Poem
Toshio Nakae
A HOUSE FOR STARS
Without the help of any classical designer or avant-garde architect, a house is built somewhere in a corner of the sky.With no sound of a hammer and with no concrete mixer, a house is built.
Without a fence or walls and without even land, things and expenses are only lavishly wasted in the far distance.
A bare, boundless night garden. A tiny, empty, landless house. Nothing but the crystallized fruit of sighs, unapproved, without a roof, without pillars, without a steel frame. Cold, cold meaninglessness.
House-shaped crystals of countless trembling sighs. Set apart without roads, they constitute a city.
Not to live in that house in that city, not to rest in that house, but to get angry in that house, only to get angry, life was necessary in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Life was necessary in Auschwitz and Stalingrad.
And yet, that city where no visitors are. That house. The house where only stars live, a house for stars, a house for human sighs.
It will evaporate in anger. A house that beautifully arouses an illusion just as a faint, faint dream does at the end of despair.
© Translation: 2007, William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura
A HOUSE FOR STARS
© 1963, Toshio Nakae
From: 20 no shi to chinnkonnka (Twenty Poems and Requiems)
Publisher: Shichosha, Tokyo
From: 20 no shi to chinnkonnka (Twenty Poems and Requiems)
Publisher: Shichosha, Tokyo
Poems
Poems of Toshio Nakae
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A HOUSE FOR STARS
Without the help of any classical designer or avant-garde architect, a house is built somewhere in a corner of the sky.With no sound of a hammer and with no concrete mixer, a house is built.
Without a fence or walls and without even land, things and expenses are only lavishly wasted in the far distance.
A bare, boundless night garden. A tiny, empty, landless house. Nothing but the crystallized fruit of sighs, unapproved, without a roof, without pillars, without a steel frame. Cold, cold meaninglessness.
House-shaped crystals of countless trembling sighs. Set apart without roads, they constitute a city.
Not to live in that house in that city, not to rest in that house, but to get angry in that house, only to get angry, life was necessary in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Life was necessary in Auschwitz and Stalingrad.
And yet, that city where no visitors are. That house. The house where only stars live, a house for stars, a house for human sighs.
It will evaporate in anger. A house that beautifully arouses an illusion just as a faint, faint dream does at the end of despair.
© 2007, William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura
From: 20 no shi to chinnkonnka (Twenty Poems and Requiems)
From: 20 no shi to chinnkonnka (Twenty Poems and Requiems)
A HOUSE FOR STARS
Without the help of any classical designer or avant-garde architect, a house is built somewhere in a corner of the sky.With no sound of a hammer and with no concrete mixer, a house is built.
Without a fence or walls and without even land, things and expenses are only lavishly wasted in the far distance.
A bare, boundless night garden. A tiny, empty, landless house. Nothing but the crystallized fruit of sighs, unapproved, without a roof, without pillars, without a steel frame. Cold, cold meaninglessness.
House-shaped crystals of countless trembling sighs. Set apart without roads, they constitute a city.
Not to live in that house in that city, not to rest in that house, but to get angry in that house, only to get angry, life was necessary in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Life was necessary in Auschwitz and Stalingrad.
And yet, that city where no visitors are. That house. The house where only stars live, a house for stars, a house for human sighs.
It will evaporate in anger. A house that beautifully arouses an illusion just as a faint, faint dream does at the end of despair.
© 2007, William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura
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