The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan. I have been reading about them lately through books like Kayano Shigeru’s The Ainu (Tuttle Publishing, 2004.) Kayano Shigeru, who died in 2006, was himself an Ainu and worked tirelessly to preserve and disseminate elements of Ainu culture to the world. The Ainu had an oral tradition of tale-telling and one of their oral tales or songs known as kamuy yukar is translated into English by Kyoko Selden and given here on the website of the Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. As typical of many oral tales, it is presented as poetry. As it explains on the website, kamuy yukar are songs of gods and demi-gods. This particular story is of the wind goddess, Pitatakamuy and her encounter with the demi-god Okikurumi. It is a revealing tale insofar as it shows how the Ainu relate to their deities — they relate to their gods not just with reverence, awe and respect but they also challenge and chastise the gods for wanton and destructive behaviour! I remember being surprised by that when I read The Song of the Cicada by Shizue Ukaji, another Ainu writer and storyteller. The old woman swept away in the typhoon gets angry at the goddess who has caused the terrible typhoon much like the demi-god Okikurumi becomes angry with Pitatakamuy.
The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of poetic tale-telling, but little of it has been translated into English. However this is slowly changing with the efforts of a variety of scholars and students of the culture. I’ve discovered a wonderful blo
g called Project Uepeker: Introducing the Ainu Oral Tradition to the English-Speaking World that is chock full of information about Ainu culture in English. In fact, it was at this blog that I discovered a new book called Ainu Spirits Singing by Sarah Strong (University of Hawaii Press, 2011) which is a study and translation of Ainu kamuy yukar as originally translated into Japanese by Ainu writer Chiri Yukie. I hope more developments like this keep happening and that word gets around about the oral storytelling traditions of this indigenous people of northern Japan.
Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe.
Some coincidences cannot be ignored. A coupla weeks ago I enjoyed a gripping performance of the poem below by Joy Acey, a fellow participant in that Highlights Foundation workshop I keep mentioning. It's one of the poems Joy uses in her workshops with children. Despite my fondness for Mary Oliver's work, it was new to me, and striking.
Then I found the same celebration of ordinary miracles (go here for the start of this thread) posted on Mary Lee Hahn's Year of Reading blog, with a whole different 84th birthday spin on it.
Today I notice that the actual title of this poem is not "The Grasshopper," or "A Prayer," or even "At last, and too soon." Instead it is "The Summer Day"--not "A Summer Day," but "THE Summer Day," and here it comes. Tomorrow our family will host our 10th Annual Summer Solstice Picnic, a loose affair involving a Ritual Unveiling of Foil and Plastic, watermelon, lightning bugs, mosquitoes, public consumption of alcohol, and quite often a thunderstorm.
Maybe this year, as we drag the picnic tables up the hill to the gazebo, there will be a grasshopper. I'll take sugar just in case.
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day....
Read the rest at
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html P.S. More juice: my son is right now telling me that "this pineapple has two kinds of energy, even though it's not moving: heat energy, and citrus energy: the burning acid parts....It's true."
It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Poetry Friday post, but then I’ve been away for awhile from my home digs in Canada. Right now I’m in Japan for a couple of months – however, being here hasn’t kept me away from good books for children in English as there are plenty of such books to be had here. One great short little book I was introduced to by mothers in a reading group for my daughter’s elementary school (see my Postcard for Japan post on this group) was this book A Friend by Japanese poet, Tanikawa Shuntaro (Trans. by Arthur Binard, illus. by Wada Makoto, published by Tamagawa University Press, 2004.) The original edition (Tomodachi) in Japanese contains pithy sayings by Tanikawa about the nature of friendship like “A friend is someone you think about even when you’re not together” or “Even if you speak different languages, a friend is a friend.” The simple and plain illustrations of Wada Makoto supplement the statements nicely. At the end of the book, the statements philosophically expand their horizons. For example, by showing a photograph of a disabled child in a wheelchair, the book asks “A friend might be someone you haven’t yet met. How can you lend a hand to this friend?” or showing a child in a tent-city squatting in the sand, the book asks “Is there anything you can do to help a friend faraway?” The book ends with a poem by Tanikawa on the nature of friendship and on how it essentially removes one’s notion of self-centeredness to create an awareness of the other in a way that is truly compassionate. I enjoyed reading this book aloud to both my children — teenager and child alike — and found them nodding in agreement to many of the statements. The woman who lent the bookto me told me she read the Japanese version to her child when she was in elementary school, and then bought the English version for her when she was in junior high school and just beginning to learn English. Both books provide thoughtful meditations on the nature of friendship that are not always so obvious but true nontheless – it was certainly not surprising to me that it was penned by one of Japan’s more well known contemporary poets, Tanikawa Shuntaro.
Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe.
The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan. I have been reading about them lately through books like Kayano Shigeru’s The Ainu (Tuttle Publishing, 2004.) Kayano Shigeru, who died in 2006, was himself an Ainu and worked tirelessly to preserve and disseminate elements of Ainu culture to the world. The Ainu had an oral tradition of tale-telling and one of their oral tales or songs known as kamuy yukar is translated into English by Kyoko Selden and given here on the website of the Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. As typical of many oral tales, it is presented as poetry. As it explains on the website, kamuy yukar are songs of gods and demi-gods. This particular story is of the wind goddess, Pitatakamuy and her encounter with the demi-god Okikurumi. It is a revealing tale insofar as it shows how the Ainu relate to their deities — they relate to their gods not just with reverence, awe and respect but they also challenge and chastise the gods for wanton and destructive behaviour! I remember being surprised by that when I read The Song of the Cicada by Shizue Ukaji, another Ainu writer and storyteller. The old woman swept away in the typhoon gets angry at the goddess who has caused the terrible typhoon much like the demi-god Okikurumi becomes angry with Pitatakamuy.
