三つの詩

Ishihara Yoshiro was a wrestling poet. He wrestled with God, with meaning, with humanity, with darkness, with light. His experiences in Soviet POW camps after the war shook his faith in God, humanity, and himself, and left him with what he referred to as “quiet enemies,” with whom he would grapple for the remainder of his life. His writing was his arena.

This war experience provided him with powerful images for his own struggles and also for explorations of the contradictions and conflicts of human nature. In “Poetry”, for example, the line “Even if I’m left stranded where the cannons lie” is both his literal experience and a metaphor for human experience.

Another source of imagery was the Bible (Ishihara became a Christian as a young man, lost his faith during his POW years, then following his repatriation returned to God with a troubled faith). In “Poetry”, the fig tree image probably comes from the gospel account of Jesus shriveling a fig tree which wasn’t bearing fruit, and the word I have translated as “wasteland” is used in the Japanese Bible for the wilderness in which the Israelites wandered for forty years.

Among his war experiences, one which affected Ishihara particularly deeply was seeing men in the POW camps slowly losing their humanity (for example when extreme hunger overwhelmed friendship, morality, and speech and the only concern was to get food before someone else got it). “Horses and Riots” is one of his many poems which delves down into what drives people, and what happens when we have conflicting desires inside us.

The Japanese language is written as a combination of ideographs and two syllabaries. Choosing which of these to use to write particular words can alter the nuance, and broaden or narrow the meaning quite significantly. In the whole of “Potato Talk”, Ishihara only uses two ideographs and doesn’t use any for the key words. This actively suggests to the reader that each word carries more weight and a broader range of potential meaning than in normal usage. Trying to create this openness in English, which does not have this function, brings significant challenges to both vocabulary choice, and creating the right poetic space for the reader to explore.

In his writing, Ishihara was always striving to get as near as possible to expressing what cannot be said. His poetry is both the act of him thinking and an invitation for the reader to abandon comfortable categories and face squarely the unanswerable and inexpressible, to search for the truth with the understanding that we cannot understand more than the smallest part of what we find. As he expresses it in another poem,

Though you have seen

what you have seen

you smash a glass

you slam a door open

and they’re gone