For whom is (the evening glow) “red”?To human eyes, the red wavelength shimmering in the air is reflected,but to the eyes of birdswhich recognize even ultraviolet rays,the evening glow looks much paler.And when all the lives on Earth are finally snuffed out,and the human solstice has passed,every color will cease to “exist.”As clouds pile up densely above the sea,kids get restlessfeeling some sort of invitation.On such occasions, when you’re unable to read a “book”while splashing around in the sea or riveras though dancing with water gods,you’ll notice beads of water on your skinreflecting the world.In such an optical play, the summer vanishes;some people have gone offwith the water godsand have never come back.Textbooks, left on a desk unopened,hold on to their tiny equations.When each and every living thing has lost its lifeand there remains not a single being,for whom is (the evening glow) “red”? 小さな数式（夕焼け）は、 誰にとって“赤い”のか？人間の目には 大気に散乱する 赤の波長が届くが紫外線まで視える鳥たちにとっては夕焼けとは、もっと蒼ざめたもの。そして、地上に生命という生命が絶えたときあらゆる色彩は 「存在」しなくなる夏至を過ぎると。海には稠密な雲が積み上がり何かに誘われているような気がして子供たちは落ち着かなくなるそんなときには「本」なんか読めない海や川で水神と戯れるようにしぶきを上げてはなめらかな肌にまとわりつく（水滴）に世界を映し取るその光学的遊戯のうちに 夏は過ぎ気がつくと、何人かは水神とともにどこかへ行ってしまって二度と帰ってこない残された教科書は開かれることなく小さな数式などを隠しつづけるのだろうタ焼け）は、 誰にとって ‘‘赤い” のか？たとえ生命という生命が絶え、見る人がひとりもいなかったとLても。
A Tiny Little Equation
Feature Date
- May 3, 2023
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- Translation
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“A Tiny Little Equation” from NAMES AND RIVERS: by Shuri Kido.
Published by Copper Canyon Press on September 20, 2022.
English Copyright © 2022 by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Shuri Kido, known as the “far north poet,” has published a lot of poetry books and essays and is one of the most important contemporary poets 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 poets of so-called “Pound Tradition,” and modern and contemporary Japanese poets such as Junzaburo Nishiwaki, Katsue Kitasono and Kazuko Shiraishi and others along with pop artists Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and others. He is a co-translator of Shiraishi’s three long poems with Forrest Gander in My Floating Mother, City. He contributed an essay in English on the relationship between Pound / Kitasono / Shuri Kido to Ezra Pound Review for the 2022 issue.
In addition to Names & Rivers by Shuri Kido, Forrest Gander’s recent translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Mexican poet Coral Bracho. His own most recent book is KNOT, a collaboration with photographer Jack Shear.
“Shuri Kido is well-known in his native Japan, and his work at last comes to the United States in this lovely bilingual selection, translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander. Kido’s poems are frequently spiritual dramas set in a dreamlike landscape of symbols, in which a central, isolated figure encounters mysterious phenomena while making ambiguous progress toward an inscrutable goal. ‘Elusive water,’ he writes in ‘Some Thoughts on Kozukata.’ ‘You draw it up, / pour it over yourself. / Today courses by like yesterday, / today floats like a cork on tomorrow. / And that’s why you draw water.’”
—Washington Post, “The Five Best Poetry Collections of 2022”
“The expansive, philosophical poems in Names and Rivers: Selected Poems by Shuri Kido consider themes of solitude, time, and ‘naming’ through close attention—fueled by both scientific knowledge and awe—to geological forms and rivers. . . . Kido, an eminent writer known as Japan’s ‘far north poet,’ draws on his ‘geographical imagination’ to engage with ‘time as an encompassing palimpsest’ . . . . Co-translator Forrest Gander, in his preface, notes that he and Endo agreed to ‘avoid the kind of translation that tries to stuff the glorious difference of another language’s features into the polished shoe of conventional English,’ and the effect is a slightly unconventional use of syntax and sentence, which, as evidenced in the selection above, adds a dynamic dissonance without compromising the poem’s communicative clarity.”
—Poetry Foundation
“Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander dizzyingly transpose Shuri Kido’s exploration of synchronous time and realization through an array of carefully selected and presented poems. Beginning with a delightful essay on Kido’s conception of time as ‘an encompassing palimpsest’ by Tomoyuki Endo, Names and Rivers urges the reader to detach from a linear view of time and to open their eyes to the smudged writing in the margins. . . . Names and Rivers is an intense, looming permutation of Shuri Kido’s poetry. It is a hand drawn halfway from the river as two currents crash back into one. It is a call to see everything as everything, to ‘take to our feet, to get going,’ and to continue crossing the river.”
—Action Books
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