Waltz 53
The speed of light in a vacuum is unrelated to a ray of light’s wavelength.
—Ebert
Red lightbulb ← Green lightbulb
White lightbulb → Yellow lightbulb
Black lightbulb ← Blue lightbulb
Blue lightbulb ← Yellow lightbulb
Yellow lightbulb → White lightbulb
Green lightbulb ← Black lightbulb
P I K O O • P I K O O
P I K O
P I K O • P I K O • and
Illumination July night
K I R O R O • K I R O R O and riding a car
Perfume art exhibition also
The view from a gear mechanism’s eye
A cutlet of soap bubble or
Drunk on a toy balloon’s soup
A delightful gentleman
Strolls along a bank’s paved street
P I K O R O • P O R O • P O R O
P A P A • R A R E • P A P A
3 5 5 5 5 5 5 6 5 3 5 6
1 2 3 5 5 6 5 3 5 3 2 1
1 1 2 3 5 3 5 2 1 6 6 5
1 6 1 5 5 6 1 2 2 2 2 2
A trumpet’s melody is intriguing
Arranging one’s footsteps and admiring the nighttime shops
A tinplate-crafted acrobatic toy
1 is 7 S E N • 2 for 7 S E N
(what a splendid deal, isn’t it)
If I buy the young gentleman, I should get the young miss as well
I’ll take her too
My uncle also yields quite a profit,
Returns home, buys rice,
Drinks the leftover sake,
P E K O R E • P O R O • P O R O • Let’s dance.
Domestic Harmony • Rich Country, Strong Army
Lots of battleships and cannons made
And a beautiful widow is still
Playfully plucking a Nagoya harp.
—MAVO, no. 6, 1925
Semiotic Theory
★
white plate
flower
spoon
spring afternoon, 3pm
white
white
red
★
prism architecture
white animal
space
★
blue flag
apple and madame
white landscape
★
flower and musical instrument
white window
wind
★
seashell and wreath
slippers’ woman
portrait in a canary’s ripened steamboat
★
greenhouse’s lad
distant moon
white flower
white
★
makeup and fireworks
doll’s blue window
white socks
aesthetics
white aesthetics
★
silver three-dimensional doll
silver three-dimensional doll
flower and mirror
statics
★
white architecture
sky of a distant suburb
distant
★
sky
sea
rooftop garden
tobacco-smoking lad white lad
1 person
space
★
magic using madame’s magic using silver lad
magic using madame’s magic using silver lad
reflection in a red mirror
reflection in a red mirror
white hand and eyebrow and flower
myself
space
★
blue sky
nothing is visible
nothing is visible
white house
★
white vista
light pink flag
despair
★
white lad
distant sky
hyacinth
window
white landscape
★
it’s a bright lifestyle and I
it’s a bright thought and I
it’s the pleasure of transparency and I
it’s the pleasure of propriety and I
it’s a fresh appetite and I
it’s a fresh love and I
memories of the blue past
are packed into every ink bottle and discarded
★
mechanics is dark
plants are heavy
★
white plate
bouquet and poetry collection
white
white
yellow
★
white residence
white
pink madame
white landscape
blue sky
★
the trumpet’s young nobleman is wearing every red handkerchief
★
evening dress
evening dress
evening dress
evening dress
evening dress
not interesting
—Shiro no arubamu (White Album), 1929
Doll, Pistol, and Balloon
1 SCENE
A white room
A small square’s only window
An old woman is sitting on the center stool
Noise
Suddenly
One red toy balloon rises into the sky
The old woman
Laughs in a soft, tiny voice
It grows dark
A yellow flame burns outside the window
It goes out at once
A cornet screeches
Magnesium radiates
Suddenly
A very (affected) human-like monkey’s screaming voice
It stops at once
Silence
Silence
Silence
Suddenly
The sound of glass shattering
2 SCENE
A white 3-cornered room
A woman hangs upside down
A young lad comes crawling
He suddenly cries
Clings to the woman
Moans
“Maria, Maria”
1 shot
A pistol fires
The crowd’s furious footsteps
They stop at once
The room grows purple
The young lad roars in anger
“Nihilism”
It grows dark
The crowd’s footsteps
Whistling
Magnesium radiates
Silence
The room grows brighter
Two old women
Are gnawing on the hanging woman’s head
Occasionally exchanging glances
Laughing expressionlessly in loud voices
The hanging woman suddenly falls
The old women
Shriek in terror
Shrill, slender, loud voices
It grows dark
Center
A blue flame burns
The old women laugh
“Hehe, hehehehehe”
The blue flame goes out
Magnesium radiates
A pistol discharges one shot
Silence
Silence
—Shiro no arubamu (White Album), 1929
Three Poems
Kitasono Katsue
translated from the Japanese by Kevin Michael Smith
Listen to the original read by the translator:
Translating Kitasono Katsue’s poems is a rather unique experience. Closer perhaps in kind to the visual arts than to the typical hierarchical syntax of literary construction, his poems pose both advantages and obstacles for the translator. One benefit I’ve found has been the sheer numerical gain over other translation endeavors—as is readily evident from all the blank space on the page, Kitasono employs far fewer words than his contemporaries, reducing the translator’s character count. For a non-native speaker of Japanese with a limited lexicon, this is, however, a somewhat deceptive advantage. The brevity of Kitasono's compositions invests more meaning per term in the poem’s overall economy, making each permutation a riskier opportunity to deliver the original intention—the poem’s very substance—through the target language. To grapple with this, and following Kitasono’s visual-semiotic method of typographic association, I have tended to treat each word as a semi-discrete unit rather than as determined by the sinews of grammatical order—despite this making recourse to contextual understanding near impossible. To give an example, perhaps the most difficult line to translate was “portrait in a canary’s ripened steamboat” (kanariya no ureru kisen no aru shōzō) from “Semiotic Theory.” Since this poem comprises montage-like juxtapositions of recurring, abrupt images, particularly colors such as “white” (shiroi) and “red” (akai), there is really no enveloping context from which to make sense of this perplexing utterance. How can a steamboat be “ripened”? Of course, because Chinese characters are unambiguous, there is no doubt that this is the intended verb, and Kitasono’s kanji-laden vocabulary—in addition to his frequent line breaks—contributes to the piecemeal, fragmented nature of the translation process. But one interesting point about this line is how Kitasono used a rather unfamiliar spelling of “canary,” a compound of three kanji ending here with the more general character for “bird” (tori) rather than the conventional use of the specific character for “sparrow” (suzume). Furthermore, this term itself involves a rather heightened disjuncture found in the Japanese language between orthography (the reading of kinshichō is also possible) and ascribed pronunciation, encapsulating a feature typical of Kitasono’s poetry more broadly, which, like the plastic arts, is arguably meant to be viewed on the page with the eyes more than it is to be heard with the ears. Nonetheless, I’ve done my best to recreate a similar collage effect in the aural dimension through my attempt at recitation.
Kitasono Katsue lived from 1902–1978 and was a leading Japanese avant-garde poet in both the prewar and postwar eras. His early precursors to concrete poetry, what he called “graphic theory” (zukeisetsu), were groundbreaking in their lexical simplicity but dispersed typography, playing with margins, lines, and parentheses to develop his poetic arguments and semiotic associations. Kitasano was involved with both literary and artistic experimentation, and his works have been described by literary historian John Solt as “shredding the tapestry of meaning.”
Kevin Michael Smith is a scholar and translator of modernist poetry. He earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature at UC Davis in 2019 and currently teaches academic English at Yonsei University’s Wonju Campus in South Korea. His translations have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, and Hyperallergic.
