Phantom Tokyo- The Other Side |
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"O und die Nacht, die Nacht, wenn der Wind voller Weltraum/ uns am Angesicht zehrt--" if you want it in German. What a difference a translation makes. Take the next bit:
she'd wait for anyone in the Young translation; and 'for whom would she not remain in Leishman and Spender's. That's Stephen Spender, the poet; but I still think Young does a better job, bar the identations, which are a pain in html. What a clunky code for one space. Went out to pay bills at the banking machine where there were no envelopes, and got hailed on, twice, by the expected flower-bruising semi-snow. *My* kind of May, she says with no irony at all. Came home, began last chapter of Godchild, interrupted by sorties into Hi izuru... (fascinating and frustrating as ever) and Takemiya's book on gaijin boiz I have loved (she finds them in the oddest places, like Arsene Lupin.) Wasting time, as ever. Can't remember the line in Catullus- if it /was/ Catullus in the first place only that the line sounds like him- that I couldn't translate to my satisfaction at seventeen, but which I now know translates as 'You thought it'd be that way forever.' You did. We all do. We're all wrong. Time to pull out the Rilke as well.
If I cried out
Sure, spring depended on you
Thought- another nayamu kotoba for the translator is kusuri. 'Medicine' only covers perhaps a third of the uses I see. 'Drugs' should cover the rest, but because of the baggage that word has over here it doesn't. Saiyuuki's Yaone is a kusuri-uri no musume. What the hell's that in English? A pharmacist or a drug-peddler? Herbalist? Herb-woman? But she also compounds explosives. Apothecary? Alchemist? You gotta reach way back to get even an approximation, and none fit. All the kusuri that runs through Cain- some of it drugs, some of it--- unidentified plant-based substances. If there's a word for that I don't know what it is. And it's driving me a little batty. Accomplishments for the day, in my attempt to avoid the update? I biked out to the vacuum cleaner store and got the brush attachment for the Mysterious Hoover that I lost at the daycare. The brush, I mean. The MH was in my house when I came home from Japan and I have no idea how it got there, because I'm pretty sure that whatever vacuum I had when I went to Japan was different. But I'm not sure, not being as you might say intimate with my vacuum cleaners. (Quick, tell me the make and colour of yours. Yeah, see?) Have yet to try putting it on Hoover to see if it fits like indifferent store man said it would. For $23 will not heartburn if it doesn't. Had mass-produced Chinese food at the mall (our malls are in the heart of downtown. That's how we do things in Trawna.) A woman pushed in front of me in the line, bringing back her plate of veg and making a big fuss because she'd found money in it. Manager tried to convince her that outlet doesn't regularly drop coins into the food and maybe it happened when she was getting her change. Woman wasn't buying that at all and wanted a new plate with a guaranteed lack of dimes and quarters. Some people, J muses, are never happy. Came home and fucked up the html-ing of Godchild twice. Did not start review of Italian djs, last chapter of Godchild, EC1 OVA writeup, or Lynda's htmling. Am going down to Tasty's for more souvlaki now. I am a cow, as I tell my outraged charges when I prevent them from pulling to stand using a friend's hair. MOO. End of the week when I was not hahaha going to work hahaha. I did not work Monday. Today I worked 9-6, with a half hour break in which I bicycled over to the old place to rescue Vicky's shoes in their LCBO bag. The new place is an Edwardian behemoth that was once pretty snazz, as you can see from the bits that didn't get institutionalized ie the front door and the staircase. Oak, with newel posts. Greeeat big stained glass window, easily ten feet high, on the way up to the second floor. We had stained glass and newel posts in our just-post-Edwardian place on Bedford, but not nearly as high-class as this. There's also, from the third floor where the staff lounge is, a lovely west-facing view among trees, and since I've been dying for exactly that for nearly 15 years, I look forward to seeing late autumn sunsets from there. (I'm not in the building at sunset this time of year.) But the little detail of kitchen in basement, workspace on first floor, washroom on second and office on third involves a feck of a lot of stair-climbing. Buns of steel is what Diane says we'll all have before we leave. Sprung knees, say I. The horticultural meterological social calendar, that we don't have here but that I can't get out of the habit of living by. No-one will turn out to view the late-blooming double cherries on our streets, or the (I swear) daphne bush around the corner, so I have to do it alone. It's because horticulture here is so very private- no parks of cherry trees, no famous iris gardens in the Meiji jingu, nothing that even remotely approximates the Meiji jingu itself, come to that. Ottawer and DC may be different for all I know, but not TO. At times Tokyo feels greener than here, but only because in Tokyo the greenery pretty much belongs to everyone. So, well, it rains, it's wet, it's sticky and muddy, it's the soft little catkins fall from trees time of year. The