The ABC bookstore has again asked me to name a title for its summer book festival. Thank you very much. The topic this year is "water scenery".
Without much hesitation, I chose Joseph Brodsky' s Watermark. The book is translated into Japanese by the late Hisao Kanaseki. The translator of Gertrude Stein, Gary Snyder, and Native Amnerican poetry, Kanaseki must have made a great interlocutor for me... but alas, without our meeting each other, he left this planet.
Brodsky is as good as ever. What a prose.
There is something in me, I suppose, that always respects the physical side of human utterance, regardless of the content; the very movement of someone's lips is more essential than what moves them. (72-73)
I have always admired his prose written (from the scratch) in English.
But then, this is the first time I noticed that his family name reflects a "sky", a broad sky, as if the name itself was the surface of the water... and both the water and the sky curiously resembling the quiet graveyard.
