Shuntaro Tanikawa
Shuntaro Tanikawa Poems
Having parted with the evening glow
I meet with night.
But the angrier red clouds go nowhere
...
Mother,
Why is the river laughing?
Why, because the sun is tickling the river
...
When I am sad I can't write a sad poem.
All I can do is endure my tears.
When I'm happy I don't write a happy poem.
...
Yes, this is the guy I call "watashi"—
Two tiny eyes and two common ears,
one nose, one mouth.
...
Human beings on this small orb
sleep, waken and work, and sometimes
wish for friends on Mars.
...
Sound becoming sound
had begun to infest the blank white paper,
...
'Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
Bright copper kettles and warm woollem mittens,
Brown paper packages tied up with strings -
...
This thing lying on the desk is now being seen by my eyes. I could
pick it up at this moment. I could cut out a human figure with it. I might
even cut off all my hair. Though it's understood that murder is out of
...
Plump and snug and feathery,
a ball of yarn
rolls gaily down the street
...
As of yesterday I am a squash
and no longer think at all.
I grow gradually fatter
...
Dad's eating, staring striaght ahead,
looking at no one.
My younder brother tells him
...
Shuntaro Tanikawa Biography
Shuntarō Tanikawa (谷川 俊太郎 Tanikawa Shuntarō?) (born December 15, 1931 in Tokyo City, Japan) is a Japanese poet and translator. He is one of the most widely read and highly regarded of living Japanese poets, both in Japan and abroad, and a frequent subject of speculations regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature. Several of his collections, including his selected works, have been translated into English, and his Floating the River in Melancholy, translated by William I. Eliott and Kazuo Kawamura, won the American Book Award in 1989. Tanikawa has written more than 60 books of poetry in addition to translating Charles Schulz's Peanuts and the Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese. He was nominated for the 2008 Hans Christian Andersen Award for his contributions to children's literature. He also helped translate Swimmy by Leo Lionni into Japanese. Among his contributions to less conventional art genres is his open video correspondence with Shūji Terayama (Video Letter, 1983). He has collaborated several times with the lyricist Chris Mosdell, including creating a deck of cards created in the omikuji fortune-telling tradition of Shinto shrines, titled The Oracles of Distraction. Tanikawa also co-wrote Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad and wrote the lyrics to the theme song of Howl's Moving Castle. Together with Jerome Rothenberg and Hiromi Itō, he has participated in collaborative renshi poetry, pioneered by Makoto Ōoka. The philosopher Tetsuzō Tanikawa was his father.)
The Best Poem Of Shuntaro Tanikawa
Music Once Again
One day somewhere
someone played the piano.
From beyond time and space the sound caresses my ears,
even now making the air tremble.
A sweet whispering from far beyond─
I cannot interpret it.
I can only yield myself to it like trees in the grove
that rustle in the wind.
When was the first sound born?
In the midst of the vacuous universe
like a code that someone secretly sent,
and enigmatically….
No geniuses ‘created' music.
They merely closed their ears to meaning
and just listened humbly to silence,
which has existed from time immortal.
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