Student Translations

The Battle Against Meaningless Things

by Yosuke Tanaka

translated by Amanda Berke

In the beginning, there was chaos.
No, that’s not quite right.
In the beginning, there was nothing.
It was a spacious, deserted emptiness.
Time slipped by, two years specifically. A desk was carried in, then a bed,
a computer, a shelf, chairs (two of them), a folding table,
an electric piano, a fax machine, and lots of newspapers.
Books. Magazines. Playbills. Envelopes. CDs. Faxes from someone.
Letters from someone else. Unimportant things. Important things.
Things that may become important.
(Meaningless things
now filling every available space.

The act of reorganization
is not unlike excavating a mountain.
I piled various objects, one by one, upon the mountainside-
because they were useful, because they were important, because I enjoyed them-
and because at some point I loved them,
I guess they become that much more difficult to discard.
Papers are harder to deal with than books, this is a well-known fact, so I decided to leave the books alone.
I chose to do battle only with the mountain of documents.
However, as I transformed them into orderly rectangles, that is,
as I bound them into their true forms, as
novels
and
notebooks
and
folders
and
two-ring binders
and
weekly photo magazines,
they became even harder to handle.
They seemed heavier
and more depressing, somehow.

I love two ring binders and organizers.
Just one click of that classic two-hole punch, together with
the satisfying snap of the metal hardware, and I’m filled with a pleasant sort of feeling
as the paper documents are arranged into itemized, colored files. It all
becomes beautifully tidy. I line up the largest binders in
a row on my office desk (bookends included), but they fall ungracefully left and right.
I push from the left, they fall to the right; I push from the right, they fall to the left.
They tumble down, a study in physics –
triggering an avalanche (a cascade of snow.) across the surface of my desk
(Meaningless things
now a mountain strewn across my floor.

I almost started crying when I dropped my bicycle key on the ground.
I only dropped it, but
it seemed to be absorbed into the floorboards.
Every fallen thing, every file, every book, every piece of trash,
one by one I checked them all, moving each to a new place.
The bag was only half full, but
I even went so far as to disassemble my Hitachi home vacuum cleaner
in order to inspect the insides, until –
ah, it’s getting dark out. And now I can’t even ride my bike.
One thing after another, that’s how life goes to pieces.
In my distraction I lean against the tower of books, which collapses again,
scattering across the floor of the room.

A multitude of things
spread out before my eyes.
What the hell is this insipid feeling?
Everything has a name written on it,
“Shinchō Japanese Dictionary,” for example,
“Bungakukai Monthly,” for example,
but I can no longer grasp the spatial or temporal relationship between
Shinchō Japanese Dictionary and Bungakukai Monthly and this room and the time I’ve spent in it.
Love and courage.
Courage and strength.
Those are the real essentials. Oh, I’d like to go out and join hands with every person in the world,
and talk to my heart’s content about the battle against meaningless things. To clear out some of
this wasteland.

From the other side of the room, suddenly:
“Let’s keep the mountain clean by taking home our trash!”
The letters catch my eye.
A paper bag from ICI Ishii Sports. I got it when I rode my bike to Jimbocho
to buy some supplies for climbing Mt Okukuji Nantai.
The problem today is what happens after I’ve brought my trash back home.
Maybe the garbage rises in a sloppy stack as I avert my eyes from other problems,
escaping instead into meaninglessness.
When to get married, for example.
When to go to the dentist,        for example.

Isn’t it so hot in the summer? I bought a drink cart, very functional.
It’s a convenient size, and it even has two nice drawers.
The top is heat-proof, too!
It uses a material
called melamine.

Yes, that will do fine. There, on the top of the cart, the only empty surface;
I rest my chin on my hand
and wait in a daze as summer passes by.

[The original text can be found here.]

Outcrop

Aureate dawn and shivering evening finding our brig head to wind face to face with this stately home and its outbuildings which shape an outcrop as extensive as Epirus and the Peloponnese, or the great isle of Japan, or Araby! Shrines lit by the return of gyrovagues, grand vistas of Martello Towers, sand dunes adorned with hot blossoms and Verres-like parties; the wide waterways of Carthage and jetties of a seedy Venice; the muffled eruptions of Etnas and fissures of blossoms and glacial waters; laundrettes besieged by Teutonic aspens; banks of unique parks bowing the crowns of Japanese trees; the ‘Royal’ Crescents and ‘Grand’ Boardwalks of Scarborough and Brooklyn; their railways flanking, crossing, undergrounding the layout of this Hall, picked out from the pasts of the most swanky and most colossal constructions of Italy, of America, of Asia, whose windows and terraces show off full beams, booze and breathiness, are open to the whimsy of wanderers and peers – who permit, in daylight hours, all the quicksteps of the coasts, – and the triple-time foxtrots of the renowned vales of art, to wondrously adorn the elevations of Outcrop Abbey.

Translated by James Brookes, after Rimbaud’s “Promontoire” (Illuminations)