For the last week’s assignment in poetry class, we had to select ten poems and write what we could learn from them and how we can apply them in our own poetry writing. Poems I chose were written by well-known poets such as Shuntaro Tanikawa, Misuzu Kaneko, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickenson, and also by other poets I became acquainted with more recently. They all taught me of limitations of words – the indescribable. In order to show what-are-not-words by the use of words, true poets must know the fine line between what words can do and cannot do.
I am a great fan of Tanikawa Shuntaro’s poems, so I searched on internet for his poems in English and luckily stumbled across a website with a set of six poems written about books in both Japanese and English. I chose a poem titled “A Man in Love” but unfortunately the site is already closed. Too bad! (This poem is collected in “Asa.”)
A Man in Love
by Shuntaro Tanikawa
Trans. by William I. Elliot & Kazuo Kawamura
Unable to read his love's ironic smile,
he reads a book about love.
Love on the open page
has neither scent nor texture
but is bursting with meaning.
He closes the book and sighs,
then goes out to his judo lesson.
The teacher rebukes him, shouting,
"Read your partner's moves!"
That night, refused a kiss by his sweetheart, he thinks,
"This world is full of things we have to read.
Compared to reading a person's heart,
reading books is a snap."
But shouldn't we remind ourselves
that we read words
in order to read what are not words?
He goes back to reading about love, sighing,
and using a condom for a bookmark.
It compares words and the wordless, and the acts of reading them. The first and last stanza shows the example of reading a book, a sheer volume of abstract concept. Between those two stanzas lie two contrastive, concrete everyday examples - a delicate act of reading facial expressions in romance and an aggressive act of reading moves in martial art – inserted like a bookmark. And what shall I say about the last line....? Well, I actually see two unlike-yet-alike icons of love, the abstract and the concrete, coexisting after all, but temporally. The role of a bookmark suggests the mobility of such a contact point. And the organization of stanzas affirms the metaphor of a bookmark. How cleverly written!
The punch line of this poem is,
“We read words in order to read what are not words,”
but it can also be said that,
“we produce words in order to express what are not words.”
Since then, my mind had been hovering on the concept of words and what-are-not-words, and then I bumped into few blogs on the similar concept, a sort of synchronicity? First of all, the popular “Kikko’s Blog” introduced me to an expression, “Forget the net, forget the trap.” A great Chinese philosopher of Taoism, Chuang Tzu, once spoke of words, “A net is necessary for fishing; however, once fish is caught, the net is forgotten. A trap is necessary for catching rabbits; however, once a rabbit is caught, the trap is forgotten. Words are merely device to catch meaning, therefore once the meaning is caught, the words are to be forgotten. I wish to find someone to talk to, someone with whom I can forget about words in such a way.” Make sense. But I think to “forget the net” altogether is quite a clear-cut deed. I’m kinda word-addict so whenever I encounter words representing the wordless image exquisitely, I so want to congratulate the words with “Good job!” Yet, to come to that point, I must first grasp and associate with the wordless....
