Once Again I Found My Fortune Cast to the Wind Leonie Gilmour

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Yone Noguchi (1875-1947)
[known in Nippon as Noguchi Yonejirô]
http://www.h.ehime-u.air-conditioning.jp/~marx/YN/index.htm

Hokku
These 'hokku' first appeared in Poetry 15 (1919), p. 67.
http://world wide web.themargins.net/bib/D/d15.html

I
$.25 of song—what else?
I, a rider of the stream,
Lone between the clouds.

Two
Total of faults, you say.
What beauty in repentance!
Tears, songs—thus life flows.

III
But the march to life—
Break vocal to sing the new vocal!
Cloud leaps, flowers flower.

IV
Song of sea in rain,
Vocalisation of the sky, earth and men!
List, song of my heart.

Japanese Hokkus
Japanese Hokkus, Boston, The Iv Seas, 1920, 120pp [84 hokku]

1
Suppose the stars
Autumn and pause?—Do they ever audio
Like my ain love song?

4
Some one at my door?
Go away, become,—go away!
Good dark, sir or madam.

xviii
Is information technology a fallen leaf?
That'due south my soul sailing on
The silence of Life.

29
Full of faults, you say.
What beauty in repentance!
Tears, songs . . . thus life flows.

43
Lo, light and shadow
Journey to the home of night:
M and I—to love!

77
Is at that place anything new under the sun?
Certainly at that place is.
See how a bird flies, how flowers smile!

Yone Noguchi
A Proposal to American Poets (1904)
Yone Noguchi, "A Proposal to American Poets," Reader 3:3 (Feb. 1904): 248.

Hokku (seventeen-syllable poem) is like a tiny star, mind you, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly-open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. It is but a guiding lamp. Its value depends on how much it suggests. The Hokku poet's chief aim is to print the reader with the loftier atmosphere in which he is living. I ever compare an English poem with a mansion with windows widely open, even the pictures of its drawing-room being visible from exterior. I cartel say information technology does not tempt me much to see the within.

"A deject of flowers!
Is the bong from Uyeno
Or Asakusa?"
(Basho.)

Yeah, cloud of flowers, of class, in Mukojima, the odorous profusion shutting out every prospect! Heed to the bell sounding from the distance! Does it come up from the temple of Uyeno or Asakusa? Doesn't the poem suggest a Leap moving-picture show of the river Sumida?

"On a Withered branch,
Lo! the crows are sitting at that place,
Oh, this Fall eve!"
(Basho.)

What a suggestion for the solitariness of a Japanese Autumn evening!
The crows--what a monotonous "Kah! Kah, Kah!"--are the image of melancholy for Japanese.
Basho was a master of Hokku, a great suggester. He made long excursions to the remotest spots often, leaving behind him traces which remain to this day in the shapes of stones with his inscription. His monuments are said to number more than grand.
Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets!
You say far too much, I should say.
Here are some of my ain attempts in the seventeen-syllable verse:

"My girl'south lengthy hair
Swung o'er me from Heaven's gate:
Lo, Evening'south shadow!"

"Lo, light and shadow
Journey to the home of night:
Thou and I--to Love!"

"Where the flowers sleep,
Thank God! I shall sleep, to-night.
Oh, come, butterfly! "

"Fallen leaves! Nay, spirits?
Shall I become downward with thee
'Long a stream of Fate?"

Yone Noguchi
from Through the Torii
London: East. Mathews, 1914; Boston, The Four Seas, 1922

What is the Hokku Verse form?
in Through the Torii [first published as "Hokku" in The Academy, 13 July 1912, and reprinted as "What Is a Hokku Poem?" in Rhythm 12 (January. 1913).

PARTLY to make my annual settlement at the terminate of the year, at least my spiritual settlement, one month later, as the villagers are all the same attached to the erstwhile lunar agenda, mainly to chase after the plum-blossoms (why, hunting is the proper word), although I knew it was only a few weeks since the chrysanthemums turned to dust, I left cold Tokyo in December towards Atami where the glad laughing sunlight of Spring always arrives showtime beyond the seas. You may call me mad or fantastic if you volition, when I tell you that I journeyed 1 hundred miles for simply an early sight of the flowers; that early sight indeed makes my ephemeral life worth living. I was glad, when I reached Atami, to find that my blossom exploration was started well, though fifty-fifty at Atami the season was a lilliputian early on for it; when the plum trees in the well-known "Plum Forest" there, a calendar week or x days later, began to smile upward to the skies and sunlight (and to me), I carried my world-exhausted soul every day out nether their shade, and talked with them in the silence that was [<126] across the globe and humanity. I was at one time besieged by the aforementioned winter common cold; worse than that, I was forced to settle my yearly account from which I had attempted to escape some xx days before. My trivial adonis davurica, to utilize the botanical name, or the Fortune Longevity Grass at the southern window of my abode was non yet in bloom; I was again obliged to shut myself within the room with a little brazier on whose ashes I could write and rewrite the pages from the Songs of Innocence, and to look happy travelling before Fuji Mount's presence in Hiroshige'due south pictures. But it happened one morning when I was washing my confront in my garden (oh, where's yester year'south morning-glory?) that the very first annotation of a nightingale made me raise my confront at once to the plum tree where 2 or three blossoms had just begun to break; "At last, Leap even to Tokyo," I exclaimed. I made a habit from so to sit down on the balcony facing the garden when the sunlight fell there with all heart and soul and to count the blossoms [<127] every twenty-four hour period; I recall here to my mind the following seventeen-syllable hokku verse form:

