Vision and simplicity

2008-01-30

Vision and simplicity

Hey, Hirato-lovers! There's another poem up at Néojaponisme! This one's called "Vision" and is entirely unlike "Fish".

Sound that echoes without end!
Light in torrents without end!
Bound with knots that have no end
A moving, driving heart – the beauty!

Entirely unrelated, but here's another poem I've been pondering recently. It's by YAGI Jūkichi (八木重吉) and is only four lines long.

Soboku na koto (素朴な琴)

Kono akarusa no naka e
Hitotsu no soboku na koto o okeba
Aki no utsukushisa ni taekane
Koto wa shizuka ni nariidasu darou

A simple koto

If into this light
You were to place a single, simple koto,
Unable to endure the autumn's beauty,
That koto would, no doubt, quietly ring out

Popularity factor: 3

language hat:

I like the koto one a lot. As for futurism, it seems to me to have aged far less well than any of the competing movements of the day (imagism, acmeism, etc.). Ironic!

Matt:

Yes, the things they got all excited about and hailed as avatars of The Future, like trains and skyscrapers (or am I confusing them with Ayn Rand?) are ridiculously quaint and old-timey now. Not to mention that whole mid-20th-C. European history thing.

language hat:

Yeah, that's them. Except for the Russian ones, who despised the Italians and mocked Marinetti when he came to visit what he thought were his faithful acolytes; they apparently thought the future was going to be like the distant past, and they hated skyscrapers and all that. Russians are weird, I love 'em.

2008-01-30