Takashi Hiraide, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, Trans. by Sawako Nakayasu. New Directions, 2008.
Read it at GoogleBooks
Excerpt
A walnut is a train is a poem is a heart is a shadow. Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut is
avant-garde poetry that nevertheless relies on the most ageless of
poetic devices: metonymy. But rather than create sets of parallel
relations, his use of metonymy propels a seemingly endless string of
shape-shifting objects and experiences. The book is divided into 111
short poetic prose sections whose splintering effect is enacted via a
unique combination of speed and minutiae.
Hiraide wrote most of the work while commuting, and, like train cars, its sections can be shuffled around and read in almost any order. This adds further to the associational feel, as objects, images, ideas, and memories flash in and out of view. Here’s the whole of section 91: “The young rustling breeze blowing through the trees of a borrowed landscape, beside the glass window, insists it is a migratory anticyclone. The cheerful hustler. In this spring of brute strength, you’ve tired yourself out confirming the balance between the fading halo and the boiling light. I, too, am to quickly understand, from that hoarse voice of yours, that something boiling over inside me has expended the balance of noon.” What initially reads like free association turns out to be a near-microscopic record of emotion and phenomena.
To crack open a walnut is ultimately to destroy it; to unlock a poem’s secrets partially steals its life. Hiraide’s writing obstructs this intrusion, or at least seeks to defer it for as long as possible. There’s no narrative arc to the work, no resolution, no closure—to the contrary, eraser is a favorite word: “Entering the room, a pulse is taken right when the heart is crushed upon a color-printed newspaper. And so it is today, too, a line of poetry goes without shooting you, and is nothing more than a soundless watery segment floating up for the first time, finally, enfolded in the gathering dusk of a long detour.” Sawako Nakayasu’s deft translation appears in a striking bilingual version: the English starts from the front and works its way forward, while the original Japanese starts from the back. The languages meet on either side of inverted images of a lightning strike. The mirrored texts thus mimic a walnut’s fleshy swirl, as well as productively frustrate attempts to impose a definitive order on Hiraide’s unruly poetry.
Hiraide wrote most of the work while commuting, and, like train cars, its sections can be shuffled around and read in almost any order. This adds further to the associational feel, as objects, images, ideas, and memories flash in and out of view. Here’s the whole of section 91: “The young rustling breeze blowing through the trees of a borrowed landscape, beside the glass window, insists it is a migratory anticyclone. The cheerful hustler. In this spring of brute strength, you’ve tired yourself out confirming the balance between the fading halo and the boiling light. I, too, am to quickly understand, from that hoarse voice of yours, that something boiling over inside me has expended the balance of noon.” What initially reads like free association turns out to be a near-microscopic record of emotion and phenomena.
To crack open a walnut is ultimately to destroy it; to unlock a poem’s secrets partially steals its life. Hiraide’s writing obstructs this intrusion, or at least seeks to defer it for as long as possible. There’s no narrative arc to the work, no resolution, no closure—to the contrary, eraser is a favorite word: “Entering the room, a pulse is taken right when the heart is crushed upon a color-printed newspaper. And so it is today, too, a line of poetry goes without shooting you, and is nothing more than a soundless watery segment floating up for the first time, finally, enfolded in the gathering dusk of a long detour.” Sawako Nakayasu’s deft translation appears in a striking bilingual version: the English starts from the front and works its way forward, while the original Japanese starts from the back. The languages meet on either side of inverted images of a lightning strike. The mirrored texts thus mimic a walnut’s fleshy swirl, as well as productively frustrate attempts to impose a definitive order on Hiraide’s unruly poetry.
I don’t particularly like walnuts—they taste woody; their texture is
borderline mealy; and they ruin anything they’re added to, especially
ice cream. I’m not sure how much Hiraide enjoys them either, but I bet
he admires their Deleuzian folds and resemblance to a cerebral cortex.