"One bloom of the plum--
Yeah, as much equally that one blossom, every day,
Have nosotros of Jump's warmth."

It might be from the conditions of my impaired health of late that such a little verse form as the above makes a strong impression on my mind; indeed, I never felt before as this year, the kindness of the sunlight and the joy of leap. I declare myself to exist an adherent of this hokku poem in whose gem-pocket-size grade of utterance our Japanese poets were able to limited their understanding of Nature, better than that, to sing or chant their longing or wonder or adoration towards Mother Nature; to call the hokku poem suggestive is near wrong, although it has get a recent fashion for the Western critics to interpret, not only this hokku simply all Japanese poetry (even my work included) by that one word, because the hokku poem itself is distinctly clear-cutting like a diamond or star, never mystified by any cloud or mist like Truth or Beauty of Keats' understanding. It is all very well if you [<128] have a suggestive attitude of heed in reading it; I say that the star itself has almost no share in the creation of a condition fifty-fifty when your dream or vision is gained through its dazzler. I am just pleased to know that the star had such an influence upon y'all ; and I am willing to endorse yous when you say the hokku poem is suggestive in the aforementioned sense that truth and humanity are suggestive. Only I can say myself equally a poet (am I likewise bold to claim that word ?) that your poem would certainly end in artificiality if you get-go out to be suggestive from the outset; I value the hokku poem, at least some of them, because of its own truth and humanity simple and plain. Let me say for once and all at that place is no discussion in so common use by Western critics equally suggestive, which makes more mischief than enlightenment, although they mean it quite only, of course, to exist a new forcefulness or salvation; I apologise to you for my digression when I say that no critic is necessary for this world of poetry. Who will criticise Truth or Humanity? I ever thought that the most beautiful flowers grow shut to the ground, and they need no hundred [<129] petals for expressing their own beauty; how can you lot call it real poetry if yous cannot tell information technology by a few words? Therefore these seventeen syllables are just enough at least to our Japanese mind. And if you lot cannot express all by one hokku, and so y'all can say it in many hokku; yes, that is all.
I confess that I secretly desired to become a hokku poet in my younger days, that is now twenty years ago, and I used to put the hokku collection of Basho or Buson with Spencer'due south Education in the aforementioned drawer of my desk; what did Spencer mean, you lot might wonder, for a boy of sixteen or seventeen? I myself wonder to-day nearly it when I expect dorsum on it; but it was the younger solar day of new Nihon when even nosotros boys idea to educate others before being educated ourselves (there was Spencer'due south Didactics), and we wished to swallow all the Western wisdom and philosophy, Spencer or Darwin or what else, at a gulp. I used to pass through Shiba Park famous for the Sleeping Houses of the Feudal Princes and likewise for the pine forest towering over the mortality and age, towards my school at Mita, whither to-day [<130] of xx years later on I plow my steps again to tell the Japanese students almost the English poets born in the golden clime or other clime; and I often looked up with irresistible longing of heart, to a piddling cottage on a hill in this sacred park where Yeiki Kikakudo, the descendant of the famous hokku poet Kikaku in poetical lineage, used to live in his seventieth yr. I cannot recollect at present exactly how I happened to call on him i night except from my impulse and decision that my meeting with him was idea necessary for my poetical evolution; it was the dark of meigetsu, the full moon of September, when many wanderers like myself, moths restless subsequently soul's awareness, could be seen in the park through the shadows of trees. The lilliputian house, I mean that of Main Yeiki, so small that it might exist comfortably put in whatever ordinary-sized Western drawing-room, was mortiferous silent with no light lighted; I thought at in one case that it was the poet's cute consideration towards the moon whose heavenly light, not being disturbed past any earthly lamp, might thus take full sway. I met the old poet sitting on the step under the aureate [<131] shower of the lite, when I climbed upward to his house, he led me inside the business firm where the all open shoji doors welcomed the moon with old-fashioned hospitality. Indeed that should exist the way to treat the angelic guest; when you lot observe how the Japanese moonlight crawls in with its fairy-like gilded steps, you volition wonder how humanised it is here. We 2, young and one-time, sat silent, leaving all the talk to the breezes which carried down the moon's autumnal message; the light brutal on the hanging at the tokonoma whereon I read the post-obit hokku poem:

"Fall'due south full moon:
Lo, the shadows of a pine tree
Upon the mats!"