lilacs have *almost* bloomed (taking their own sweet time but Sunday was so freezing I had to wear gloves to ride. Flowers don't feel encouraged by that kind of chill.) The neighbour's cherry tree has almost lost all its blooms, where mine got stripped away in the monsoon a week ago, I believe. Sunday it rained, Monday which I do not now remember it rained, Tuesday it rained when the garage man came. Wednesday was sunny, for a change, and I went and got my bank stuff straightened out. Today... This time of year in 1989 I went to Japan for the first time, and it rained, almost like this but lusher and thicker and greener because we were in Kyoto a lot. The Japan I saw then I saw again, briefly, the first two weeks I was there in the fall of '90, and never again. That was a tourist's Japan, and the very weather is different for people who live there. So when I went to Kyoto with Nell in the fall of '92 for a weekend, it looked nothing like the place I'd been in three years earlier. If the update gets done this weekend I will be very surprised, because translating is indeed about as much fun as flagellation. Especially the very uninspired God Child. (yawn) It was so bad that I did a short chapter of Arslan just for a break, and enjoyed it much more. I suppose the little fangirls on the Earl Cain ML may be pleased by GC, but my impression was that they've all read it in Chinese anyway. (Translators are by definition Important Fans, are we? Pull the other one, as the Brits say. It's got bells on it.) "When I find myself in times of trouble..." I get out my copy of Wang Wei's poems. They've consoled me through a bunch of things, like appendicitis in Tokyo, and they still do. This is the Penguin translation done by G.W.Robinson 30 years ago. I've read other translations of Wang Wei, with the Chinese text facing, and yes that seems to be what the Chinese says and no, there's no magic in the English at all. But Robinson I think must have been a poet himself or just a natural genius with words, not that anything in his biography suggests it. He was born no later than 1920, and after WW2 he studied Chinese and Japanese. "He has lived in the Languedoc since 1957," and I hope he lives there still, healthy and well-preserved from drinking all that good wine. It would be appropriate. The Chinese tell you the great poets are Li Bo and Du Fu, and I'm sure they are. The axiom about them in English is that Li Bo translates badly and Du Fu doesn't translate at all. But Wang Wei was a painter as well as a poet, and that may be what makes the difference. Plus Mr. Robinson. In return for Mr. Yang's poem
Brush dust from ancient texts and read
In the empty valleys few come home In the hills at nightfall in autumn
In the empty hills just after rain Huatzu Hill
Flying birds away into endless spaces I read that one a little after my friend Richard died when the worst of it was over except for the constant low-grade tiredness and depression. The last line stunned me, because it turned this autumn picture into an image of what my life felt like then- walking up the hill and then walking down it again, the familiar and pointless daily round, with this dragging melancholy there always. Sitting alone on an autumn night
I sit alone sad at my whitening hair I wanted to use that bit in a story, only translated into French. I consulted my aunt, who said basically that you couldn't say that in French. She should know, but it seems a pity. Lament for Yin Yao
We followed you back for your burial on Mount Shihlo And finally a spring poem to counter all those autumn ones- Return to the Wang River
Distant bell sounding at the mouth of the valley
Whenever I get to the point of being able to indulge in some really *big-time* retail therapy: specifically, when I feel solvent enough to buy, finally, after more than a decade without, a proper tape deck, component and CD player that would actually play my CDs and not randomly decide, as the boom box does, that some of them don't exist ("I know I've played this for the last six years but today, Madam, there is 'no disc' in my drive")-- one with maybe even a turntable so I could, you know, listen to records again-- whenever that mecca of music appears before my eyes, invariably it turns into katta tsumori- wanted to buy it but went and had the roof repaired, the furnace replaced or a new back deck installed instead. Furnaces I understand, especially when they die in December as the last one did. But the 'concrete operations' portion of my brain (the one babies have- if I don't have it in front of me it's not real) rather resents spending money on things like roofs and back porches that I neither see nor use. One was invaded by a large raccoon in a snowstorm so that a lot of slush water leaked down into some light fixtures, and the other fell down under its own weight thus cutting off access to the back yard, but that's neither here nor there to me. So now I'm getting a new garage door for the garage I never use. The $1300 that will cost me would have bought a really nice stereo system, she says sadly. It's not like I even get something *fun* in the house, like a new bathroom. Structural repairs, that's all it is, structural repairs. Heaven, please send me one of those carpentering dyke girlfriends, would you? So she can play with my house and I can have a proper sound system. Thank you.
