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Konoshima’s American Diary: A Present to Kindred and Friends
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Hudson was written
in the United States by Kisaburo Konoshima (1893-1984) and published
in Japan by Hakuyo Shoin
under the same title in 1970. This English-language edition, translated
by Konoshima’s grandson, David Kei Callner [Carolyn Callner, Konoshima's
youngest daughter, is the translator’s mother] contains the entire
contents of the original book, about seven hundred tanka.
Reading Konoshima’s
Hudson was, for me, like being left alone in a room with a very large
bowl of mixed nuts. I was hooked in the first two
pages, where I found these three tanka under the heading “New
York Sunrise, 1951”:
When I fling a snowball
and it bursts against a tree trunk
scattering with a whack my spirits brighten
There is a little
monkey earnestly polishing an empty can
as I stand pondering verse
I sadly scorn myself
for being a good-natured fool
then accept what I am and feed the pigs Without restraint
or any sense of passing time, I dived into this book with both hands
and an empty stomach. I craved what
this book seemed
to be offering me. The more I read, the more I wanted to read.
Clearly,
the poet Kisaburo Konoshima in his later years found retreat
and refuge in his practice of tanka. His poetry became
a means
of exploring and observing his life in the United States—probing
it for its textures, values, and rhythms—while maintaining
that connection to Japan, the land of his birth and early life,
which appears to have been essential to
Konoshima’s sense of self and spiritual integrity. These
poems reveal a person of great modesty and dignity, a soul simultaneously
serene and
ill-at-ease. As Konoshima, his wife Yoshi, and their children
were absorbed into American life, things Japanese and the old
sights, sounds, and ways
of home appear to have been dearer to him the farther away
they became in both time and geographic distance. While becoming
American, he remained
Japanese; his birth-home never faded from his consciousness,
and appears to have been a constant presence in his thoughts and
private moments: Young people stay
one or two years and practically become New Yorkers
I have lived here twenty years and am still Japanese
There are many tanka
that return to the tone and mood found in this portrait of Konoshima
and his wife:
Speaking with my
aged wife whether we should visit Japan once again
I squish my evening sake’s sea-bass roe on my tongue
In fact, Konoshima
was able to return to Japan several times during his lifetime; there
are many tanka expressing
his
joy and pleasure
on these
occasions. Here are two of my favorites:
Even the sparrows
twittering chi chi at daybreak
I listen to them wistfully from my hard futon
Gurgle gurgle – day and night go the sound of the rapids
How many lamented friends rest in this town?
Konoshima
also collected Japanese swords and studied the lore
of their history and manufacture;
to him, they appear to have been concrete representations
of the land and culture
he loved: Thoughts will not
come together this icy evening
I unsheathe an antique sword and stare at it
Similarly,
this poem about a Japanese fan:
More
than a cooler – more than an electric fan
it is a tattered Japanese fan that quiets my heart The seven
hundred tanka in this book show a wide range of style and
subject matter.
About one out
of five tanka are poetical, lyric reflections like these:
Having
left without informing even my aged wife of my whereabouts
I take the little path to the end and stand alone
With
an urge inside to shout something out
difficult to grasp – I stand at the river bank
Washed
by showers how many times each day
moist coco leaves shine glossily in the trade wind More
than half the tanka appear to be a kind of simple but
disciplined note-taking, or
form of diary entry, the tanka structure becoming for
Konoshima a consistent and comfortable vehicle for recording his
thoughts
about those things
that
caught his eye, focused or gained his attention, or passed
through
his life: people, events, incidents, moments of happiness,
sadness, and longing.