Really it was my commencement opportunity to find the full beauty of the light and shadow, more the beauty of the shadow in fact far more luminous than the light itself, with such a decorativeness, particularly when it stamped the dustless mats as a dragon-shaped ageless pino tree; I thanked Kikaku, the author of the to a higher place lines, for giving me just the point where [<132] to find the natural beauty, on which my imagination should have play enough. I bowed to the Poet Yeiki for practiced-nighttime, and thanked him for the most interesting talk, although nosotros had spoken scarcely a word, but I was perfectly tickled in delight equally already so the old story of Emerson and Carlyle who had a happy conversation in Silence was known to me. When I left him, the moon was quite loftier, under whose gold blessing all the copse and birds hurried to dream; it was exactly such a dark on which only 2 or three year ago I wrote the following lines:

"Beyond the song of night and moon,
O perfume of perfume!)
My soul, equally a wind
Whose heart's likewise total to sing,
Only roam, astray . . ."

Indeed, how l wandered that nighttime, now thinking of this poet, then on that hokku poem; I conspicuously retrieve it was the very night that I felt fully the beauty of the following impromptu in hokku by Basho:

"Shall I knock
At Miidera Temple's gate?
Ah, moon of to-night!"

Suppose yous stand at that temple's gate high upon the loma lapped and again lapped past the slow water, with your dreamy face towards this Lake Biwa in the shape ot a biwa-lute, which, as a certain poetess has written, "like a beat of white lies dropped by the passing mean solar day." I am certain you will feel yourself to be a god or goddess in the beginning of the earth as in the Japanese mythology, who by blow or mystery has risen above the opalescent mists which softly cover the globe of later night.
I did non forget to bear with me the hokku collection of Basho or Buson or another poet in my American life, even when I did the and then-chosen tramp life in 1896-1898 through the California field full of buttercups, by the mountain where the cypress trees beckoned my soul to fly, not merely considering the thought of habitation and longing for information technology was then my only comfort, but more because by the blessing of the book, I mean the hokku book, I entered direct into the bang-up centre of Nature; when I left the Pacific Slope in subsequently years towards the Eastern cities built by the modern culture and machineries, I suddenly thought I had lost the [<134] secret understanding of the hokku poems born in Japan, insignificant like a lakeside reed and irresponsible like a dragon-fly; how could y'all properly sympathize, for case, the following poem in New York of skyscrapers and automobiles:

"A deject of flowers!
Is information technology the bell of Uyeno
Or that of Asakusa?"

The poet, by the way Basho, means the cloud of flowers, of form, in Mukojima of Tokyo, whose odorous profusion shuts out every prospect and thought of geographical sense, of East or Due west; listen to the bell ringing from the distance! Does information technology come from the temple of Uyeno or Asakusa? Why, it is the poem of a Spring film of the river Sumida.
Although I was quite loyal to this seventeen syllable grade of Japanese poesy during many years of my foreign wandering, I had scarcely any moment to write a hokku in original Japanese or English, till the day when I most abruptly awoke in 1902 to the racket of Charing Cross Where I wrote as follows: [<135]

"Tell me the street to Heaven.
This? Or that? Oh, which?
What webs of streets!"

And it was by Westminster Bridge where I heard the evening chime that I wrote again in hokku which appears, when translated, as follows:

"Is it, Oh, list!
The dandy vocalisation of Sentence Mean solar day?
So runs Thames, and then runs my Life."

In September of 1904, I returned home; the tender silken autumnal rain that was Japanese verse, and my elder brother welcomed me (what a ghost tired and pale I was then), and I was taken to his house in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo to launder off my strange dust and slowly renew my old associate with things Japanese; Oh, that memorable kickoff night after thirteen years abroad! I spent it alone in the upstairs room where I was left to sleep. I did not autumn asleep for many many hours every bit my back already began to ache from lying on the floor in the Japanese fashion; and my nostrils could not make themselves gratis from a strange [<136] Japanese smell, indeed the soy smell, which I thought was crawling from the kitchen. As I said, the rain dropped quite incessantly; the lamplight burned feebly; and I was alone. Listen! What was that I heard? Well, it was a cricket singing under the roof or behind the hanging at the tokonoma. I exclaimed then: "Was information technology possible to hear the cricket in the very centre of the city ?" My heed at one time recalled the following hokku poem by Issa:

"Let me turn over,
Pray, go away,
Oh my cricket !"

