Dead Boy
translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles
I am a boy, having never known love,
Who has suddenly fallen from the summit
Of frightening infancy into the darkness of a well
Dark, watery hands choke my delicate neck
Innumerable needles of cold push into me,
Killing my heart, wet as a fish
Inside, each organ swells like a flower
As I move horizontally below the earth
Along the surface of the water
Eventually, from the green horn in my groin
A sprout, unreliable and delicate, will grow
Clawing up the heavy soil with thin hands
One day, like a pallid face,
Its tree will rustle under the painful light
For I desire as much space inside me
For light as space for shadow
死んだ少年
ぼくは 愛も知らず
怖ろしい幼年時代の頂きから 突然
井戸の暗みに落ちこんだ少年だ
くらい水の手が ぼくのひよわなのどをしめ
つめたさの無数の雛が 押し入って来ては
ぼくの 魚のように濡れた心臓をあやめる
ぼくは すべての内臓で 花のようにふくれ
地下水の表面を 水平にうごいていく
ぼくの股の青くさいつのからは やがて
たよりない芽が生え 重苦しい土を
かぼそい手で 這いのぼっていくだろう
青ざめた顔のような一本の樹が
痛い光の下にそよぐ日が来るだろう
ぼくは 影の部分と同じほど
ぼくの中に 光の部分がほしいのだ
Copyright © 2024 by Mutsuo Takahashi and Jeffrey Angles. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 19, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“[‘Dead Boy’]: This poem was included in my second book of poems, Bara no Ki, Nise no Koibito-tachi [Rose Tree, Fake Lovers], published in September 1964 by Gendaishi Kōbōsha. My first collection of poems, Mino, Atashi no Oushi [Mino, My Bull], was published in November 1959 by Sabaku Shinjin Shudan Jimuyoku [Office of the Desert Poets]. In 1946, when I was seven years old, I started writing things that resembled poems, but my work really began to take poetic form around 1953, when I was fourteen. Mino, My Bull contained thirty-four poems written between then and the time that I was twenty-one. I wrote them in Kitakyushu, the city where I lived at the time, and most of them were printed in Sabaku [Desert], a magazine financed by its contributing members and published in Kitakyushu. ‘Dead Boy’ came in my second book, Rose Tree, Fake Lovers, but it still retains a strong whiff of the earlier Mino, Atashi no Oushi. The poem is characterized by narcissism and its subjugation. The ultimate place for adolescent narcissism is death. The boy here is looking at a ‘tree’ that ‘rustle[s] under the painful light.’ This poem is a somewhat regressive self-portrait of me at that age.”
—Mutsuo Takahashi, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles
Mutsuo Takahashi
