Forthcoming in Vestiges_04: Aphasia
THERE ARE MULTIPLE GIRLS AND WAYS OF APPRECIATING OLIVIER MESSIAEN (TRANSLATION)
Girl F’s the getting, and tiredness is the reference, and the other is girled by their initials. There’s the decisive finding, that is, the name-outer, the girl-eacher, the come what may, but there are also some extremely marching shes, which makes Girl J say very well why there was so much Hi, name, fuck, of you: at asking-for, it is yours. It is Girl F, swallowing. There’s no hardness, no embarrassment, no whiling, just this listening…so, intentions were a little Girl J by whose whispers, because, amid all this bare audibility, justly, a case would want you.
WHEN GIRL B IS FORCED TO ROLL OVER AND QUANTIFY IT ALL OVER AGAIN (TRANSLATION)
A matter of boats // not having the angle // love against love.
Diplomacy / traps / securities
hours blow over
my wound of strange return
Forty-five degrees Celsius —— Minus twenty-five degrees Celsius.
Is there / a thing I can pay // for this bottle of shimmer
Pause to dislocate a belly or a leg.
Substitute torque for ego, light for ice.
Dark night // flee fight // begin again,
I’m with you.
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Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues, 2014) and Costume en Face, a translation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s butoh dance notations (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). Current projects include some translations of poems written in Japanese by the Korean Modernist poet Yi Sang (edited by Don Mee Choi and forthcoming from Wave Books) and an anthology of twentieth-century Japanese poetry, co-edited with Eric Selland (forthcoming from New Directions). She teaches at Brown University.