My thought dwelt for a long while that night upon Issa, the hokku poet at the mountainside of Shinshu, and his shabby hut "of dirt and Wattles fabricated" where he indeed lived with the insects, practically sharing his house with them; whenever I read him, the starting time affair to strike me is his simple sympathy with a small living thing like a butterfly or this cricket, that was in truth the sure proof of his being a poet. Although I had often read the above poem, I can say [<137] that I never felt its humanity and so keenly every bit that night.
When the late Mr. Aston published A History of Japanese Literature quite many years agone, I know that the part about Basho, the greatest hokku poet of the seventeenth century, and the hokku poems in full general, did not brand a proper impression on the Western mind. And here I have no particular intention to forcefulness on your appreciation with this Japanese form of poetry; this article is merely to express my own love for it. When nosotros say that the East is the same as the West, nosotros hateful that the W is as different from the East equally the East is from the West; how could you sympathize united states of america through and through? Poetry is the most difficult art; it will lose the greater part of its significance when parted from its background and the circumstances from which information technology bound forth. I should like to ask who in the West volition be able to think the following hokku poem the greatest of its kind as we Japanee in one case thought:

"On a withered twig,
Lo, the crow is sitting at that place,
Oh, this Autumn eve!" [<138]

Even to united states of america, I confess, this solitariness of a Japanese Autumn evening with the crow crying monotonously on the tree is growing lately less impressive, when in fact every bit to-day the crows become scarce before the factories and smoke; and our mod heterogeneous minds are get-go to plow somewhere else. [<139]

Again on Hokku

THE give-and-take "epigram" is no right word (and in that location's no correct word at all) for Hokku, the seventeen syllable poem of Japan, just every bit overcoat is non the word for our haori. "That is good," I exclaimed in spite of myself, when I plant this comparison to begin my article. We know that haori is more, or less, according to your attitude, than the overcoat of Western garb which rises and falls with practical service; when I say more than, I hateful that our Japanese haori is unlike the Western overcoat, a piece of art and besides, a symbol of rite, as its usefulness appears often when it means practically naught. If I rightly understand the give-and-take epigram, information technology is or at least looks to accept one object, like that overcoat of applied utilize, to express something, a Cathay of idea or not, before itself ; its beauty, if it has whatsoever, is like that of a netsake or okimono carved in ivory or wood, decorative at the best. Simply what our hokku aims at is, like the haori of silk or crepe, a usefulness of uselessness, not what it expresses simply how it expresses itself spiritually ; its real [<140] value is not in its physical directness but in its psychological indirectness. To use a simile, it is like a dew upon lotus leaves of light-green, or under maple leaves of red, which, although it is nix but a trifling drop of water, shines, glitters and sparkles now pearl-white, and then amethyst-blue, once more crimson, co-ordinate to the time of twenty-four hours and state of affairs; better withal to say, this hokku is similar a spider-thread laden with the white summertime dews, swaying amid the branches of a tree like an oftentimes invisible ghost in air, on the perfect rest; that sway indeed, not the thread itself, is the dazzler of our seventeen syllable verse form.
I cannot forget Mrs. N. Southward. who came to run across me at the poppy-covered Mountainside of California one morning, at present almost seventeen years ago; what I cannot forget chiefly about that morning is her story that she made a roundabout way in entering into my garden as the little proper path had been blocked past a spider-net thick with diamonds. I exclaimed then as I do oftentimes to-day: "Such a dear sweet soul (that could non dare break that silvery thread) would be the very soul who will capeesh our [<141] hokku." What do y'all say, if in that location is i, suppose, who brings downwards the spider-cyberspace and attempts to hang information technology up in another place? Is it not exactly the example with a translator of Japanese verse form, hokku or uta, whatever it be? To use another expression, what would you say if somebody ventured to imitate with someone's fountain pen the Japanese picture fatigued with the bamboo brush and incensed Indian ink? Is it not over again the exact case with the translator similar Mr. William N. Porter in A Year of Japanese Epigrams?
We confess that nosotros take shown, to speak rather frankly, very little satisfaction even with the translations of Prof. Chamberlain and the late Mr. Aston; when I say that I was perfectly amazed at Mr. Porter'due south brazenness in his sense of curiosity, I hope that my words volition never be taken equally sarcasm. With due respect, I cartel say that nearly all things of that book leave something to be desired for our Japanese mind, or to say more true, have something too much that nosotros do non find in the original, as a event they only weaken, confuse and trouble the real atmosphere; while perhaps, information technology means [<142] certainly that the English listen is differently rooted from the Japanese heed, even in the matter of poetry which is said to accept no East or W. When I announced to unkindly expose Mr. Porter'due south defects (excuse my careless use of word) to the calorie-free, that is from my anxiety to brand this Japanese poesy properly understood. To take a poem or ii from his book at random

Uzumibi ya
Kabe ni wa kyaku (not kaku) no
Kage-boshi. Basho.

Mr. Porter translates it every bit follows:

"Alas! My fire is out,
And there'due south a shadow on the wall--
A visitor, no dubiousness.

