Poem: Shuzo Takiguchi

Shuzo Takiguchi
(Mirador. Blog de Joan Miró,
Cultural y Arte, por
Antonio Boix.)

Keeping with the theme of ekphrasis and with the principle that an ekphrastic poem or poem about art need not describe a specific artwork, as Monica Youn's poem yesterday demonstrated, today I'm sharing yet another approach: you could write a poem about a specific artist, an homage/femmage/themage, with references however overt or subtle, to their oeuvre. Such is the case with Shuzo Takiguchi (1903-1973), the Japanese Modernist poet, painter and critic, who was associated with various movements in Japan, including Surrealism and Dada. I happened upon Takiguchi's tribute below, and two others--to fellow Surrealist artists Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró--on the Poetry site (the three translated poems appeared in the October 2014 print issue of Poetry Magazine), and was intrigued.

"René Magritte," once you read it, is an open tribute to the great, popular Belgian Surrealist, who lived from 1898 to 1967, and who produced some of the most iconic art work of the Surrealist movement--though he broke with André Breton over his decision to stay in Brussels instead of returning to Paris before the war. Allusions to various recurring Magrittean images, such as silhouettes, water, mountains, and hats appear, but it is not just the imagery, but the incantatory repetition of phrases, privileging sound and juxtaposition over clarity and immediacy of meaning, the unmooring of realist logic, that also underpins Takiguchi's own Surrealist poetic practice, and the way he translates his understanding of Magritte into poetry. His translation is not literal, but imaginative and contextual.  Additionally, the end words, when read aloud, almost make the two stanzas feel like the opening or ending to a sestina, though it clearly isn't one.

So was there a particular Magritte painting or were there paintings that Takiguchi had in mind? He mentions "silhouettes / flow incessantly like water," as well as "a mirror trick, / like a human echo / burns a silk hat endlessly." Given these references, two Magritte paintings, "La Belle Société" (1962) and "Décalcomania" (1966) come to mind.  In both there are human silhouettes that open up, like windows, onto beach landscapes with water flowing in the distance. As it turns out, Takiguchi created his own set of decalcomanic artworks, keeping the media as the title. The final stanza seems to refer to the two paintings above as well as to another famous Magritte image, "The Masterpiece Or the Mysteries of the Horizon," featuring three men, angled in various ways away from the viewer, and three crescent moons that could also be eclipses. (The poem could also be titled "Giorgio de Chirico" given the landscapes Takiguchi describes and paints.)

Yet what I want to argue is that even if Takiguchi had these two paintings, or just the latter one, in mind, his poem's language and imagery capture the spirit of Magritte such that any painting could stand in. His approach stands against literalness in favor of something more elusive and strange, not unlike Magritte's often very beautiful and bizarre paintings. Here I quote from Mary Jo Bang's and Yuki Tanaka's "Translators' Note," which shares a bit more information about what Takiguchi was after:

With Takiguchi, the surrealist estrangement has to be maintained in today’s poetic world where defamiliarization is not as surprising as it once was. To that end, we have had to be careful not to normalize the poems or alter their dialogic relationship to French surrealism. Takiguchi was actively involved in that literary movement. He corresponded with André Breton and translated his 1928 Surrealism and Painting into Japanese two years after it was published in France. An Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, compiled by Breton and Paul Éluard for the International Surrealism Exhibition in 1938, recognized Takiguchi as a “poète et écrivain surréaliste.” The present poems were first published in 1936 in L’échange surréaliste, a collection of writings and drawings by European Surrealists in Japanese translation, designed to foster international exchange. Takiguchi also helped revive the avant-garde scene in postwar Japan by spearheading an interdisciplinary art group called Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), which was active from 1951 to 1957. The experimental fervor of French surrealism can be felt in the radical texture of Takiguchi’s poems and his decision to call them “poetic experiments.”

You can find more about Takiguchi here. There's also his archives, where you can view some of his drawings.

And now, the poem.

***

RENÉ MAGRITTE



by Shuzo Takiguchi



Translated by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka

Released silhouettes
flow incessantly like water,
flow between mountains
swiftly like a kaleidoscope.
The solitude of  the North Pole
bustles with human silhouettes.
Endless transmission of  ABC.

On the shredded shore
a silk hat burns
like a mirror trick,
like a human echo
burns a silk hat endlessly.
Then the flames
were received like ABC.

On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse
the silhouettes smiled.

                     
                 Translated from the Japanese

Translators’ Note: Three Poems by Shuzo Takiguchi

Here are the three paintings by René Magritte, followed by one of Takiguchi's "Decalcomania" series:

René Magritte, The Beautiful Society,
oil on canvas, 1962.

René Magritte, Decalcomania, oil
on canvas, 1966.

René Magritte, The Masterpiece or Mysteries of the Horizon,
oil on canvas, 1955, private collection.

Shuzo Takiguchi, Spirit of Matthias
Grunewald, decalcomanic painting on paper,
1962.

Poem/Translation: Hagiwara Sakutaro

So busy these recent have been that unlike in prior years, including 2009, when I was in Cuba, I have been able to post a daily poem from National/International Poetry Month. I will strive to post a few more before April flows into may, but for now, here is one by Hagiwara Sakutaro 萩原 朔太郎(1886-1942), the late, acclaimed experimental Japanese poet, whose volume The Iceland, translated by Hiraoki Sato, will be published this summer by New Directions.

The poem below, which appears with two others on Asymptote journal's website, displays the quintessence of Hagiwara's work: its use of free verse, rather than traditional Japanese forms (which he also employed during his career); its mixture of linguistic registers, including lofty poetic speech, everyday language, and philosophical discourse; and oscillation between pedestrian and psychologically dark imagery. Several previous volumes of his work, including Howling at the Moon and Blue (Green Integer, 2001), translated by Hiraoki Sato, and Rat's Nest: The Poetry of Hagiwara Sakutaro (UNESCO, 1999), translated by Robert Epp, have previously appeared, as has Hagiwara's Principles of Poetry: Shi No Genri, from Cornell University Press in 1998.

The Tiger

It's a tiger
wide and vague as a giant statue
you sleep in a cage in the uppermost floor of a department store
you are born no machine
you may tear apart and eat meat with your fang-teeth
but how can you know human reasoning?
Behold, under the orb sooty smoke flows
from the roofs of a factory-zone town
sad whistles rise and spread.
It's a tiger
It's a tiger

It's an afternoon
the ad-balloon rises high
in twilight-close city sky 
on this high-rise building sitting in the distance
you are as hungry as a flag.
When you scan vaguely
you make the worms crawling along the streets
your live food dark and depressing.

It's a tiger
on the roof of prosperity in the midst of Tokyo City
where elevators go up and down
wearing an amber striped fur
you suffer solitude like a wasteland.
It's a tiger!
Ah it's all your afterimage
a useless total view of a void.

Copyright © Hagiwara Sukitaro, translated by Hiraoki Sato,from The Iceland,

New Directions Publishing Corporation, June 2014.

This poem appears on the website of Asymptote Journal. All rights reserved.