To note FTR that I did indeed accomplish something today. Finished the second Godchild chapter I intended to do. Probably shouldn't have started it in the first place because now I must either do the 2-parter of Scold's Bridle as well, or only run two chapters of six. But it's a Rif chapter and far superior IMHO to any of the Jezebel chapters. Angel Sanctuary put Yuki-sensei's eye out for good, is my feel, and Dr. Disraeli has sunk to the level of cheap Rociel clone, boo hiss. Greer: Social blogging? You ever heard the phrase 'slippery slope'? But yes, thanks for the pic of the toddlers (not babies, mind, not from a pro pov) in the boxes. Made my day. Quote of the day, to be referred to in the next round of Aesthe-bashing: "20-somethings are stuck in that not-quite-grownups stage where they waver violently between being insightful and bright, and being idiotic because they're still young and inexperienced." IOW "She who knows not, and knows that she knows not" can actually get away with it, while "She who knows not, and knows not that she knows not" gets bitch-slapped. The scratch in the throat, the little shivers, the sneezing. I have a cold. Why do I fail utterly to be surprised? ^_^ Places are more immediate to me than people. An unfortunate fact, perhaps, but a fact nonetheless. Was back and forth yesterday in the rain to the old centre ('What happened to the mirrors? Where's the ballet bar? Did you see our kettle?') Hurts, to see it devastated and pillaged like that. Cupboards ripped off walls, mess scattered around, papers and left-over daycare clothes and garbagey stuff littered across the carpets. A ruin that a week ago was full of kids and friends and good feelings, a living unit, another home; like seeing the corpse of a friend. Jeanne's version of the old desert hermits' skull on the table, a concrete memento mori. (And some big Buddhist guy too- walked around with a skull on the end of a stick talking to prostitutes.) I should go and read some Anglo-Saxon poetry- they were good at this sort of stuff. Her bith feoh laene, her bith freond laene/ Her bith mann laene, her bith maeg laene/ eall this eorthan gesteall/ idel weortheth- Here faith is fleeting and friends but for the moment/ Here men depart and women do not stay. This earthly dwelling of ours soon becomes empty. On another note, they sent the youngest strong back off to get the mirrors in the truck and I went with him. I don't think I've driven with a guy in his 20's in fifteen years or more, and I can't say I've missed the experience. One-hand u-turns in the middle of Spadina were the least of it. But interesting, that young guys' utter physical confidence, when you're used to people who fall down just from the weight of their bottoms (sigh- Liandra) or who regularly walk into walls. (Yes I know I blog a lot. I've been awake since 4:30. I have lots of time to blog in, except I also spent seven plus hours setting up the daycare. Is no bigger, but sure looks a lot better.) You know what I like? I like when the spam filter catches every single spam message sent me today, and I can go to the message centre and see them all in there wriggling and dying like gokiburi in a cockroach motel. Eat death, capitalist scum!! Sabina said somewhere in that commonsense fashion of hers that makes me believe some people are just born knowing how it is, that the mark of a professional is not that you do it perfectly but that you get it done on time. Belike I am not a professional then, because if I were I'd be writing to that week-from-now deadline, and instead I'm playing free cell. The infinite labyrinths of denial.
