niji to the bug

translation with rhyme and meter is the cheapest trick. it's a party trick. it's a small child who is praised for her wit because she can solve long strings of addition and subtraction quickly and accurately in her head. all that it requires is a grasp on a large enough vocabulary so that one is more or less an ambulatory rhyming dictionary. it is a process almost entirely mechanical. the soundless flapping of lips taste-testing from a mental thesaurus, the flickering of fingers tapping out a rigid tempo on tabletops, substituting synonyms into spaces set in stone.

translating with rhyme and meter is my go-to gimmick. that trick so weightless I can keep it up my sleeve, on the tip of my tongue. a getaway route so streamlined I barely need to think, just run with it, pull a switch, and we're off. fireworks. snap crackle boom. brilliant. put your hands together for me. utterly artless.

I can speak derisively of the practice because I know how I arrived at it. a twelve-year-old girl bored doing dishes humming a song she wished she could sing but whose words escaped her because she didn't know their meaning. words in a language she doesn't know but the tune she likes. so she looks it up. words in a language she will never learn. the translation doesn't fit. she feels cheated. she spends an afternoon making them fit. wriggling and squirming until the stubborn words become spineless notes and this is now a thing she is familiar with. musical composition.

I was no more a translator than a calculator is a mathematician.

For me, it'd be better if
Life could be more like yabusame^[1]
Where it doesn't matter
How many targets you shatter
But rather you're judged
By the grace of your form
Loosing each arrow
As you gallop down the sand

A sport that deems worthy
An arrow sailing harmlessly
Over the waves and into the sea

A world that finds worth in
The journey, not the end

Some people are born with good aim and easily gain mastery. Others are born with bad aim and improve over time. Still others are born with no aim to speak of whatsoever. I am one of the third kind.


^[1] http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/sp20090106a1.html (This article was one of the first things I ever blogged about back in high school when I started a blog as an English assignment)

The truth is, I was never one of those incredibly coherent preteens.

shimizu_hitomi has known me since I was 13, not personally, but via my fanfiction, which I posted behind my father's back. (Like many children of my background, I wasn't allowed to use the internet except for schoolwork and only when my father was present to supervise my use.) I think shimizu_hitomi initially doubted my age because of my vocabulary and propensity to make things rhyme (needlessly, might I add).

I could hazard calling what I had back then "raw talent". I lacked finesse, had no method or clarity to my thinking. My writing was a parlor trick; I showed it off like it had no value. Was I wrong in doing so? No. In hindsight, it strikes me as very appropriate. This was the way I played, expressing my innermost desires. I swapped the gender of everyone in The Fellowship of the Ring; I made up an adventure about Lirael's daughter; I wrote love songs to Inuyasha. For a voracious reader, I was a stereotypically 13-year-old writer.

( Read more... )

8 o'clock.

The summer is young and so is the evening. The breeze barely brushes you; the sky is orange and blue. The air feels weightless but coolly palpable. This world has never smelled so sweet.

You could be dying, and you still wouldn't know it.

( I forgot about the grass, green but bedecked with tiny purple tassels )

Today I received a letter from my 14-year-old self. Its honest brutality - no - its brutal honesty took my breath away. I read it first in disbelief; I read it again in profound, dry-eyed gratitude. Every word is true. Everything is real. Memories in danger have been thwarted from their demise.

I am my own catcher in the rye.

What can I do, what in the world else can I do but to repay? And heaven knows - never mind if I use that rhetorically - that I owe everything to myself. For once.

( Mary meet Meg )

At the carboniferous period of my life
I smelled like juniper berries
Sleet was negligible
And pinecones were below me
But I am in reality
A very large amoeba
Humans are funny creatures
In the strange way they eat
I carry my life
In membrane-bound sphericals
Rainbows slide over
Their transparent outsides
No matter when
I grow and shed my needles
Because the rain still feels like seasons
To an evergreen tree

There was a time in days gone by 　
Before I knew how to spell the word despair 　
When fantastic birds of an otherworldly sky 　
Lit from the far reaches of my mind and took to the air.

That was many a summer ago 　
The boy who sat skipping stones 　
Across Willow Creek had to grow 　
Moving through regions of time and light 　
Into a not-so-faraway world 　
Where the ciel was indigo 　
The sun young and bright.

I feel as though a thousand years have passed 　
And I have left that world behind 　
No longer do I hear waves lapping yellow rock 　
To the shining of blue snow my eyes have grown blind 　
And if a great dragon sailed over my estranged heart 　
From the first glimmer of scales to the wingbeat echoing last 　
I would not lift my head to find 　
That which I cannot feel, and gone so fast.

Heart become empty and eyes become dim 　
Many colored feathers falling in whispered lament 　
I had it in me to have followed him 　
Through distant fiery whorls of living stars 　
Sailed silver rivers and climbed 　
Up tall mountains with wingèd flow'rs 　
On which crystal frost rimed 　
But now 　
With my tired head in my tired hands 　
How? ask the tumbling feathers, how?

What I wouldn't give to stand beneath that sky once more
(An entire planet born of my dreaming) 　
The wind threading gladly through my hair
(Foolish like simplicity seeming) 　
Listening to the dancing sand up and down the long shore
(Peopled by my childish hopes and fears 　
Where everything is just as it appears)
I am braver now, and can love more than I ever dared to as a child 　
Take me there

I want to have back what I cast aside 　
The air seems to throb with my plaintive desire 　
It's as though a part of me has died 　
But somewhere lie the gleaming coals, and their secret fire 　
Waiting to be scooped up by burning hands in the summer again 　
Take me there

Call down the rainbow, the bridge that connects us 　
Hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, wing arching over wing 　
Step into the light that so deeply affects us 　
MAKE the precious journey I have kept waiting, and waiting.

I am braver now, and can love more than I ever dared to as a child 　
Take me there, and let me stay

It has been such a long time.
I am scarcely worthy to write out your name.
I have changed, slowly, but definitely changed 　
While you—I can feel it—remain much the same.

One day when I am dying, I will gaze at the sky 　
And glimpse a small eternity in the darkness above 　
(Take me there)
By simply rememb'ring that 翠綠 bird 　
Fly 　
Out of my story, my first and final love.