There is a strange sense of despair in the poems of Sagawa Chika a lost voice a sound from the other side invisible flowers and summer, already distant but they are enrobed in a seductive elegance mostly with the appearance of a dignified thing thorns infused with the slightest amount of poison smirk at an old person plant emptiness in the fingertips of young girls and sting me
In the Sagawa Chika corpus, there is no single authoritative edition of any of her works. She died before she could publish her first collection of poetry, and in subsequent decades her work was compiled and published by various editors. Many poems had been published repeatedly in small journals, leaving a trail of one to four edited versions of any single poem. Here, several iterations of a single poem give access to the poet’s graceful handwriting, her edits between published versions, two translation versions, and the poem set to music by Japanese composer Miyoshi Akira. This multiplicity around Sagawa’s poetry opens up space for reevaluating previously acculturated norms about publication, authority, accuracy, and translation.
Sagawa’s handwritten manuscript of “One Other Thing.”
“One Other Thing” (Song)
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Notes on composition:
One Other Thing
Translated by Miryam Sas
A thick growth of asparagus
Plunges into the dirty sun of afternoon
The stalks cut out of glass
Blue-green blood flowed down
a window
On the other side of it
The sound of winding up a spring
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Shī no ki, Vol. 1, No. 8, August 1933. © The Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Kōdō, Vol. 1 No. 3, December 1933. This spread contains four poems by Sagawa. © The Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Sagawa Chika Shishū (Poems by Sagawa Chika) (Shōrinsha, 1936). © The Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
One Other Thing
Translated by Sawako Nakayasu
A thicket of asparagus
Dives into the dirty afternoon sun
Their stems cut off by glass
Blue blood streamed down the window
And on the other side
The sound of coiling up a fern