It was two o’clock in the morning, and I was looking for something to read before I went to bed. I scanned my bookshelves until I picked up a collection of haikus by Basho. I browsed the book until one haiku caught my eye:
taros sprouting
at the gate,
young creepers.
I had imagined taros to be primitive, potatolike tubers found only in Papua New Guinea, as part of a funeral feast of roasted boar. I was surprised to read in the book’s endnotes that, “to the Japanese, [the taro] has the taste of haiku.”
I had never thought of a haiku as having a taste, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be true. Here are three of the best I have read:
low tide
the drift wood
rests
-Giovanni Malito
old garden shed
the insecticide can
full of spiders
-Ernest Berry
first snow
the neglected yard
now perfect
-Elizabeth St Jacques
The next day, I went to the Asian market on Abbey Street. I always feel dizzy entering this place. I have no idea where anything is or what the names of Japanese foods are in Chinese. I am too shy to ask the staff for help.
Continue reading ‘Haibun’
When I was walking one time I saw this Japanese guy smoking under a row of geriatric lampposts. He sucked on his cigarette like a spit in reverse, puckering his mouth to greet the stick, and then relaxing it as it entered. His eyes were grey and watery, and he smelt of water, and with his smooth snout he seemed like a fish from a glass lake. He was speaking Japanese, which I can’t speak but I can recognize, which is how I knew he was Japanese.
The words were low and steady, cadenced to synchronize with the punctuation of the cigarette sucks. I stood watching him speak, and then I spoke on top of him, out of sync. Oh man, the stuff I spoke. I spoke about my kite that was attacked and torn to pieces by a pigeon, and the gold-leaf intricacy of the orange leaves in my driveway, and that dickhead Tits McKenzie, who we all called Tits McKenzie because he has big tits, who spat in my ear. That was all I got to speak, because then he finished his cigarette and handed me one of his green earphones, and with one in my ear and one in his ear, we danced to angry-insect jazz.
Continue reading ‘Activities with a Japanese guy’
Gabriela Ailenei (Translator)
published in Translations on December 6, 2008
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Lucerne, 1938: I imagine Brahms composing his Symphony No 1 at night, in Vienna, toward the end of spring. The composer leaves the kafeehaus late and decides to walk home. He passes the Votivkirche. It’s chilly. It rained. From time to time, you can hear, as it moves away, the distant sound of thunder. The last trams race past. Around the composer, the melancholy of life gathers – its longings, fleeting happiness, everlasting beauty, nostalgia. It is especially because he knows he must die that a man’s soul is enchanted by so much evanescence and the world around him seems so solid.
Those men. They were boys, really. Sex with someone Irish: I thought it would obliterate my foreign memories.
They were brief, inept, humourless encounters in similarly cold apartments. I noticed, as one of them flailed about inside me, that there were dirty clothes piled in the corner of the bedroom. He had lit a candle beside the bed; the other one turned all the lights off.
That year, 2002, I was unemployed and living off savings from a job I had left in Vienna. It was autumn. I got caught in endless wintry downpours waiting for buses, the number seven in particular.
Continue reading ‘Minutos, horas, días, años’
I have been digging for weeks. My muddy tunnel was supposed to take me free of the prison walls, but instead it led me into the prison sewer. They put me away for robbing a merchant of his gold and his wife of her virtue, voluntarily I might add. I was given thirty-five years hard labour: this was Haiti, under French colonial rule.
My mind is wandering. There was a one-eyed dwarf I used to know in Cuba. He may be still alive, but it is improbable. He loved cheating strongmen out of their money. He ran whores for the General and was renowned for his ability with the ladies. I’m thinking about his scarlet dress-coat now.
Continue reading ‘The guard is singing something lovely, and I am sat in shit’
