[may rain]

Masaoka Shiki
Translated from the Japanese by Abby Ryder-Huth

 

 

                                            may rain
                                            and the hills of ueno
                                            I am tired of seeing

 

 

 

 

 

may rains and summer rain hills in ueno to be tired of looking enough steep rain stays beading on seen rain summer ueno, a mountain the city of ueno city a hill of fields over also rain still eyed too may city hills sated in seeing, seeing, seeing tried to find seeing I was exhausted, then enough, he said, water saying saw me, dare I, awed, the eye saying aching, dare we again in flood of it, the rains remaking themselves, each way a way to be not in it, an eye like a moon that closes, the moon the eye alive all night, quietly I find the moon running seamed at its stomach and leave it wettened, I run to my body—

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Masaoka Shiki was a poet, essayist, diarist, and literary critic, and is considered instrumental for revitalizing traditional poetic forms in Meiji Japan. He died at age 34 in 1902, having written nearly 20,000 haiku and tanka.

Abby Ryder-Huth holds degrees in poetry and literary translation from the University of Iowa. Abby’s work includes The Glass Clouding (UDP, 2023), and can be found in The Paris Review, Poetry, Bennington Review, Changes, and Annulet.

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The Glass Clouding
Ugly Duckling Presse
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The Glass Clouding blends translation and poetry in an extended meditation on and through Masaoka Shiki’s late-life writing. Shiki, a Japanese poet and critic who died in 1902 of tuberculosis at the age of 35, revitalized the form of haiku. His work, a study in looking, documents his experience of confinement with a spare immediacy and a rich sense of the visible outside world he could not directly access. The Glass Clouding wrestles with the limits of translation, using experimental forms, image, parallel texts, and prose to question what translation can and cannot make visible.

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