The pumpkin tendrils creep
Along the station platform.
A ladybird peeps
From a chink in the half-closed flowers.
A stopping train comes in.
No one gets on, or off.
On the millet stalk
Growing by the railing
The young ticket-man
Rests his clippers.
Theme
The beauty of the world’s many cultures in found in their diversity. Culture is something that forms, over time, between people, as they either live or work together. It is vital that any business has a clear and recongiseable culture, and one that permits, within its binding nature, a multiplicity of ideas. Moreover, we can learn so much from each other’s cultures, from trading languages and ways of seeing: a culture, to survive must be open to change.
Who?
With this in mind, our poem this month is a translation—from Japanese into English. The poet is Yūji Kinoshita (1914 –1965), who specialised in pastoral writing, focussing on humanity’s interactions with the natural world and its various processes. Though working as a pharmacist for most of his life, Kinoshita wrote hundreds poems, perhaps characterised by a kind of persistent, tranquil melancholy, and spotlighting the seemingly commonplace lives of the people he observed and the serene beauty of the landscape in which he lived.
What?
Japanese, in its grammar and its sound, is especially good for creating ambiguity, for fashioning verse that intimates and hints, and revels in the indefinite. Naturally, much of this is lost in the translation into English, but we can still see how the poem paints a suggestive picture of mankind’s interconnectedness with nature through unexpected juxtaposition (essentially placing things side-by-side) and line-breaks: ‘The pumpkin tendrils creep | Along the station platform.’ Japanese verse will often deal in images like this: composites that hinge on the on two quietly surprising ideas. In this case, the pumpkin tendrils become entangled (both physically and conceptually) with the train-station, a manmade interference that cuts through the landscape in ghostly fashion. This happens, too, with the ‘millet stalk | Growing by the railing’. It is a snapshot of a world in a state of precarious balance.
What Else?
We can learn much about our different cultures through reading each others’ poetry—and even more by translating it. This poem, for example, does not explicitly state any kind of argument or judgement (compare it one of Shakespeare’s sonnets here and you’ll see what I mean); instead, it is content to suggest by arrangement, and then stand back and let the poem breathe.
It is only in the final stanza that an actual human presence appearance—an important, perhaps, discerned more clearly in this cultural exchange: we are not, always, at the centre of things.
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