July 8, 2009

Japan, by Billy Collins

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It’s the one about the one-ton
temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

(I first read this poem in 2005, in Japan for the first time, in a small Japanese class too hard for me held in a tiny lovely inn on the far northwest side of Kyoto with a beautiful front garden. It was the middle of the rainy season, and all my memories of Kyoto the first time are hung about with mist.

A more literal translation of the haiku {釣鐘にとまりてねむる胡蝶かな, tsurigane ni tomarite nemuru kochou ka na, by Yosa Buson} would be something like “Oh, the little moth stopped and sleeping on the hanging bell!” Let me emphasize that that is not a disparagement of translation linked to above, which is clearly the one Collins knows, and is beautiful, and not as different as you might think at first. A “hanging bell” is the huge, iron bell that hangs in a specific place in Buddhist temples; a “little moth” is a type of butterfly/moth with a famous dance built around it, and is the name of one of the chapters of the Tale of Genji. Getting all that in and keeping the poem beautiful is a feat indeed.)

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