I should similar to know who would ever think of the above as poesy, even poor verse, in his reading of it in one breath; what does "no doubt " (which the original hasn't) hateful except that it rhymes with the first line; and the rhyme cheapens the poetry at least to the Japanese listen from the reason of its English conventionality. The beginning line of the original is not "my [<143] fire is out;" on the contrary, it ways that the burn, of form the charcoal fire, is buried under the ashes. The poem is a verse form of winter nighttime which becomes late, and when a charcoal fire already modest grows still dearer every bit information technology is more cold without, perchance windy; now the talk of the guest or visitor (lo, his sad lone shadow on the wall) and the primary poet stops, and then information technology starts again, like a piddling stream hidden nether the grasses; and the desolation of the avant-garde night intensifies the sadness of the house, doubtless Basho An whose small body is wrapped by a few large leaves of Basho's love assistant tree in the garden. You must know, earlier you attempt to sympathize it, a few points of the poet's characteristics, in a higher place all the way of his living, and the general aspect of his house, I mean Basho An, the poetical poverty of which volition be seen from the fact that he fabricated a big hole in the wall to place a tiny Buddha statue as he had no place to enshrine it ; not only this Basho'south hokkus, nearly all the seventeen-syllable poems that were produced 'in the early age, you will observe difficult to understand when separated from the circumstances [<144] and background from which they were born, to use a simile, similar a dew built-in out of the deepest heart of dawn.
It is not my purpose here to criticise and examine Mr. Porter'due south translation to satisfy my fastidious heart of minuteness-loving ; let information technology suffice to say that the hokku is non a poetry to be rightly appreciated by people in the West who lie past the comfortable fire in Winter, or under an electric fan in Summer, because it was originally written beside a paper shoji door or upon the straw mats. We have a saying: "Better to leave the renge flowers in their own wild evidently;" it suggest[s] quite many things, but what information technology impresses me most is that you should admire things, flowers or pictures or what not, in their own proper place. To interpret hokku or any other Japanese poem into English language rarely does justice to the original ; information technology is a thankless task at the best. I myself was a hokku pupil since I was fifteen or sixteen years old ; during many years of my Western life, now among the California forest, so by the skyscrapers of New York, again in the London 'bus, I oft, tried to translate the hokkus of our quondam masters [<145] but I gave upwardly my hope when I had written the post-obit in English:

"My Love's lengthened hair
Swings o'er me from Heaven's gate:
Lo, Evening'due south shadow!"

It was in London, to say more particularly, Hyde Park, that I wrote the higher up hokku in English, where I walked slowly, my listen being filled with the idea of the long hair of Rossetti's adult female every bit I perhaps had visited Tate's Gallery that afternoon; pray, believe me when I say the dusk that descended from the sky swung like that lengthened hair. I exclaimed and so: " What utilise to attempt the impossibility in translation, when I have a moment to experience a hokku feeling and write virtually it in English?" Although I had only a few such moments in the past, my determination non to translate hokku into English is unchanged. Allow me await patiently for a moment to come when I become a hokku poet in my dear English language. [<146]

Yone Noguchi
Hobby
Yone Noguchi, "Hobby," The Adelphi (Ser. ii) 11:2 (November. 1935): 106-111.
This essay as well appeared in The Visva-Bharati Quarterly n.s. 2 (Nov. 1936): 35-40.

One who looks in my department of Who's Who will notice that walking is my hobby. Some fifteen years ago when I was asked most my life by its editor, I found that the item of "hobby" was hard to satisfy, because I had no hobby that might pass nether its proper name. Simply to have cypher of it, I thought, information technology might bring disgrace upon my gentleman's nobility. Driven into a corner, I might say, I put down the word of walking equally my hobby. Just this walking, at to the lowest degree in England, was supposed to be a legitimate kind of hobby for whatever admirer. Especially equally a hobby of an former human information technology is healthy, economic and proper. It is true that I know personally a few men in England who make a hobby out of walking. It sounds somewhat spiritless to become one of them; simply I thought that, when walking was said to be my hobby, nobody would spin controversies out of it. As I said, it was the matter of humbug altogether; and so I never happened to think whether walking suits me or not. If you lot accuse me with irresponsibility, I will say that I only feel small. Only when in Who's Who I see many men whose hobby is walking, I cannot assistance feeling suspicious, grinning in thought that they might be equally I am, a poor beast with no hobby to mention of. I know that most all my friends are better off for the affair of hobby; fifty-fifty when people criticise me, saying that I am a miserable boyfriend like a dry herring hard and tasteless, I have no word to protest confronting them.

But I feel sometimes terribly lonesome from very reason that I accept no hobby. In the volume of Issa's hokku poems which I opened non long ago, I found the following:

"Alas, 30-six years take passed since the 6th of Anei (1772-1780) when I left my country habitation for life's vagabonding over ten thousand miles; thirty-six years are fifteen thou ix hundred sixty days. How bitterly take I been subjected to application! There has not been even one day when I felt ease in my mind. Merely before I knew it I became a white-haired old man.

How strange information technology is
That I should take lived fifty years!
Hallelujah to flower's spring! [<106]

First day of jump at last!
Fifty years I've lived, . . .
Not a beggar in rush-dress!

