The elliptical lines or orbits trace the way the words in this poem interact with one another. There is movement here. The poem is a living thing. Especially the largest ellipse traces the path of a planet traveling around its sun: it heats and cools. There is a relationship between snow and water and fire. When water is furthest from heat, it recools, recoils. Similarly, a hippo is a river horse, an animal whose house is of water. A cluster of snowflakes is a male animal of the earth. It is also snow. It is also a flower. A male horse gets fired up. When this occurs, it is enough to melt the snow. It is enough to set the river on fire.

There is an association in Japan between the falling of cherry blossoms, which occurs in spring, and dying a noble death. Countless Samurai stories end with the hero’s death under the falling petals. The echoing of scattering or falling of leaves or blossoms in the name of the common medicine Ryugakûsan with the last word chiri, to scatter, places death at the center of this poem, and thus death is the apex between the mother, the spring wind, and the scattering of petals (or ashes). The scattering out from death is represented by the dots emanating from the center while the triangle is an attempt to acknowledge the sharpness of the word “corner” in the medicine. The poem also contains grammatical ambiguity as to what exactly is occurring on the spring wind (the mother’s death, the scattering of the medicine, which comes in the form of a red or green powder, or the scattering of the mother herself). This merging of traditional Japanese culture (the correlation between the falling of petals with noble death) and the contemporary (the inclusion of a common over-the-counter medicine) is part of Nenten Tsubouchi’s project and is handled beautifully by him here.

```````` Language declines— the grasshopper becomes less grasshopper. The green of Asia’s sky less green. ````````

NOTE

Language is the sky and the sky is made of language: as one thins, the other must follow. The words in this haiku are written almost entirely in the simplified phonetic alphabets of hiragana and katakana, although more complex kanji exist. The only kanji that remains is one of the most simple and airy available: sky. In this diagram the sky (read clockwise) thins as the grasshopper spreads its wings. Words that were once represented in kanji, word pictures—grasshopper, Asia, light green—have been usurped by modernity and their inner lives abridged in favor of accessibility. Moving up from the center of the diagram, the image of the grasshopper transforms into kanji, then to katakana, then to English. The haiku is as much about the dilution of the Japanese language as it is about the dilution of the green sky of Asia. We do not see, in hiragana, that leaping is the essence of the grasshopper, or that light green is thinning pampas grass made into language. One other difficult notion to translate here is that the batta, though it is commonly called a grasshopper, also refers to the locust, and that singular and plural nouns are often determined by context. Thus, above the single grasshopper, or perhaps inside of it, the sky over Asia turns green in the time it takes an infinitude of locusts to leap, simultaneously, to fill the poem.

A dandelion, once it has d(r)ied, is held together by a preponderance of parachute pods. They part and pop, as fire does, in play and on the planes of prairied minds. The tanpopo’s popo is the dandelion’s lion, but it is also the pop of Pop-Rocks, the pip of pomegranate, the chugga chugga of the choo-choo. A train engineer is a popo-ya, shushu-popo the child’s word for locomotive, popo-popo-popo the sound a train makes moving across an empty field. A 1603 Jesuit Japanese dictionary lists poppo as “the manner in which steam or fire rises.” But in Japanese, tanpopo is not onomatopoetic until Tsubouchi makes it so. Popo itself is a wordless word, it is the seed of a word, a seed which bursts into flame as soon as it is spoken. Imagine a great gust of wind. Imagine a fire.

translated from the Japanese of Nenten Tsubouchi

Haiku 1 and 2 excerpted from Rakka Rakujitsu (Kaifusha, 1984), 3 from Neko no Ki (Chusekisha, 1987), and 4 from Popo no Atari (Chusekisha, 1998), by permission of Nenten Tsubouchi, Kaifusha, and Chusekisha.

Every word in Nenten Tsubouchi’s haiku is a node on a web; to focus only on English language equivalents is to disregard relationships, to change the web’s shape. In our approach to these translations, we’ve borrowed the concept of the “relational field” from psychoanalytic theory. We represent each of Nenten’s haiku in myriad forms, each form a possible rendering of the web. As a result, the diagrams sometimes deconstruct words and phrases that may seem commonplace to the native speaker of Japanese in an effort to elucidate their inherent complexity. We hope this is a foreignizing text for both readers of English grappling with unfamiliar linguistic systems and for native speakers of Japanese viewing their language through the eyes of foreigners.

The translation of haiku is further complicated by cultural idiosyncrasies couched in language, such as the use of seasonal kigo to help color representation with recognizable social referents that are simply not present in English. Our diagrammatic translations attempt to reveal similar referents that are found within the codes of language, rather than the codes of culture (though to what extent these codes can be disentangled we’re not sure). Below each diagram is a note, which in itself is a creative and relational work acting simultaneously in the mode of explanation and the mode of creation.

Because Japanese uses three different alphabets, it is impossible for English to carry every implication of their convergence. One example is the use of furigana, the smaller phonetic alphabet that appears above ideogrammatic kanji to indicate the proper pronunciation of unfamiliar words. To translate this idiosyncrasy, we’ve included homophonic approximations in English above the romaji spellings of Nenten’s haiku, which are again relational: if we intend to translate each element of the Japanese poems into English we would be remiss to exclude the purely phonetic.

Nenten has coined the neologism katakoto, or “chips of words,” to refer to the onomatopoetic, childlike, fragmented speech he employs. His project seems intent on breaking down language and examining its composite parts. It begs the question, “What does it mean for language to be alive?” Like so many haiku poets before him, and like the Japanese animist religion of Shinto, Nenten’s haiku gives agency to objects and the objects of language. It is true that English also contains an associative web—the word “apple” carries various theological connotations—but there is no direct corollary for the fact that the kanji for chatter or talk (喋) is an image of a generation or epoch (世) of trees (木) coming out of a mouth (口), or that a leaf (葉) is similarly a generation (世) of vegetation () on a tree (木). We hope our translations bring new readers to Nenten Tsubouchi’s work, constructing new pathways between nodes in a broadening web.

Nenten Tsubouchi was born in 1944 in the Ehime Prefecture. He received an M.A. in Japanese literature at Ritsumeikan University. He edited Gendai Haiku, the journal of the Modern Haiku Association, from 1976 to 1985. In 1986 he founded his own haiku circle and journal, Sendan no kai. He is an emeritus professor at the Kyoto University of Education and a professor at Bukkyo University. Tsubouchi Nenten is also a committee member of the ‘Study of Rivers’ in Japanese Literature (Nihon bungaku ni okeru kasen) and a member of the Modern Haiku Association.

Martin Rock is a poet, editor, and book designer pursuing his Ph.D. in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. He is the author of Residuum (CSU Poetry Center First Book Prize, 2016) as well as the chapbook Dear Mark (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), a response to the work of Mark Rothko. With Kevin Prufer and Martha Collins, he co-edited the book Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2015). His work has been published in Best New Poets 2012, AGNI, Conduit, and numerous other literary journals. He lived in Japan from 2004 to 2008, where he taught English and began translating poetry from Japanese. He is managing editor of Gulf Coast and his website is located here.

Joe Pan is the author of two collections of poetry, Hiccups (Augury Books) and Autobiomythography & Gallery (BAP). He is the editor-in-chief and publisher of Brooklyn Arts Press, serves as the poetry editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic and as small press editor for Boog City, and is the founder of the services-oriented activist group Brooklyn Artists Helping. His piece “Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper,” a hybrid work about drones, was excerpted and praised in The New York Times. In 2015 Joe participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space artist residency program on Governors Island. Joe attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, grew up along the Space Coast of Florida, and now lives in Brooklyn.