Gozo Yoshimasu at Words Without Borders: Why and how does this thing called “poesy” or poetic mind occur in our mind?
I’m giving a humble introduction to this book that has a somewhat intimidating title, What is Poetry, while clumsily speaking and carefully listening to my own voice. I expect, by doing so, that a subtle hum-like voice would be heard beyond or besides my voice, or from afar.2
There used to be poets like Chuya Nakahara3 or Kenji Miyazawa4 who established their poetry in their youth with their innate genius. However, in my case—and perhaps this is the norm of all my contemporaries—it’s taken more than sixty years to become aware of and be able to talk about my subconscious poetic history and memory . . . about so many things that I’ve unconsciously preserved in a “storage room” in my mind. I never know if it will go well, and I always have these nagging doubts, but still I persist.
The poetic side, or mind, or spirit; poesy, or simply “poetry” . . . we have many names for it, but it must be basal, primordial, and unnamable, and more like an incorporeal body of concepts rather than so-called “thought.” What we must do is seize its workings, as well as the faint inducements for it to work. Now that we’ve experienced several great wars and terrible natural disasters, it’s high time to take it as our duty, although I know “duty” sounds too heavy, that we try and reach for nontrivial fragilities. Poetry is one of the few narrow paths for that. Poetry has drastically changed after World War Ⅱ; it’s parted from art—including poems, waka, haiku, and novels written until around the end of the War—that adheres to a certain purposive style and “shape.”
I only write in Japanese, a language that is plural by nature. It’s a language that has embraced several languages in its making, so you may hear the Chinese of the Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing periods, or the languages of Okinawa, Ainu, or Korea resonating within it. Asia is a region with an extensive history of a totally different sort from the West. Like in Africa, I guess, we inherit a thick layer of profound time in our basal memory that shapes our physical and mental subconscious gestures, and we always have to remember that.
That being said, Japanese is too complicated to discuss, so let me return to the topic of poetry. I know from experience that my mind goes blank if I’m suddenly given a pen or pencil and asked to write poetry. And that’s what matters. While discussing translation, Walter Benjamin advocated a concept of “pure language” as an extreme goal of all languages. Supposing that every language aspires to this “pure language,” we must make efforts to set our sights on it.
More here.