Teenage
crimes of butchery increase
even the governor and mayor take alarm
While
thinking of a quondam samurai cut off from his stipend
I mend a fan in tedium An
important thread throughout the book are poems that
reflect Konoshima’s
abiding sense of being an outsider, of being forever
Japanese. He and his wife were not officially naturalized
as citizens until 1955. We frequently
find ourselves looking over Konoshima’s shoulder
at the mysteries and peculiarities of American life,
or sitting beside him in his apartment’s
living room as he ponders his ancient roots and his
present life:
In
a time when the art of advertising can become a science
I who am Meiji born stand perplexed
While
gazing at the figure of a Hokusai courtesan
I am drinking alone – the atomic age’s dead of night
Related
to these poems are those on themes of alienation,
isolation, and the impersonality of life in New York
City:
Without
a single neighbor to say good-bye
I leave the apartment where I’ve lived twenty years
Japanese
magazines know more of the American language
than I who have lived in America forty
years
A
mass of people without affection or charm
great New York is a human desert
Lost
in a subway station – when I inquire the way
that person too is a stranger
In contrast, other tanka containing self-portraiture
are more at peace; despite a hard life,
Konoshima appears to
have few
regrets
and a stoic’s
sense of endurance and satisfaction:
Neither
a wicked man nor conscious of being a virtuous man
the expression “ordinary person” redeems me
Desiring
to make a life of the soil and sweat I left for America
but with no ties to the soil I
grow old in New York
Simple
homilies like the two above are a favorite mode or “voice” for
Konoshima, as are tanka containing
a dignified, quiet self-mockery, or poems that express
a modest man’s simple wishes or desires:
Donning
new coat over new suit
I go out to the street as though
wealthy
On
what business was it I came to the kitchen?
still unable to remember
I pick at some food
While
feigning indifference it appears that upon occasion
my aged wife reads the
poems I write
Without
troubling people or the world
O to quietly live my
old age and die is what
I desire
The
tanka are arranged in over 60 groupings
that carry
such
titles as “Autumn
at Fifty-five Years
Old”, “A
Human Desert”, “Fifth
Avenue 1959”, “An
Old Friend”,
and “The Summer
Hudson”. Within
these groups, the tanka
provide variations
on a theme, or a kind
of synoptic view of
a particular event,
incident, or
personal experience.
Many
of Konoshima’s tanka have to do with prominent,
headline events in the nation’s life:
With
guards on rooftops more than twenty
stories up
New York City welcomes
the Soviet premier
I
detest the photograph of Truman celebrating
his seventy-fifth
birthday
because of Hiroshima
Making
a day’s round trip of four thousand five hundred
miles
the sixty-eight-year-old
Pope appeals
to the United
Nations
for peace
While
unremarkable as poetry, and frequently
recorded with
little or no
personal comment, such poems provide an historical
context and flavoring to
the other material, reminding us of the era in
which Konoshima lived.
I
admire Callner’s willingness to set for himself
such a time-consuming, painstaking task—this
project took six years to complete. As we all know,
poetry is not easily translated from one language to
another.
Sound, phrasing, and meaning frequently find no
adequate equivalents in the target language. As a result,
most translators cherry-pick the
poems they translate, selecting only those that
feel most at home in the target language and its inherent
culture, and which provide sufficient
opportunity to show-off the translator’s
own poetic skills in that language. Perhaps Callner
has been willing to take more risks because
of his familial relationship to the poet, and because
he has little interest in being a professional
translator. Whatever the case, Callner has done
admirable work here, giving his grandfather’s
history, American experience, and achievements
in tanka a second life, in a new language,
for a new readership.
Callner chose to use a two-line format for his translations,
explaining his decision this way:
“I
was uncomfortable with the five-line form that maintains
the 5-7-5-7-7 Japanese meter, so after attempts with
various other structures, all
my own, I arrived at a two-line version that roughly
maintains the upper and lower tanka form (kami no ku
shimo no ku) but completely ignores
the 5-7-5-7-7 meter. I believe this brings me as
close as I can come to the essence of the original
Japanese.“
The
bi-lingual reader will be pleased to find each English-language
rendering accompanied by the original
poem in Japanese.