On a related note, although I like the idea of poetry, I don’t always
like poetry itself. Hiraide also seems ambivalent, given the book’s
assault on various conventional poetic structures. In Nakayasu’s
introduction, she quotes Hiraide as saying: “There came a point when I
could no longer stand to speak about poetics with those who were
unwilling to consider poetry from an external distance.” A sense of
resistance as a resistance to sense is fundamental to Hiraide’s
approach, and is part of the walnut’s “fighting spirit.” In another
book, Hiraide compares poetry to baseball. For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut
similarly doubles as a book on poetics, and specifically of the
fragment borne by a poetic line where the literal lives in pieces. —Alan Gilbert
When a fan of the neglected American genius Guy
Davenport wrote to tell him that she admired his ability to express
himself, his response was: "Yick!" Davenport's reaction — somewhere
between bemusement and horror — upon learning that anyone could so
misunderstand his art, and, indeed, art in general, seems apposite in
considering the work of Takashi Hiraide whose "For the Fighting Spirit
of the Walnut" has more in common with the cool integrity of the best
work of poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Guillaume Apollinaire —
modernists, one and all — than it does with versifiers who appear to
believe that writing is a way for them to work through the emotions that
wash over them when, say, the sun sets behind bare trees, the seasons
change, or a dog dies. Readers willing to leave all that warm fuzziness
behind will enjoy the linguistic and conceptual fireworks, the wit, and
the mystery that make Hiraide's Walnut a poetic page-turner.
Like much of the best work done in this poetic
tradition, "Walnut" is a collection of fragments. The shortest of the
111 numbered sections is three words; all but one of the poems are
compact enough that they can fit two to a page. Some surrender their
meaning without much of a struggle; none are blunt enough to be boring.
There are bits, for example, that seem to come
from the poet's life, such as No. 14: "Today, with a triple hangover, I
slowly pedaled and pedaled my wobbly bicycle, like / a mist, past a back
alley that murmurs condolences." The play on the Japanese word for
hangover, "futsukayoi" — literally: "second day drunk" — is obscured in
English, but even those with only barroom Japanese will suspect that
it's lurking there in "triple."
Other pieces of "Walnut" reflect on writing and
its inadequacies: "Continuous thoughts of packaging ice. No matter what I
write it melts, even the / address. If and when it arrives, that person
will be gone." This is chilling enough that we can't quite share the
author's despair over his art, but as satisfying as this bit and the
others that constitute Hiraide's "Walnut" are, as is usually the case
with modernist works, the real fun begins when the reader starts to
think about how best to mentally slide the fragments around to make them
form a coherent whole.
A book-length poem cannot be taken in all at
once, but rather must be explored in the same way one comes to terms
with a piece of music: over time. Just as one won't grasp a challenging
piece of music on first hearing or from its first few notes, neither
will one extract the full riches from "Walnut" on one's initial pass
through it or from its first few parts.
As with all poetry worth reading once, "Walnut"
must be read more than once. Even on that first pass through, though, it
will be apparent that the fragments are not random, that they are
linked. Images recur ("the radiant subway"), as do notions (the inner,
the outer, protective shells, tunneling). Several pieces refer back,
like a mirror, to the work in which they occur ("A train whose one
hundred and eleven cars each simultaneously break into the lead / past
the thin hazy air of the midnight sun").
There is, one comes to see, coherence lurking
under the surface incoherence — not concealed, but rather defined by the
juxtapositions Hiraide has created. We close the book after our first
reading, our second, and look forward to the pleasure we know awaits us
when, once again, we crack Hiraide's "Walnut." - David Cozy
"Spirits wrapped in a skin of green. Each one lushly growing, a hanging drop of a thunderstorm!" Takashi Hiraide's collection of prose poetry For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut
is a multileveled and labyrinthine exploration of how things small in
scale have the potential to transcend their physical, temporal and
existential boundaries. Expressing encouragement for this motion,
Hiraide inspires confidence in the subjects of his work by illustrating
ways that great accomplishments can be achieved through seemingly
inconsequential actions: "Come see how the dust rises when you say it
again, right here, hey you, say it again." In its directness and
frankness with its audience, his work functions with an understanding of
how the individual pieces making up its existence form a whole.For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, originally published in 1982 to critical acclaim, is only the second of Hiraide's works to be translated into English—following Postcards for Donald Evans (Tibor De Nagy, 2003). Selections of the poet's work have also been published in such publications as the translation journal Factorial as well as in the long-out-of-print Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry (Norton, 1993). Although still largely unknown in English-speaking countries, Hiraide is a prolific writer and the recipient of many literary prizes, with over a dozen works of genre-defying poetry and nonfiction in print in Japan. Hiraide's translator Sawako Nakayasu calls his work "ineluctably contemporary," iterating his position as one of a group of poets born afer the war who do not reflect on late imperial Japan, and writes that in For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, "lyric, phenomenological, faux-scientific, rhetorical, abstract, descriptive and observation writing are blended with a subtle humor." Indeed, this is a work in which many types of writing coexist; as one poem reads, "tied together, the bells which report their whereabouts dance, and between these dancing bells, look, the swirling has started after all."
