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and small press publishing. Thousands of books are released each year by
presses representing communities and viewpoints not always found in your
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"something in us always wants to cry out
someone we love knows hears"
Perhaps even more than writing itself, the art of translation requires the
most careful attention to nuances of sound and meaning. Crow with No
Mouth: Ikkyu moves away from literal translation to "versions" of
more than two hundred short poems by a 15th Century Japanese monk, the Zen
master Ikkyu. Noted poet, translator and editor Stephen Berg (winner
of a National Translation Center Grant from the Ford Foundation and the
Columbia University Translation Prize, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in
Poetry) brings a light touch and an emotional truth to these poems, which
remain moving, funny and profound more than 500 years after their writing.
While not formally exact translations -- Ikkyu's normal four-line form
has been reduced to two, and the language inhabits the tone of vernacular
speech -- Berg fully succeeds in recreating the emotional life of the poems
for a contemporary audience.
Born in 1394, a precocious student of both Zen Buddhism and poetry, and
enlightened at age 26 upon hearing the caw of a crow, Ikkyu later
became known as a notorious iconoclast, scandalizing the Zen community with
both his libertine ways (his poems and life were filled with wine and
frequent trips to the brothel) and his impatience with formality. He railed
against what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Buddhist aristocracy, accusing
them of being more concerned with the raising of money and the intrigues of
politics than the true path of compassion. As part of a lineage which
reveled in the pleasures of the body, seeing them as just as much of the
Buddhist path as meditation and asceticism, Ikkyu immersed himself in
daily existence. The concreteness of his poetry feeds on observations
made not only in temples and retreats but in taverns and alleys, while
candidly describing sexual passion alongside the transience of bodily
existence.
"Ten years of whorehouse joy I'm alone now in the mountains/the pines are
like a jail the wind scratches my skin", laments one poem which neatly
encapsulates the dichotomy of Ikkyu's life. Drunken escapades in the
brothel often led the monk to a period of retreat, as did the bureacracy of
temple life. Ikkyu writes with typical disdain for formality, "ten
days running this temple all red tape/look me up if you want to in the bar
whorehouse fish market." Few koans (puzzles for meditation) make their way
into this slim volume, although some verses do strike at the heart of
Zen philosophy ("the mind is exactly this tree that grass/without thought or
feeling both disappear"). Most of the poems collected here closely observe
the small miracles of life: "watching my four-year-old daughter dance/I
can't break free of her", reveals a deep understanding of family ties. Two
connected poems reflect on a friend's death with the same exactness:
"my friend's funeral this morning
burns inside me like my own death"
"and it breaks my heart how easily
smoke rises tonight like the thought of him"
Sex and wine are never far from Ikkyu's mind, conjured with the same
attention to detail. "Her mouth played with my cock/the way a cloud plays
with the sky" provides a relatively mild example of these occasionally
explicit poems. In his later life, Ikkyu fell in love with a much
younger, blind temple attendent, and their relationship remained one of his
favorite subjects -- in forms both touching and arousing -- until his death.
"A butterfly hovers in front of her face/how long will she sleep" asks one
tender poem, that, like much of his verse, ties Nature to human nature.
Ikkyu's other great subject, after the relationship of the mind to
the body, is in fact man's relationship with Nature, but he does not
reflect the classical Western view of constant struggle for dominance
between the two. Human beings simply cannot affect the workings of the
seasons, Ikkyu asserts: "you can't make cherry blossoms by tearing off
petals/to plant only spring does that".
Berg's approach to the poetry is typified by a loose enjambment of the
lines, as seen in the poem above. His condensation of four lines to two
requires a voice closer to rhythms of hurried speech, as each of
Ikkyu's freewheeling thoughts tumble one after another. Presented in
seemingly chronological order, but without commentary, the poems in Crow
with No Mouth succeed in connecting the reader, across a vast gap in
time and culture, with a sharp intellect and intensely joyful master.
Although a knowledge of Zen will undoubtedly allow a deeper understanding of
the Buddhist concepts involved in Ikkyu's poems, their deeply
universal emotional impact hasn't been muted by the passing of centuries.
-- Ryan Tranquilla
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About the Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
The past quarter century has witnessed the greatest blossoming of American
poetry in history, along with the first translations of some of the world's
classic literature. During this time, Copper Canyon Press has remained
dedicated to publishing poetry in a wide range of styles, and from the full
range of the world's many cultures. As the premier publisher in the United
States devoted exclusively to poetry, Copper Canyon has been honored to
publish so many talented poets from multifarious backgrounds and cultures,
including Pablo Neruda, Thomas McGrath, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Kizer, W.S.
Merwin, Su Tung-p'o, Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, Olga
Broumas, David Lee and many others.
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