Alas, fifty years take passed,
Having no nighttime
When I danced in joy."

How strongly I was impressed by the last hokku verse form, since I myself, similar Issa, had spent long fifty years with no night in dancing! Issa must have been a poor boyfriend similar myself, who, if he was asked about his hobby, had no other manner to respond but with the word of walking. I have had no opportunity to suffer Issa's intense awarding; fifty-fifty though I had no take a chance to feel a mother'due south great love -- I had no experience like Issa's, to suffer nether step-female parent'south tyranny. Issa, information technology is said, was turned out from domicile when he was a boy; but from my own costless volition, in elated spirit, I left domicile toward the western state, where I spent more than than 10 years. Now having already passed fifty years, I look back upon the past and often retrieve what a hard life I experienced. Indeed my 50 years were a painful serial of fight in loss or gain, having no favourite pursuit in leisure to please myself. I was a miserable creature, similar Issa, who "passed 50 years having no night when he danced in joy."

I used to play a game of shogi-chess when I was a boy; my usual opponent being a son of a neighbouring priest, who was a better player, beside being clever to brand me irritated; I ever lost the game eight times out of 10, because my passionate beloved of it made me more bad-mannered and clumsy. With a swell determination to beat him during my life, I played the game with him 1 summertime nighttime, sitting on a wooden bench which I brought out in front of my house. But fate was non kind to me again so that my king became checkmated, when at this moment of death agony I kicked off the chess-board by my human foot, and exposing my cowardice, I jumped back into my business firm. Never again my fingers touched chessmen.

I cannot understand how the game of go-checkers is played, although I take seen its contests so often in the past. While I lived in America, I went not and then seldom to a identify where my countrymen assemble in joy or sorrow, and I saw sometimes how they played this game. In spite of my consummate ignorance with its rules, I felt some agreeable sensation running through me. How pleasantly the checker stones sound striking the board! I should say that the pleasure in their sound was something hard to ascertain. And it was and so agreeable to meet the faces of the players [<107] with their special expression non seen in ordinary time, which, every bit if an autumnal sky, now became cloudy and then articulate, or as if a spring bird, now sung songs and so stopped singing. It is the mischief or playfulness of the game that makes a man who is close-tongued in usual days talkative and jolly in mood, or makes a man who is unproblematic and directly, unmask of his hidden psychology when he repeats "non yet" all the fourth dimension. Since returning home, I have had hardly any occasion to see a get contest. In one case some years ago when I was living in a monastery at Kamakura, I happened to hear a cool refreshing audio of the checker-stones echoing through the big rooms with sliding screens unclosed; I knew that the monk was playing the go game with a invitee. Only non wishing to see their contest, I simply enjoyed then the rhythmical sound of the checker-stones which was most appropriate to the summer morning. It is indeed the sound that suggests Oriental solitude. If I am asked what I dear in sound, I will point out, kickoff of all, the sound of go-stones, and then the sound of a wind playing play a joke on and geese in a bamboo forest.

There was a "Chinese Town" in San Francisco of olden day, a dirty extraterritoriality where dusky weird temper obscured Oriental immortality into mystery ; non the Chinese Boondocks of late, just that of thirty years ago, revolved on its axle of gambling and harlotry. It was, in truth, a human garbage wherein Japanese labourers threw freely money which they earned with sweat. Comparing life with the game of cards, Rossetti writes:

"What be her cards, yous enquire? Even these:
The center, that doth but crave
More, having fed; the diamond,
Skilled to make base seem brave,
The society, for smiting in the dark;
The spade, to dig a grave."

Indeed these are life's cards. A heaped aureate, Rossetti sings, is plant beside the carte du jour-dealer whose "eyes unravel the coiled night and know the stars at noon"; the dream that wraps her brows is wonderfully rich. Nosotros human beings surroundings this mysterious menu-dealer, and stake all upon the cast.

When Rossetti writes about the cards flying on Life's lath faster than a dancer's feet, a pale skinny Chinese in the gambling den comes to my listen, whose long fingers, so cunning and slippery like a snake, counted the buttons on the board with a bamboo stick. I was charmed strangely, I confess, by the stillness in the den, that kept for a time all the gamblers in feet. I was, however, a man of whom game or sport was not [<108] in claret; so I never felt to bet annihilation that dark when my friend took me to the gambling den near which I am speaking. My friend wished me to put down his stake on his behalf; just when I obeyed him and lost the game, I was sorry for him that fate had opposed me in this new undertaking. how could the gamblers' god have smiled, I wondered, on me who cursed him ! When I gave my friend some coin to embrace a portion of his loss, I felt piece of cake in my listen thinking that it relieved me somewhat from a responsibility which, however, I had taken reluctantly. One more occasion on which I showed that I was born without gambling instinct, came to me subsequently at Santa Barbara of California in South. There were many Japanese farmers who tried to impale fourth dimension with buying a Chinese lottery called ''Fool's Ticket.'' They were buying information technology in hope that this lottery might change into a wise human being's ticket. Beingness asked past one of the farmers, I chose for him characters of the lottery which existence wise words from the analects of Confucius, were used for such a vulgar purpose as gambling. I mused, however, thinking that this Chinese lottery was not without the suggestion that in People's republic of china a sage and gambler live together. Unfortunately, I could not represent these two persons myself; and so you will know, without my telling, how the lottery ticket which I marked turned out. Although I had in America for a long fourth dimension, where gambling might be a sort of admirer'southward pursuit, I never again put my hands on any game or sport. I never saw even a game of baseball or boxing match in America.

