Without Lifting A Finger

Challenging myself with some "Modernist" Japanese poetry in translation. Not easy to find (I wanted Kindle not paper), not easy to decide (I wanted a woman poet). Anyway, I hit on Chika Sagawa (translated, somewhat resurrected, by Sawako Nakayasu), and, in reading the intro, I've also learned a bit about the poet and translator Keith Waldrop. From the intro: To this day, I have only taken one formal workshop in literary translation, taught by the great poet and translator Keith Waldrop in the spring of 2002. Beginning to translate can be a fraught endeavor—there is a seeming abundance of potential errors, pitfalls, and failures. There is an assumption that one should be translating “the very best” texts in the most accurate, “faithful” rendering. Waldrop, brilliant iconoclast that he is, eschewed most conventional wisdom and encouraged us to translate what we most wanted to translate, and to “make it better in the translation”—he refused the conventional thinking that a t...

Missed a little Gray Flycatcher by me not long ago, so I had to go after this one at Riverdale Park along the Santa Ana River. I was afraid I'd chosen the wrong day to go because of the wind, but the faithful little bird kept to its favorite "leafless tree by the back gate" and all I had to do was wait for the wind and sun to cooperate. Happy Friday!!!🎈 #rlswihart #anaheim #santaanariver #newyearsstillyoung #gobirding #goforawalk #writeapoem #grayflycatcher #flycatchersofinstagram  #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2025🎈

Allecto ignited in rage. The challenge still on his lips, a sudden shuddering seized him, eyes fixed in terror, the Fury was looming up with so many serpents hissing, so monstrous her features now revealed. Rolling her eyes, fiery as he faltered, struggling to say more, she hurled the man back and reared twin snakes from her coiling hair and cracked her whips and raved in her rabid words: 530 “So, I’m in my dotage, am I? A doddering wreck too spent to see the truth? I and my warring kings— a mockery of a prophet, am I? False alarms? Well, look at these alarms! I come to you from the nightmare Furies’ den, I brandish war and death in my right hand!” With that she flung a torch at the prince and drove it home in his chest to smoke with a hellish black glare. A nightmare broke his sleep and the sweat poured from all over his body, drenched him to the bone.

Let me clasp your hand, my father, let me— I beg you, don’t withdraw from my embrace!” So Aeneas pleaded, his face streaming tears. Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck, three times he embraced—nothing…the phantom 810 sifting through his fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.

Here the enormous whirlpool gapes aswirl with filth, seethes and spews out all its silt in the Wailing River. 340 And here the dreaded ferryman guards the flood, grisly in his squalor—Charon… his scraggly beard a tangled mat of white, his eyes fixed in a fiery stare, and his grimy rags hang down from his shoulders by a knot. But all on his own he punts his craft with a pole and hoists sail as he ferries the dead souls in his rust-red skiff. He’s on in years, but a god’s old age is hale and green.

 

But first go down to the House of Death, the Underworld, go through Avernus’ depths, my son, to seek me, meet me there. I am not condemned to wicked Tartarus, those bleak shades, I live in Elysium, the luminous fields where the true and faithful gather. A chaste Sibyl will guide you there, once you have offered the blood of many pure black sheep. And then you will learn your entire race to come and the city walls that will be made your own. Now farewell. Dank Night wheels around 820 in mid-career, cruel Dawn breaks in the East, and I feel her panting stallions breathing near.” With that, he fled into thin air like a wisp of smoke.

Then Juno in all her power, filled with pity for Dido’s agonizing death, her labor long and hard, sped Iris down from Olympus to release her spirit wrestling now in a deathlock with her limbs. Since she was dying a death not fated or deserved, no, tormented, before her day, in a blaze of passion— Proserpina had yet to pluck a golden lock from her head and commit her life to the Styx and the dark world below. 870 So Iris, glistening dew, comes skimming down from the sky on gilded wings, trailing showers of iridescence shimmering into the sun, and hovering over Dido’s head, declares: “So commanded, I take this lock as a sacred gift to the God of Death, and I release you from your body.” With that, she cut the lock with her hand and all at once the warmth slipped away, the life dissolved in the winds.

Rereading Virgil's Aeneid (Fagle's translation). What I remembered is that many of the best parts were related to Dido.;) * Dido, her lips parted, pores over their entrails, throbbing still, for signs… But, oh, how little they know, the omniscient seers.  What good are prayers and shrines to a person mad with love?  The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour and deep in her heart the silent wound lives on. Dido burns with love—the tragic queen.