The Glass Clouding

Masaoka Shiki

Translated by Abby Ryder-Huth

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $20

November 2024
Read an excerpt

May 15

May is a bad month. In the last two or three days it’s begun to feel like May, it’s unpleasant and I can’t bear it. My head is fuzzy and I can’t collect my thoughts.

Even now I have dreams I’m walking calmly. But when I have to jump over something, I don’t trust that I can.

These days I’m surprised even when the weather report’s not right.

It hurts when anything brushes against me, can’t do anything but suffer through. I’d like to float in midair and touch nothing I think, make the gravity of air and the gravity of the body the same.

This time last year I could make it into the next room if I crawled, now even turning over in the night has gotten difficult. Next May I might not be able to move.

Sokotsu’s report: I got a bad fortune from Anamori shrine, but he went ahead and swept it away.

Want to try digging up the bamboo shoots.

New green shoots in the sunlight then a sudden rain comes and is gone, clear. In the glistening green a crow flies straight through the wet leaves as if to touch them.

A note: if someone looks at this later they’ll see the writing style is inconsistent. Proof of my bad head.

The Glass Clouding blends translation and poetry in an extended meditation on and through Masaoka Shiki’s late-life writing. Shiki, a Japanese poet and critic who died in 1902 of tuberculosis at the age of 35, revitalized the form of haiku. His work, a study in looking, documents his experience of confinement with a spare immediacy and a rich sense of the visible outside world he could not directly access. The Glass Clouding wrestles with the limits of translation, using experimental forms, image, parallel texts, and prose to question what translation can and cannot make visible.

About the Author

A Japanese poet and essayist, Masaoka Shiki was born in 1867 in Matsuyama, Japan. He attended University Preparatory College and Tokyo Imperial University, before dropping out from the latter due to illness. He worked for a newspaper and signed up as a war correspondent to China in 1895. Shiki was influential in developing a modern style of Japanese haiku and tanka. He wrote a book on his poetics, Utayomi-ni-atauru-sho (A Book Bestowed on Composers of Poems) and also edited the journal Hototogisu (Cuckoo). He died of tuberculosis in 1902.

About the Translator

Abby Ryder-Huth is a poet and translator from Michigan.

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-15-6
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 128 pp, 5.5 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: November 15 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)