Hiraide thematically introduces several points of departure throughout the collection, points which later reappear in tandem, intersecting or diverging. There is the city poet's narrative—an amphibious Paris Spleen in which the flaneur traverses Hiraide's "radiant subway" where "small white explosions occur here and there." These "small white explosions" are "the sounds of our joints popping, the sound of an all-too-convenient despair fading away." The poet writes at another moment that, "verse finds strength in being segmented." Just as our own joints enable us to move freely, it is through the interconnectedness of the individual prose poems that the work as a whole finds its strength and flexibility. Another theme examines the lives of things such as walnuts, plums and small animals from the moment of their conception till death, or rebirth by means of "a courage that exceeds the imagination, a despair that compels the imagination."
This edition is presented bilingually, and has been beautifully translated into English by Nakayasu, the esteemed poet and the editor of Factorial. A further connection is added, then, in English translation, as Nakayasu not only separates and ties the individual threads of Hiraide's work back together, but it is also through the process of translation that the two poetic strands—the text written by Nakayasu and Hiraide—are intertwined. Thus the original work is further strengthened through the process of translation.
To illustrate this connection, the Japanese text, rather provocatively, begins on the opposite side of the binding from its English translation, and the translation mirrors the original work until the two texts meet in the center. As a result, Nakayasu's translation does not stand beside the original as though anticipating or even inviting scrutiny. Instead, like a walnut, the original work and the translation form two halves: Hiraide and Nakayasu's texts have come together in this edition to form one transcendent new work.
In explaining the layers of meaning in the book's title, Nakayasu writes that the walnut suffers, "not only in poetry, but also in translation." The word walnut in Japanese is kurumi, and shi, which could alternately mean either "poetry" or "death," is inserted into the walnut, making the word kurushimi—or "suffering": the walnut suffers in poetry. It is sometimes thought that poetry suffers as a result of translation, but here the translation can be understood as an act of compassion. And even this compassion is neither an invention of Nakayasu's, nor a by-product of translation, but simply an accurate translation of a work she calls an "utterly compassionate book." This compassion is an essential component to all successful translations, and through Nakayasu's translation of Hiraide's work, the role of the translator is renegotiated and redefined.
In her translator's note Nakayasu writes that For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut represents a turning point in Hiraide's writing "…in which he begins his lifelong explorations of prose as the Idea of poetry, extended syntax and a poetics of the grammatical line." A variation of these same explorations are most apparent in Nakayasu's own 2004 poetry collection, Nothing Fictional but the Accuracy or Arrangement (She), in which Nakayasu uses the personal pronoun "she" to connect individual prose pieces into one narrative structured around an extended exploration of poetics.
In For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, the extended syntax is represented visually as the meat inside a walnut, a system of subway tunnels, or arms outstretched; this extension is compassionate, as one poem reads, "admitting to a beautiful shadow outside itself…," the metaphor of the reach is the guiding impulse behind the text. Furthermore, in the context of Hiraide's prose, this shadow is proof of the work's existence. This shadow can be understood as translator or the translation itself. This shadow, a sort of inverted reflection, is often referred to with the feminine pronoun "she." The lines "she who will one day be forced to approve of my existence" thus strike a resonant chord with Nakayasu's own poetic project. With the publication of For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, the explorations of two highly experimental poets have met and the result is an act of compassion and an extension of the Japanese text to an English-speaking readership. - Alecs Mickunas
An Open Letter to Takashi Hiraide Inspired after Reading the Poet’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut
Dear Takashi Hiraide,(First: please forgive all the numerous asides. I seem to want to address you directly— or as you would have it, “Hey, say it again, one more time. Come see how the dust rises when you say it again, right here, hey you, say it again”—while avoiding any real confrontation at the same time. Second: I should provide you, Hiraide, with some justification of what I am doing here, as this piece rests somewhere between critical review and epistolary essay. I refuse the conventional form in order to better understand your work. And if you can write and address an entire book of “postcards” to an artist—Donald Evans—whom you never met, surely I can write a letter of appreciation to a poet who will only respond with immaculate silence?)