Bear the unbearable... and endure the unendurable. I must have gotten more Japanese than I thought over there, because I find that phrase very cheering. Makes me feel like ganbaruing until I turn into one of those little old ladies who survived a lifetime of malnutrition, the privations of the '30s, the disaster of the war, the hardships of the Occupation and the sacrifices of the next two decades, to become 85 at last in the calm sun of Heisei. 'Bear the unbearable'? Sure. Like saying 'the universe continues to unfold as it should.' (Wonder what Trudeau was referring to when he said that? He said it sardonically, of course. One needn't know much about Trudeau to know that.) Compared to the unendurables the Showa emperor was talking about, the present inconveniences are nothing to speak of. Still, it's been a long time since I've been in a funk as bad as this. Reminds me that the last six years have been remarkably stress-free, bar the bends of reverse culture shock just after I came back. But then I /was/ in shock at what had happened to the city I'd left (fallen into the hands of a military governor who took a new bunch of people out and shot them with every piece of legislation) and not registering much for about six months. And the stresses of Japan registered quite differently from this. Acute flare-ups, and very unpleasant too, but not this diffuse lowgrade misery and anxiety. In fact, this is exactly what it felt like when my mother was dying, complete with four-hour sleep periods, and I really could stand to have been spared the little time-warp back to that. But if we're time-travelling, today is a double anniversary: of '95, a grey blowy Friday, when Papuwa ended, and ended to my vast relief without everyone dead; and of '91, another Sunday, when I came down to Tokyo for good after packing up my stuff in Fukushima. I remember the overheated threatening day, and the way the sky went grey with pollution after Omiya, and finding my ryokan among the confusing and grimy streets of West Ikebuk, and coming at last into a clean quiet tatami room in a clean if not exactly quiet building (wooden floors that magnified voices,) and feeling that at least I had this haven away from the crowds, the heat, and the dirtiness of The Horrible City. Ahh, those first days in Tokyo. Now *there* was stress. But that's an entry for the other blog. From the clarity engendered by being in medias disaster (disaster is another country: things look different there), I can now say that it's stupid that the Wankers should have convinced me that fanfic isn't worth writing. The Wankers couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. Can't write their way out of a paper bag. They write Gundam Wing, for God's sake, of which it has been truly said, "Gundam Wing is the chickenpox of yaoi fandom- something everyone seems to catch when they're young and eventually gets over (although there may be some scarring), and good that they do so because it's infinitely more dangerous and humiliating if you catch it when you're older." Older in this case being eighteen-at-the-time. They write WK. They write CLAMP. They write AS- and judge Cain to be unwritable. Where do they get off judging the value of fanfic? They haven't got the aesthetic sense God gave an architect. Stupid twits. What I *would* like to write, because it's so self-referential it'd be funny and because only two people in the world would get it, is Arslan yaoi done in the style of my Arslan translation. Utter utter schlock. It could be worse. Of course it could be worse. It could be infinitely worse. I could be watching a friend or a lover die of AIDS. I could have lost eight of my nine children to a stray American bomb in Afghanistan. All I have to deal with instead is a marginally intolerable situation that may somehow improve in the course of the next two years. But just now that seems more than I feel able to handle. And I can't think of anything that would make it better. There are times that life strikes me as being like those cartoon characters who run off cliffs and who are able to keep running as long as they don't realize there's nothing beneath them. In life there really isn't anything underneath your feet, but you're alright as long as you think there is. Of course, once the illusion vanishes, you fall. Now some people do seem to have something underneath their feet, and I've always wondered what it is. But since it's something they take for granted, like gravity, they can't