with a distinctive timbre and tone that becomes recognizable. That is remarkable insofar as her diction is quite natural, rather than stylized. There is a lovely, appealingly musical quality to these tanka that enhances the potent content rather than smoothing it over.
in the foal’s eyes
shines
such gentleness—
some part of me
is being loosened
(pg. 110)
Kitakubo pulls together the personal and the universal with graceful ease, as in:
as the baby
descends the slope to sleep
he seems
to be shutting down
the day for me
(pg. 88)
Quoting a few, or even a few dozen, of the wonderful tanka from this collection cannot do it justice. This is one of those collections, like several classics that we all have come to love, that reveals the poet’s life and inner being. After reading Cicada Forest , we are beguiled into believing that we know Kitakubo like a close friend, a cherished friend, even though here, as with personal relationships, we really catch only a glimpse.
one’s life
can no more be entrusted
to another,
than can the timing
of a perfect soft-boiled egg
(pg. 64)
I haven’t wept
as most women would.
I’ve endured
in my house
by the roaring sea.
(pg. 30)
Kitakubo is not sanguine about her legacy:
washed up
there on the beach
only an oar—
my name will never
ever be remembered
(pg. 60)
Oh, I think that it will. I am sure that it will.
This is an outstandingly beautiful and engaging collection of tanka which every tanka lover will want to own so that they can read it over and again. Mariko Kitakubo’s Cicada Forestis a collection for the ages. We also must be grateful to Amelia Fielden for making this work available to us in English.
—Denis M. Garrison, editor
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Tanka Society of America, Ribbons Summer 2008
Cicada Forest by Mariko Kitakubo, trans.by Amelia Fielden, Kadokawa Gakugei Shuppan Ltd.,Tokyo,2008.ISBN978-4-04-652019-7C0092.51/4by8,paperback,perfect bound, 189pages.
Reviewed by Dave Bacharach
For some time now,I had been thinking that I would
like to put together a bi-lingual anthology of my work.
But I held back,feeling that it was not yet appropriate
for an immature poet like myself to do so.
With these words Mariko Kitakubo opens her preface to this recent anthology of her work, consisting of new tanka and selections from I Want to Tell You in the Words of Waves(1999),When the Music Stops(2002),and On This Same Star(2006). Neither of the first two books have been published in English, which means that besides the 24 tanka selected from On The Same Star, the other 312 poems are appearing in English for the first time here. Kitakubo’s modest description of herself is belied by the poetry found in her anthology. Her range of expression, varietyof subject matter, broad structural devices, and, as Michael McClintock phrases it in his introduction, her “transcendent, personal vision of human experience,” all indicate her mature mastery of the form, She tends to write about people close to her: her son, her mother, her father, her lover; but so keen is her self-understanding, and so effectively is she able to convey her thoughts and feeling through her poems, that the reader’s level of recognition passes beyond the particular subject of any one poem and enters areas universal to the human condition. In the generous opening section, consisting of 92 previously unpublished poems, she writes of death and illness, love and the loss of love, and her father. Rain and water imagery are always important to Kitakubo, and they appear in many of the poems, as well as symbols and descriptions of decay and dissolution; sometimes both water and decay occur in the same poems, often with added poignancy created by personification:
were they yearning
for some distant water,
the crystals
scattered
when my necklace broke
a single grape
with an innocent gaze
begs my help
before it is crushed
into chardonnay
It is instructive how, in the second poem, a sense of deep pathos is created around the fate of a mere grape. A thoughtful rereading of the poem reveals that it achives its affect by the use of language in lines two, three, and four that is associated in the reader’s mind with the violent death of a child.
Kitakubo’s father, who left her and her mother when the poet was very young, figures in some of tanka of the latter part of this section. The water theme continues, and she adroitly uses it as a defining simile in a poem about her father:
like clouds
vanishing from a puddle
that morning
my father
silently disappeared
In the selections from I Want to Tell You in the Words of Waves, the author’s son and father appear prominently, and though it is natural that the two should be linked in her imagination, the recognition of that link comes as a shock to the author. She uses a simple but highly effective metaphor to describe that shock:
when he bends down
I can see in the boy
my dead father ―
the pendulum of my chest
slowly comes to a stop
Themes of birth and renewal occur throughout the section. As the title suggests, water again appears often as a recurring symbol, especially in the latter part of the section, with several poems set at the beach and referencing the sea. In a series of compelling tanka, Kitakubo emphasizes the deep, almost mystical connection between water, the birth process, and the essence of being a female. It is suggested that, ultimately ,water is the last refuge for a woman:
mind and body
the sea accepts women
with hearts
which now
have nowhere to go
sick at heart
as I face the tide
I wonder
what do I hope for,
what is my future
Many of the poems in When the Music Stops, the next to last section, express the sadness and nostalgia brought about by meditation upon temporality and death. Kitakubo’s images are always clear, hard, and striking, leaving little ambiguity as to meaning:
at night
when I try to hear the wind,
the sound of nails
being hammered into my coffin
rings in my ears
Some of these poems contain surprising images of violence, as in one startling instance where, without warning, the author makes an observation one might expect to find in a tanka written by Dostoevsky:
such brightness
wraps my morning window ―
the secret desire
to murder, and love,
are extremely similar
The last section, selected from On This Same Star, focuses on the author’s mother, whose death was the dominant theme of the book. This section is relatively brief, consisting of 24 poems, but they provide some of the bittersweet flavor of On This Same Star, and will motivate many readers to seek it out.
The above examples give some indication of Kitakubo’s variety of theme, image, and structure. A unifying element, however, runs through it ― an overrinding sense of the human condition, its joys, sadness, anger, bitterness, fear, and hope. Much of the book’s effects can be credited to Amelia Fielden’s thoughtful and knowing translation, in which the author gave her a than usual insight into the meaning and style of the poetry in its original language. This is all to the reader’s benefit: we can be grateful to the poet/translator team that has produced this volume. Perhaps in the future, if we are luchky, the same team will consider making the rest of Kitakubo’s work available to the English reading world.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Information on my reading event on Sept. 20th together with my latest bilingual anthology “Cicada Forest” was introduced in Pacific Asia Museum Newsletter.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
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