The blizzard comes on and the cave-in comes on and the landslide comes on and the avalanche too. A whistling that freezes more deeply the spines of icicles goes on and on like a siren. Out of the fog and the thunder and the smoke and my shadow a figure as pale as milk comes tottering, sloshing staggering. It's me. Me but a sliver shed from the iceberg's shoulder as it groans toward some future.
This is part of a sequence called ‘Second-Hand Kite Feathers’, all but one of which is genuinely derived from the Japanese.
I can’t speak or write Japanese, but using a combination of Google Translate, Wiktionary and existing English versions (in this case Robert Pulvers’ translation from Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems of Kenji Miyazawa), I sometimes write down versions of Japanese poems in English. I published a few in School of Forgery because the underlying theme of the book was ‘the volatile relationship between fakery and invention’.
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” goes the well-worn Eliot quote. It continues: “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” But isn’t the defaced object automatically made different? Did he mean that it should no longer bear any resemblance to what it once was? That is has to have been pointed to a new purpose? One thing I like about remakes and readjustments — the principle of them (something which seems to occupy film-makers more than poets) — is how they make it seem as if the paint is not yet dry, as if nothing is really finished.