say. To them it's just the way the world *is*. There's an up, there's a down, there's a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. Naturally. Minomawari no mono The things about one's person. The things you put on automatically because you aren't completely dressed without them. My cousin Emilie wears a delicate perfume that always goes on, no matter what, but I only discovered it was a perfume and not her herself last night. My godmother wore three or four large-stoned rings on each hand, and she looked very odd lying in the casket without them, and without her huge round yellowish hornrims. In Japan I had two pewter rings, middle and ring finger of my right hand. Back aways before that it was a pair of gold hoop earrings. Now that I do babies every day, rings and earrings are definitely only for dress-up. The one thing I always have is my backpack, because shoulder bags press the migraine-maker knots and you can't have an arm purse when you bicycle. But you don't take backpacks to funerals, so this morning I transferred the most necessary items into my old Nakano Sun Mall black beast. Keys and wallet and change purse and yes, the essential minomawari no mono without which I'm not dressed- the Wordtank. And Christians have become amazingly touchy-feely in the last 20 years. Can't go to a service, Catholic, Anglican *or* good liberal rainbow-flagged United Church without having to touch absolute strangers, or even actually kiss them. Offends my Anglo instincts, my French bourgeois instincts, and my Japanese training equally. The civil servants' strike that intervened deus ex machina fashion in February to stop our licence and thus our move to the new daycare space ended last week, so now the movers are coming Friday, and Monday we start our stint in LittleEase. Meanwhile the cherry blossoms scatter on the breeze outside my window. Mutabile semper nec permanet unquam. Sunday night went out to Book City in search of I forget what (what I ended up buying was a book on French verbs sigh.) Book City being a part of my long-ago ie pre-Japan past, because in '85 I lived round the corner from it and also had money and used to go on book-buying binges in its tempting novel section. These days I think twice about forking out $25 for a paperback; and these days too all those English words on a page seem less enticing than the words-and-pictures of a manga, or even Japanese words on a page. Oppressive, almost. Books are like rooms, and I used to think I could open the door of a western novel and find wonders. And sometimes I did, but more often not, because what I really wanted was inside the Japanese manga only I didn't know it. Some day I may start reading heavy adult English again, but I read slowly and life is short. Kids' books are different. I checked out the juvenile section thinking some Diane Wynne-Jones would go down nicely, and almost bought Black Maria except I figured I needed my French verbs more. As well. Because when I got home I found not only that I already owned it, I'd put it out on the bedroom table to read at some point. Reread, though I have no memory of reading it in the first place. (PreJapan was another life.) And what really tickled me was that it reads like it was being narrated by a net friend who shall remain nameless. I once went to a film- it was Derek Jarman's Caravaggio- and found that a friend from work was unaccountably playing the lead part. Surrealistic, watching Stephen-who-wasn't-Stephen up there on the screen. This was a little easier to take- a somewhat younger X calling herself Mig and telling me a story. But the style c'est la femme lui-meme and the style sure feels like her.
'Iyami ka, sore?' My hands smell of magnolia from cutting down the magnolia bush, the part that was all diseased and twisty. Didn't realize that magnolia wood smells like magnolia. And memory says it's not magnolia that I'm smelling on my skin but some other plant Mom used to grow at Bedford, with succulant petals that left a residue when you touched them. Gardenia? But the gardenias in Japan didn't smell like this either. Maybe the gardenias here do. But why am I smelling gardenia after cutting down the magnolia? (FWIW my brother hoovered up half the cherry pits from the lawn, as perhaps the only way to get them out of the thick grass. I like my cherry blossoms, but I'd be just as happy if what grew in the back garden was a maple or an oak instead- something that doesn't drop fershlugginer *fruit* all over.)
