I am a Child of the Sun by Fukushi Kōjirō
I am a Child of the Sun by Fukushi Kōjirō
0 Joshua L. Solomon University of Chicago
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I am a child of the Sun, a child of the Sun who has not yet begun to burn.
Now a little spark has caught and soon I will start to smolder.
Ah, and the smoke turns into a flame!
I am caught up in this brilliant daydream and cannot escape.
The dream is a field of bright white light, it is the center of a city brimming with light, it is a mountain range where pure white snow sheepishly glows at the peaks.
I am pursued by this daydream: now I smolder stronger and stronger, belching more and more thick, black, choking smoke.
O, dear world of light!
O, skies of light!
O, dear men of light!
O, you who open your whole bodies up to the world!
O, you whose whole bodies are as if carved in ivory!
O, you who are so clever and healthy and strong!
I raised my first infant cry from a place damp, watery, and dark, but
I am a child of the Sun, a child of the Sun forever yearning to burn.
Transfec
Fukushi Kōjirō (1889–1946) was a pioneer of free verse in Japan,
publishing his first collection, Child of the Sun ( taiyō no ko), in 1914 and his
second, Prospects ( tenbō), in 1920. His poetry employs modern spoken-style
language rather than rarified classical written Japanese, and was
unrestricted by the metrical limitations of the popular contemporary shintaishi form. “I
Am a Child of the Sun” (“jibun ha taiyō no ko dearu”) is one of Fukushi’s most
well-known works of poetry and is representative of the best of his free-verse
experimentations. It was published in Child of the Sun along with several pieces
exploring similar themes, including “Sun Worship” (“taiyō sūhai”) and “Children
of the Sun” (“hi no ko”).
“I Am a Child of the Sun” has appeared in a number of slight variations.
In one instance, the word jibun (“self”) is changed to watashi (“I”) (Fukushi Kōjirō
chosakushū). Difficult kanji were also replaced with simpler characters when it
was published in middle school textbooks in 1947 as part of Japan’s expanding
compulsory education initiative. However, none of these changes significantly
alters the poem’s reading.
There were a few considerations concerning diction in the translation.
Fukushi employs the dearu copula and vocative final particle yo, both of which
lend a bit of formality to the entire piece, inviting a slightly scriptural tone to
accompany the deific personification of the sun. Fukushi also uses the interjection
“cry/sigh” aa three times in this short poem to emphasize the depth of the
speaker’s emotion. The repetition is aesthetically effective in Japanese, but a static
repetition of “ah” or “oh” in translation is unsatisfying and difficult to combine with the
translation of the more prominent function of yo in the latter two instances. I tried
to express the sunny feeling of aa in conjunction with the hailing yo through the
addition of the word “dear” in “O, dear world of light!” and “O, dear men of light!”
My boldest interpretation is of the line that literally reads, “O, you whose entire
bodies are like eyes” (sōshin me no gotoki hito yo) as “O, you who open your whole
bodies up to the world!” The speaker is describing a human figure whose beauty
and strength are derived from a fundamental integration with the universe; the
eye-like body is not merely perceptive, but receptive. The more interpretive
reading seemed to better capture the nuanced meaning of “eye” in the original. (...truncated)