And the Poem is but a Fragment...

Yosano Akiko continues to surprise me; it's a shame that her literary reputation was tarnished so thoroughly by the likes of Saito Mokichi (another poet whom I admire greatly) and the various Araragi circles in an attempt to further move poetic composition toward contemplation of the sublime. Something was lost, though, a glimmer of a new romanticism in Japanese verse that essentially died with Akiko, a romanticism coupled with a brief and (as far as the Taisho government was concerned) deeply subversive call for the rights of woman, and both her passing and her aesthetic ideal's went largely unnoticed due to Japan being completely embroiled in the Pacific War in 1942. I argue, somewhat over-simplistically, in my dissertation that Masaoka Shiki's (and his disciples' in Saito and the Araragi) poetry of the mind supplanted Akiko's sensual poetics, for better or for worse, but I think Akiko would argue, from the grave (mwahahaha!!), that her verse is sensual and intellectual, that the sensual is intellectual.

思（おもひ）は長し

思（おもひ）は長し、尽き難（がた）し、
歌は何（いづ）れも断章（フラグマン）。
たとひ万年生きばとて
飽くこと知らぬ我なれば、
恋の初めのここちせん。

Thoughts are long

Thoughts are long, hard to use up,
and the song is but a fragment.
But even if I were to live 10,000 years
and never to know losing interest,
I'd never feel that first love.

Funny story, when I was browsing through Akiko's free verse poetry, of which the above is a mere fragment, I thought the katakana after 断章 (tanshou), i.e. furaguman, was meant to read "flagman." After all, "fragment" would be transliterated as furagumento, so I wondered, "how is a poem a flagman? Is Akiko saying that the poem merely points the way? gives only a rough indication of the vastness of her thoughts?" It would be a strange statement to make and yet is perfectly in keeping with the tone of the poem. As it turns out, though, furaguman is just a transliteration of fragment... isn't it?

The omoi in line one, translated here as "thoughts," encompasses feelings as well. My difficulty in translating omoi in that line is echoed by equal difficulty in dealing with kokochi, here part of a verb meaning "think/feel," in the final line. These thought-emotions pervade classical Japanese poetry, making it difficult for a Westerner such as myself, whose language and world view are predicated on the distinction between thoughts and emotions, to render that poetry as elegantly as I would like. Akiko's poem is brilliant, because it plays off the preconception of the aforementioned distinction while refusing to let it play out in the poem's diction. The middle section is basically one long adversative, but I wonder, what exactly is being opposed here? Are thoughts long and hard to get rid of? Are feelings? Will she never think about first love again or never feel it?

Perhaps the irony of the poem is that its logic cannot be resolved. You can't just "think" the poem, you have to feel it too. I'm sure that sentiment wouldn't sit too well with the vast majority of my colleagues. Feel a poem?! Ha!