While Hudson was the only
book of his tanka to appear in Konoshima’s
lifetime, all one thousand five hundred of his
tanka were published in the Japanese magazine Cho-on
between 1950 and 1984. Callner hopes to complete
the task of translating
the remaining nine hundred poems “in the not too distant
future.”
A
modest, brief “Chronology” of events and
dates in Konoshima’s
life is provided, together with information in
a Foreword by Konoshima’s
daughter, Carolyn Konoshma Callner. The outward facts are as follows:
Konoshima
was born in Yamato-mura, Gifu Prefecture, where his
father and mother farmed and raised a
large family
in the remote
village
of Kitano. With a degree in Economics from Doshisa
University, Konoshima emigrated to the United States
in 1924, coming
to Stockton, California,
which at that time was one of the major agricultural
centers of the San Joaquin Valley and yet to be
made famous in
the novels by John
Steinbeck.
Finding work as a farm laborer, Konoshima promptly
sent to Japan for
his wife, Yoshi, and four children, whereupon he
undertook the life of a hired hand for the next
eleven years,
laboring in the
fields
of Stockton,
and later in Mountain View. Through hard work,
savings, and with an eye to opportunity, Konoshima
eventually
partnered with another
Japanese
man and began an independent farming operation
to the south, in
Santa Clara. This enterprise, a fruit and truck
farm, apparently thrived
almost
from the beginning. With the advent of war with
Japan in 1941, Konoshima and his family were
scooped up
by the Federal
relocation
decree that
removed all people of Japanese descent from the
coastal areas
of the western United States. After a short stay
at the Santa Anita
racetrack
in the small town of Arcadia, in southern California,
about twenty miles east of Los Angeles, the family
was shipped
to the Heart
Mountain relocation
camp in Wyoming. They remained confined at Heart
Mountain for four years.
All
that is just framework for what is truly remarkable:
the legacy of the poetry, in which we find all
those other things
that are
in fact
the content of a man’s life— thoughts,
reflections, dreams, and those entirely personal
occasions having intimate value, meaning,
and satisfaction. Given the life he lived, the
privations and hardship, the outward humiliations,
and the struggles to overcome the events of
history with which he had nothing to do, to make
a life, raise a family, attend to the welfare of
his children and their education—what
incredible strength and dignity this man possessed,
and what peace, tranquility, and clarity of spirit
these tanka exhibit, straight from the heart, in
ink on paper. . .
In
his postscript to the Japanese edition, from which
excerpts are provided in this present edition,
Konoshima describes
his interest in poetry in
this way:
“From the time I was a child, as
far back as I can remember, I felt a vague admiration
for poetry. This was probably due to hearing
people in my house speak of the poets Saigyo, Ryoukan,
Ono No Komachi and others. On long winter nights
the elderly would sit around the irori,
the sunken hearth, engrossed in conversation while
they drank tea and snacked on tsukemono, pickled
vegetables. . .
...“It
was exactly twenty years ago, shortly after the end
of the abominable Second World War, that I became a
member of Cho-on and began to compose poems
fairly continuously. Since joining Cho-on I have received
the truly thorough and considerate instruction of Mitsuko
Shiga . . .
...“Setting
aside the proficiency of my poems as poetry, I consider
them as a record, written fragmentarily and subject
to the emotion of excitement from
certain times and occasions over a long and eventful
life . . . I have come to believe that it would not
be wholly meaningless to gather a collection as a present
to my seniors, my kindred and my friends from whom I constantly
receive kindness.”
Kisaburo
Konoshima
July
1970, New York
I
think it is fair to say that while few of the poems
here will be models for
tanka in English,
in terms
of
their
craft or
content as
English poetry, as a body of work in the autobiographic
vein Hudson is unique for its
point of view, wonderfully readable, and a volume having
permanent value to the history of tanka in the West,
written by a man
of refinement, sensitivity, and
courage. Hudson tells a story that is well worth our
time to absorb, ponder, and welcome as a friend and
fellow traveler
on the tanka
path.
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