Equally next matter I would like to dwell on my diet. Being a person with a sweet tooth past nature, I kept myself autonomously from any canteen of vino. But the majority of my erstwhile friends, strange enough, were wine-bibbers or fifty-fifty soakers; beingness sober myself, I was obliged to keep a face of pot-companion towards them, and often mind to their wild talk and sometimes chime in with pleasing remarks. A few years ago I bought some bottles of Blood which I hoped to drinkable for my health ; after spending one or two months to finish one bottle of them, I sent down the balance to my kitchen to exist used for cooking purpose. Some friend of mine says to me: "Potable, Noguchi, yous know that vino makes blood ! Information technology is a pity that you don't beverage, that is one flaw in your being a perfect jewel." Whether information technology is a flaw or not I cannot tell, just my teetotalism is inborn; I cannot assist my nature.

I was, however, somewhat an epicure in my Western life; I went circular searching subsequently a good java or salad from 1 eatery to some other in New York or London. I was able to [<109] criticise even tamales which Spaniards are addicted of, or tell yous how to make a practiced dish out of Italian macaronis. Once I wrote the following: "it is certainly a proof of one's being a prig crank that he is fond of body of water-hedgehogs or pickles of chopped fish-common salt. The fellow who eats an boxy nutrient with joy or hurting will be one choleric or obstinate. People who can {non} alive without a dish of taste or food rich and heavy, something like a tempura (fried fish) or spitchcock, are often the men given up to pleasure; they are sometimes irresponsible. One who repeats pies already at the breakfast table, cannot be bad in temperament; the human being who orders a toast cut to the size two inches square, or wants to boil his eggs exactly for three minutes, is a complete egoist."

When I returned home and lived in Tokyo or in its vicinity, I went round from one restaurant to some other for a fried fish or broiled eels, and appeared to exist a homo of special taste in food. Only for the past iv or v years I have been neglecting them; to-solar day I am but a peaceful fellow, prosaic, of taste non so particular, and my diet has no distinguished hobby.

Well, and what nigh my clothes? In that location was a time, I confess, long agone, when I took pains with my neckties or shirts, and was not afraid to spend even 1 guinea for a pair of stockings. Just to-day I am content with a proletarian tie of one shilling, and vesture information technology at least for one year. And the clothes, Japanese or strange, which I am wearing today, are as sometime as kitchen rugs; i or ii buttons of them are always off. My erstwhile wife worries about it, and sometimes says that such a careless fashion in dressing is beneath my nobility. Simply I am a harmless; agitator who wears a hat three years onetime.

Now that I accept said everything, I must render to the beginning and say that walking is the ane affair left to me as my hobby. I dare say that this walking is quite a suitable thing for me at present. But none the less it is a question which I must think about. When I was young, walking was my hobby, and I even took a journey on foot that lasted more than than thirty days; my walking then became sometimes one of the newspaper gossips. Merely my faith in walking grew dumb some ten years ago, when Robert Bridges, and so Poet Laureate, took me round Oxford for sightseeing. I could not walk as fast every bit this former poet; my walking speed was only a one-half or third of the speed he walked. Robert Nichols who was then an undergraduate, saw u.s. by the roadside and murmured to himself: "Noguchi, a short-legged tortoise, runs for life after Bridges, a long-legged [<110] stork!" I practise not know whether Robert Bridges gave walking in Who'southward Who as his hobby, but I accept no right to profess it. If walking may not exist my hobby, ought I not to correct Who'south Who? To tell the truth, even a little walking in my garden begins to be ho-hum to me at present. If such a term as "Not walking" is permissible, my hobby is "Not walking"; that is to say, I sit quietly before my table in the dingy report. But you must not take me for a studious person, considering it is only that I sit down before the table -- that is all. Therefore "Not studying" instead of "Non walking" might be a better hobby for me to-twenty-four hours.

Yeats used Noguchi'southward translation of Kobayashi Issa'southward haiku in Hobby (1935) as the footing for his verse form "Imitated from the Japanese."

Due west. B. Yeats
Imitated from the Japanese (1938)

A about astonishing thing
Seventy years have I lived;

(Hurrah for the flowers of Spring
For Jump is here over again.)

Lxx years accept I lived
No ragged ragamuffin human being,
Seventy years accept I lived,
Lxx years man and male child,
And never have I danced for joy.

cf.