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| Topiary 1, Day. Image courtesy Ross Martens. |
Consider the strangeness of the following fragment from your most recent work to be translated (masterfully, I might add, by Sawako Nakayasu) into English, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut. What I find revelatory is your violent yoking of the everyday with the impossible to define.
Just then, I noticed a single rusty rail bursting out of my chest, falling to the asphalt in front of me. I dropped to my knees in time with the landing, and it sped up, stretched even further, and was pulled into the underground stairs before me, which seemed to be cradled quietly in the belly of a lonely, faint black stone architecture. I crawled forward while drawing the track back into my chest, until I finally arrived at the entrance, and peeked in. Far beyond the cavity made of bones, near two intersecting beams of light, something with a dim shadow. And then, something surging forth from who knows when.The question asked here is a simple one—steeped in phenomenological tenets—but it can never be answered: Where does the self begin and the world end? You, of course, know well enough to not posit an answer, but simply to reveal the importance of asking the right questions.
Like Dante, a poet equally confident in language’s revelatory powers, you have your own Inferno: the Japanese subway system. (And have you read Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette? It also transforms a subway system, this time New York’s, into a hellish selva oscura.) Apparently it was during your daily commute to work on the train that you found time to write the prose fragments that became For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut—that’s not quite an example of Michel de Certeau’s notion of la perruque, but it’s almost there (the idea of stealing/diverting time/energy from work in order to construct the wonderfully subversive, the intensely personal, all under the watchful eye of the boss). But what the fragment above—number 59 out of 111, a number to which you would return to when writing your elegiac One Hundred and Eleven Tankas to Mourn My Father—illustrates is the capacity for the common to transform into the sublime. As you yourself have said, there is nothing truly surreal in For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut. According to Eric Selland, another of your translators into English, “these images [are] not surrealistic at all—they [are] extremely minute, almost scientific observations of [Hiraide's] daily commute on the train between Shinjuku and Iidabashi where at the time he was working in book design for Kawade Shobo Publishing.” All the observations in it are actually acute, almost clinical representations of objects on an incredibly small scale, or seen at breakneck speeds. I often remember, as a child, gazing at underground tunnel lights in the subway as the train rushed in/out of Manhattan, and find that you experienced something similar:
The Radiant subway again. Today, too, in this still-radiant subway, small white explosions occur here and there. They are the sounds of joints popping, the sound of an all-too-convenient despair fading away.Such clinical and exact representations of objects brings to mind another collection of yours, Portrait of a Young Osteopath, a text that has yet to be fully translated into English, and of which I only know through the few translations provided by Selland. But let me illustrate what I mean about your sharp and insightful gaze by quoting this section from Osteopath:
Between the huge rocks where the water’s foam frothed upward to become irregular granules of fire and then fall, possessed by the shadow of a jelly fish just dead, one pair of gloves whirled round and round. The ten fingers, some broken off and others twisted, strained to reach out in every direction. But according to observation, only the stars of partial destruction existed on the tips of the various fingers. There I fixed my gaze still harder.What that scene enacts is a pseudo-scientific inquiry into objects seen and observed; there is almost too much going on here to ingest on the first go. First, consider the radical shifts in scale and detail: the huge rocks give way to the foam’s froth, which give way to the incorporeal existence of the dead jelly-fish’s shadow—the shadow being a central image in For the Fighting Spirit. Even a hint of the cosmic, “the stars of partial destruction,” haunts this scene. Your poems, Hiraide, traverse spaces big and small to find the most compelling of details; and we haven’t even arrived yet at the surreal appearance of the gloves, possibly representing the fragmented identity of the narrator (the person who speaks the words, “I fixed my gaze still harder”).
This procedure of pseudo-scientific inquiry does two things: first, it allows poetry and the imagination to make “objective” claims that would otherwise only be made by science, and, second, it undermines science’s grip on the empirical and the rational. The melding of these seemingly incompatible disciplines continues in For the Fighting Spirit:
The strange insect called scarabaeus skillfully constructs round pellets from the dung of hoofed animals such as sheep, cows, and horses, and takes them to an appropriate place to be slowly consumed. For its larvae, special pellets are made by selecting only the dung of sheep, which has the most nutritional value and is easiest to digest. First the mother carefully selects the ingredients, then crushes them finely, carrying it to an underground nest. There, beginning here operation in earnest, she creates a beautiful pear-shaped pellet, and through the small hole she has left open until the very end, pushes an egg into the center. When the larva is finally hatched from the egg, it finds itself in the middle of this enormous lump of dung, and peacefully eating its surroundings, little by little grows larger.An enclosure, the dung heap, gives rise to life, one of nature’s unlikely miracles; and out of the non-poetic—the language of science—comes poetry. Here, the actions of the poet mirror the actions of the beetle.