Wish my shoulder would unknot, wish my sinuses would drain, wish my head would stop hurting. Still got five pages of Arslan done, but wish it had been four more and I'd finished the chapter. Bought a floral arrangement to be sent to the funeral home on Monday, for a fast eighty bucks. Now I understand those 'in lieu of flowers' notices in the obits. Did 3/4 of the daycare laundry because the daycare washing machine is broken and the dryer doesn't work too well either. Wish all the manga I need to read were read, wish all the reviews were written, wish all the translations were finished. Wish I had a story to write because I wish I was somewhere other than here and a good story is the only place I can imagine myself wanting to be right now. Late-breaking flash: there is intelligent life in Blogdom. (Well, LiveJournal-dom.) Even in something that's marginally That Corner of Blogdom (spits). It's here in the May 4 entry. Something I'd half been aware of but never analyzed for myself. Go her. I never got very far reading Hi Izuru Tokoro no Tenshi, the shounen ai reworking of the story of Shotoku Taishi. Tiny print, obscure kanji with even more obscure meanings in furigana the size of pinpricks, and a Nara period (pre-Nara kanaa?) setting that takes several rereads of the same koma to figure out who all these people are, once you work your way through their titles. (First you have to figure what's a title and what's a name. Then you have to figure that the -ko ending is used by men. Then you have to deal with the fact that all these people are inbred and interrelated in a way that makes the Hapsburgs look as exogamic as Navajos. The little wrinkle that half-sibs by different mothers could marry, and did, makes it impossible to read these relationships as anything congruent at all to our modern western ones. Just accept that everyone is everyone else's cousin, and all of them are related to the Sogas one way or the other.) Not to mention the problem of what the (unfootnoted- at least the relative thing gets footnoted and family-treed) place names refer to- parts of Japan? Parts of Korea? What? But last night in an access of masochism I attacked vol 1 with reading glasses, bright light, and the useful plastic thingy Sue sent me that you put on the page to magnify the text. And once you get into it- actually, once you meet the furure Shotoku Taishi himself- you're away to the races. I'd heard it was about the beautiful and conniving prince who schemed his way to the throne. I forgot that Yamagishi's bishounen (and Shoutoku at 11 in this volume is bishounen in spades) are classic shounen ai. Which means in a word- they suffer. From internal demons, that classic shounen ai mode of suffering elegantly. I look forward to seeing Shotoku being seductively evil and wrenchingly unhappy for another three volumes. I wish I had more, but the very idea of reading it in bunko form- the only one commercially available- makes me want to lie down in a dark room with a cold cloth over my eyes. And a taste may be better than the whole thing. The other leitmotif of shounen ai is protracted suffering on both the characters' and the readers' parts. I had to abandon Kaze to Ki when I got to the long long flashback, a whole volume of the anthologized series with no end in sight, where Gilbert is psychologically tortured by his uncle. The early mangaka didn't care how they abused their readers, and their readers I can only assume really liked being abused. Weird, says the woman in the glass house who really wonders what's happening in Rika now.
The cherry tree looks like pink snow against the grey sky. There is that to be said for Negawakuba hana no shita nite haru shinan, not that being in a hospital hooked up to an oxygen machine is exactly the same as being under the cherry trees. But who knows where people go in their minds when they start to drift away from their bodies? I suppose it could be a bit like dreaming and one might know the cherry trees are out there still. Whatever, my godmother died early this morning, and if her theories on what happens afterwards are correct is currently catching up on a quarter century's gossip with her sister and my mother and my aunt. Naraba ii. (My sister adds- 'over cocktails'. Specifically the Johnson cocktail, a lethal mixture of three parts Gilbey's, two parts Noilly Prat and one part Cinzano, that my godmother wasn't able to drink for the last 20 years because alcohol gave her vertigo.) Stray thought apropos of Greer's latest: the phrase 'Go me' has a definitely friendly-and-good-humoured ring to my ears now. Is this all Cassie Claire's doing or did it always? The afternoon of Sep 11 Helen's parents came to get her from the daycare at 3, an unheard of time for two professors to quit work in the first week of class. "You seem pretty calm," J said to me. "Talk to me tomorrow when I actually know something," I answered. I can't remember what exactly he said next, because when anxiety has me in a holding pattern my memory goes in and out like bad reception on a radio. But he told me he had a friend who worked in the WTC that no-one had heard anything from either. The friend in fact did get out- walked out of the WTC with bodies crashing to the pavement around him. Took a sabbatical from his work while he reconsiders his existence. I suppose you would, under the circumstances- wonder if bond trading has any connection to life as it actually is. And maybe that's it. It's the thinking that there's a disjunction between life as it actually is and the constructed life as it sposed to be. Planes do not crash into World Trade Centers. When they do, the way it sposed to be goes up in smoke. But in fact it's more a mistake of viewpoint. 'Anything that can happen can happen to you,' as the old philosophers taught. I suppose if you can believe that and actually accept it- that *there is no safe place*- you've got the security that the ancient philosophers were after in the first place. But I still have the reflex that some things ought not to happen. Montaigne argued that you should get used to pain in childhood because once you grow up you never know when you'll be tortured by the courts or just a marauding mob of soldiers. That's 16th century common sense and philosophical acceptance for you- and it's just totally wrong. |