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Cowboy Novel in Japanese
It's the first line of my new western:
Morning is painted the color of a jewel
worn by a Navajo woman marking
a tourist ledger in Arizona.
Later, the Asahi Shimbun translates
my cowboy story as a long word
in Japanese meaning:
girl with p e a c o c k wings in blue dusk over Kobe.
I pose beside my cowboy books.
Buffalo Bill Cody does not look back;
Arapaho horseman do not dismount.
A swan like a great wheel
is passing.
Last edited by Bernie01, Mar/26/2014, 10:47 am
--- Fall
Bob Grenier: the leaves / falling / out of the / water by the / table
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Mar/24/2014, 1:07 am
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Re: Cowboy Novel in Japanese
Just enjoyed Bernie. This is beautiful.
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Mar/25/2015, 8:45 pm
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Re: Cowboy Novel in Japanese
Good to see you again, Bernie. Poem stylistically yours. For me the last two lines make the poem.
Tere
Last edited by Terreson, Mar/30/2015, 9:29 pm
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Mar/28/2015, 12:52 pm
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Re: Cowboy Novel in Japanese
Bernie,
I wonder now if you read Japanese. The Asahi Shinbun is one of five national newspapers. So that's how they would translate the first line. For me, the crux of the poem is Bill Cody doesn't look back nor do the Arapaho horsemen dismount. Then the wheel of the universe turns. There's something there, but I can't hold on to it. Maybe that's the intent of the poem. There seems to be a silent center with the universe wheeling around it. Zak
quote: Bernie01 wrote:
It's the first line of my new western:
Morning is painted the color of a jewel
worn by a Navajo woman marking
a tourist ledger in Arizona.
Later, the Asahi Shimbun translates
my cowboy story as a long word
in Japanese meaning:
girl with p e a c o c k wings in blue dusk over Kobe.
I pose beside my cowboy books.
Buffalo Bill Cody does not look back;
Arapaho horseman do not dismount.
A swan like a great wheel
is passing.
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Mar/30/2015, 11:24 am
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Re: Cowboy Novel in Japanese
Coming back to this, the Arapaho horsemen and the Navajo woman. Is there a link there? Or is it just part of the local color such books throw in? Since I am clueless about the context (beyond whatever little reading I did right now on wiki.History's never been my strong point. Or geography) I am also thinking perhaps this poem is a sort of critique of how Buffalo Bill has been built up. Not sure. The swan and the great wheel are also passing strange. Yeats and revelation. Ezekiel in Japanese. Someone has to link it up for me. Or not.
p.s. some Baudrillard. It is prose. But it takes us someplace. Pins us down there while the wind rises around us. You are giving us more leeway, time to escape. But what if we don't see the point of it all?
from America
by Jean Baudrillard
Nostalgia born of the immensity of the Texan hills and the sierras of New Mexico: gliding down the freeway, smash hits on the Chrysler stereo, heat wave. Snapshots aren’t enough. We’d need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the unbearable heat and the music. We’d have to replay it all from end to end at home in a darkened room, rediscover the magic of the freeways and the distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed and live it all again on the video at home in real time, not simply for the pleasure of remembering but because the fascination of senseless repetition is already present in the abstraction of the journey. The unfolding of the desert is infinitely close to the timelessness of film...
MONUMENT VALLEY DEAD HORSE POINT GRAND CANYON
Geological - and hence metaphysical - monumentality, by contrast with the physical altitude of ordinary landscapes. Upturned relief patterns, sculpted out by wind, water, and ice, dragging you down into the whirlpool of time, into the remorseless eternity of a slow-motion catastrophe. The very idea of the millions and hundreds of millions of years that were needed peacefully to ravage the surface of the earth here is a perverse one, since it brings with it an awareness of signs originating, long before man appeared, in a sort of pact of wear and erosion struck between the elements. Among this gigantic heap of signs - purely geological in essence - man will have had no significance. The Indians alone perhaps interpreted them - a few of them. And yet they are signs. For the desert only appears uncultivated. This entire Navajo country, the long plateau which leads to the Grand Canyon, the cliffs overlooking Monument Valley, the abysses of Green River are all alive with a magical presence, which has nothing to do with nature (the secret of this whole stretch of country is perhaps that it was once an underwater relief and has retained the surrealist qualities of an ocean bed in the open air). You can understand why it took great magic on the Indians’ part, and a terribly cruel religion, to exorcize such a theoretical grandeur as the desert’s geological and celestial occurrence, to live up to such a backdrop. What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it. It is perhaps these reliefs, because they are no longer natural, which givethe best idea of what a culture is. Monument Valley: blocks of language suddenly rising high, then subjected to a pitiless erosion, ancient sedimentations that owe their depth to wear (meaning is born out of the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs), and that are today destined to become, like all that is cultivated - like all culture -natural parks.
(my emphases)
Last edited by arkava, Apr/3/2015, 4:46 am
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Apr/1/2015, 11:06 pm
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Re: Cowboy Novel in Japanese
thanks guys.
wanted a japanese feeling...non american standard.
brushstroke.
bernie
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Apr/20/2015, 5:30 pm
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Re: Cowboy Novel in Japanese
let's say, the critical following of the cowboy novel....(all in my fevered mind, of course.)
Its the first line of my new western:
Morning painted the color of a jewel
worn by a Navajo woman marking
a ledger in Arizona.
Later, the Asahi Shimbun translates
my cowboy story as a long word
in Japanese meaning:
girl with peacock wings in blue dusk over Kobe.
Poetry Kanto* is fascinated by the novel's blue color
and creates an image:
Blue the color of ocean water
after passage of a Caribbean ship.
Kyoto graduate students of English Literature summarized the novel:
Wooden sidewalks and flimsy buildings blowing away and the old cowboy who would never again ride the fading edge of a vast blue horizon.
In conversation with an interviewer I added:
Homeless blue color touched the horses, scrub cows and the lazed cowboy like a solo saxophone from a radio.
The last page I recite in Hiroshima:
The gunfire deafened him and he did not hear his own heavy, Colt sidearm fire but saw blue smoke rising from the barrel as from a gap in the earth.
* http://poetrykanto.com/articles/literary-events/welcome-to-poetry-kanto-japans-longest-running-bilingual-poetry-journal.html
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Jul/17/2015, 10:25 am
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