comments on a first encounter with Nakahara Chuya

[Lee Roberts]

Having never read Nakahara Chuya's poetry before my visit to this site, I will seem to have little more to say than a general impression. Perhaps, however, an impression is the most fitting sort of commentary for such work, which seems to communicate in fleeting images those aha-moments that threaten to fade with the slightest change in daylight or even in social custom.

I have read, looked at, and listened to both "Dedicated to a Dragonfly" and "Beach of a Moonlit Night," and, although I can certainly craft my own interpretation, I find myself wondering about culturally possible meaning. Perhaps the English translation of the Japanese poems has caused me to wonder about possible interpretations? After all, each English-language poem holds its own set of associations that will not likely have occurred to a Japanese reader.

"Dedicated to a Dragonfly" seems at once to be a mourning of a time about to end and the celebration of something new. While I am not as knowledgeable on Japanese culture as I would like to be, I faintly remember reading somewhere that the dragonfly traditionally was associated with a rebirth. It would seem that this poem may indicate the lyrical subject's rediscovery of nature on the edge of civilization. Given that the grass in this poem withers and only the buildings in the distance remain solidly visible in the light of dusk, I wonder whether this might not actually be taken as a resigned embrace of industrial Japan?

Perhaps somewhat similarly, "Beach of a Moonlit Night" leads its reader down a deceptive strand words that suggest, once again, a recommunion with nature. This time, however, there is a focus on the self. Indeed, how little the poem seems to have to do with that beach mentioned in its title. Where do our interests, desires and preferences come from? Why should we care about anything in life? Isn't everything just a button we find along the way? Yet that button, we later find, has become so important that we must ask how we could have thought to throw it away.

As for the English translation and my own English-language interpretation, I wonder whether English can capture those last vestiges of an older Japanese tradition, which we find in the usage of the "i" and "e" no longer part of modern Japanese? Beyond mere form, can the English-language reading capture the same cadence natural to Japanese, and, if not, how does English intonation--so often used to convey meaning in English--change the original? Considering my own second interpretation above, I wonder whther the Japanese language even conceptually speaks of "life as a journey," or as a stroll along a moonlight beach, as is the case in the poem?

Looking for possibile interpretations,
L.M.R.