Why the Walnut?
We’re still left with the unavoidable question: why the walnut? As Alan Gilbert wrote in a review of this collection in The Believer, “A walnut is a train is a poem is a heart is a shadow.” As Sawako Nakayasu explains in her introduction to your collection: “Kurumi, the Japanese word for walnut, is homophonous with kurumi, meaning ‘wrapping’ or ‘enclosure.’” Different kinds of enclosures proliferate in this book, a radically diverse listing of wrappings and shelters. Consider Apollinaire’s head, a humble reminder that the body itself can be the most fragile of enclosures:(Even as I roll about here, I have never for a moment forgotten about the loving, large head of Guillaume Albert Vladimir Alexandre Apollinairis de Kostrowitzky, injured by a shell and wrapped up in bandages.)I can’t help but think of Hamlet’s words, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Your work is intensely interested in different spaces, both real and fictitious. (Consider your collection Postcards to Donald Evans. As with Evans, the artist who devoted himself to painting stamps for imaginary countries, so too do you seek to explore what can only be called an imaginary psychogeography. The subway becomes one such place, a real topos but one imbued with the vitality of the imaginative.) This also applies to how you approach genre. Your work is often categorized as being hostile to certain genre conventions, and rightfully so. Again, from the introduction by Nakayasu: “Hiraide himself jokingly refers to it all as sabotage: reflecting upon several decades of intense literary production, he notes that it has been twenty-some years since this ‘poet’ has published a book of poetry.”
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| Topiary 1, Night. Image courtesy Ross Martens. |
And what is the walnut if not another enclosure, a metonymic marker for all other shelters of some kind (whether they be subway car, shadow, Apollinaire’s head, genre, language, or other?). Hamlet, in his nutshell, had only the imaginative capacity for bad dreams (one can’t blame the guy). You, on the other hand, have much brighter and lighter images to convey; this does not make them any less serious since they illustrate the severity of everyday living—the idea, for instance, that even the most prosaic of everyday activities, a subway ride, can be the staging ground for a radical poetics.
Despite the compassion and empathy that one finds in For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, there is also an extreme amount of both despair and pragmatic realism. The shadow that you return to over and over again brings this to mind. The world, despite its fighting spirits, can still be a dark place. For the walnut is not simply that which is present and real, but it can also be the absence of reality itself. Your texts, Hiraide, often bring to mind a feeling of mono no aware, that traditional aesthetic motif found in many Japanese works of art regarding the ephemeral nature of things (at least that is how this Westerner describes such a concept; but I also wonder if this at all resonates with Eliot’s shanti shanti shanty, “the peace which passeth all understanding”? Though to be honest, I have never been able to fully accept Eliot’s Christianized interpretation of this Eastern notion).
I first encountered the notion of mono no aware while reading The Tale of Genji, a text filled, much like The Fighting Spirit, with many moments of staggering poetic beauty. And that, to me, is what your always-shifting walnut represents: the transient way of things. Much like Lacan’s petit objet, it is the inexpressible object of desire; a hole at the center of subjectivity (and whether that subjectivity arises from person, thing or genre remains to be seen; but we rarely ask, what of the life of objects?). The walnut is an empty signifier just waiting to be filled, and once it is, it just as quickly vanishes, turning into something else. This brings to mind Žižek’s reading of the Kinder Egg (which I’ll paraphrase as: I love you, but I love even more that which is inside you, and therefore I must destroy you. Every Kinder Egg, like every walnut, exists to be smashed and destroyed). To name the walnut, in other words, would be to destroy it and its contents. Again we return to the presence of shadows in your texts; Emily Dickinson had her blank(s) and you have your shadow(s). It is probably for the best that you leave us there, in the luminous shadows, waiting for what comes next. (I’ve always had a difficult time saying good-bye.)
Sincerely Yours,
George Fragopoulos
108
In a decidedly vacant stone plaza, you are tapped on the shoulder by the convulsions of a section of light, and turn back, to your delight. However, to think that the countless hidden fibers of the atmosphere were already attacking you at once and tying you up, shadow and all. Inside the convulsive laughter, fight. Because the fighting spirit is that of the enemy, flooding over the plaza.
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