The pilgrimage ; Japanese Hokkus ; The ganges calls me, book of poems / [by Yone Noguchi]
(Nerveless English works of Yone Noguchi : poems, novels and literary essays / edited by Shunsuke Kamei ; v. half-dozen)
Tokyo : Edition Synapse, 2007, eleven, 142, 115, 79 p., [1] leaf of plates : ill. (some col.), port. ;

"The pilgrimage" originally published: Kamakura : Valley Press, 1909
"Japanese Hokkus" originally published: Boston : Four Seas, 1920
"The ganges calls me, book of poems" originally published: Tokyo : Kyobunkwan, 1938

Noguchi, Yone 1875-1947
Japanese poet, critic, essayist, and autobiographer.

Yone Noguchi was a Japanese poet best known for his writing in English. This included not just his poesy itself, which appeared in works such asSeen and Unseen or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail (1897), but also his disquisitional works on both poetry and art. Noguchi's poetic style in English language was characterized by a halting quality which, given his proficiency with the linguistic communication, appears to have been conscious. His words and the manner he used them writing nostalgically of Japan in From the Eastern Bounding main (1903), for instance serve to indicate his abiding awareness that he was operating in a world far removed from that of his upbringing. In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (1914), Noguchi presented forms of Japanese literature, including haiku or hokku, in a manner comprehensible to western readers; according to Yoshinobu Hakutani, a leading dominance on Noguchi, it in office was through such works that Noguchi influenced Ezra Pound'southward afterwards Imagist experiments.

Biographical Data
Noguchi was born in a village most the city of Nagoya, southwest of Tokyo, in 1875. Japanese guild, which a generation before had been airtight to western ideas, had in recent times get increasingly open to the influence of the West, and Noguchi took a neat interest in the English linguistic communication. Equally a preparatory school student in Tokyo in the 1890s, he read the works of historian Thomas Macauley and other British writers. These Anglophile tendencies found greater expression when he enrolled at Keio University, likewise in the Japanese upper-case letter. There he expanded his readings of British writers to include the poet Thomas Gray, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, the critic and historian Thomas Carlyle, the humorist Oliver Goldsmith, and others. In addition, he also began reading the American curt-story writer Washington Irving, and after finishing high school, he left Japan for America. In Dec of 1893, an xviii-twelvemonth-sometime Noguchi arrived in San Francisco, first a two-twelvemonth period in which he worked at a series of odd jobs. He connected to study the works of American writers including Edgar Allan Poe, and in 1896 met poet Joaquin Miller. Miller took an involvement in the immature man, who lived with him for 3 years. During this fourth dimension, Noguchi published his first books of poetry, Seen and Unseen or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail and The Voice of the Valley (1897). Noguchi travelled to the eastern United States and later to England, where in 1903 he published From the Eastern Sea. During his London sojourn, as he would later record, he had the idea of using the Japanese form of haiku to write in English, thus avoiding "the impossibility in translation... [of] ahokku feeling" from Japanese. Effectually this time, Noguchi married an American, Leonie Gilmour, and they had a son named Isamu, who would later on attain international fame as a sculptor. Relations between begetter and son, all the same, would be strained throughout their lives: in 1904, the year of Isamu'south nascency, Noguchi returned to Japan for skilful, leaving his family behind in America. Back in Tokyo, he returned to Keio Academy, where he would serve as a professor of English for several decades. During these years, he published dozens of books in Japanese, too as a number of notable English language-linguistic communication works, including books of criticism and an autobiography. He traveled to the W occasionally, and corresponded with at least two of the era's literary principals, Pound and William Butler Yeats. With the coming of Globe War Ii, Noguchi supported the Japanese regime; thus like Pound, who sided with the Fascists in Italy, he found himself ideologically cut off from friends in England and America. Amid the devastation that was postwar Nihon, Noguchi died in 1947.

Major Works
Noguchi published some half-dozen books of poetry, the showtime 3 during his decade-long tenure in the West as a fellow. The most well-known of these is the first, Seen and Unseen, which won the praise of Willa Cather. In this and other volumes, Noguchi showed the naturalistic influence of Walt Whitman, and of his friend Miller. Around the time he published From the Eastern Ocean in London, he began experimenting with the apply of Japanese forms, especially haiku, which he explored in The Pilgrimage (1908). The Spirit of Japanese Poetry established Noguchi every bit non only a poet, but as an authority on Japanese literary forms, including haiku and Noh theatre. He also published a number of volumes of art criticism, beginning with The Spirit of Japanese Art in 1915. The flow around the kickoff of World War I was a especially fruitful ane in Noguchi's career: during this time, in addition to his two master books of criticism, he also published Through the Torii (1914), a collection of essays that presented comparative views of the Due east and West; and an autobiography, The Story of Yone Noguchi Told by Himself (1914).

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Source: https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/noguchi.html

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