NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
SHIMA SATÕ: LAST RAYS OF LIGHT
Translated by William I Elliot with Reiko Nakagawa & Motoko Matsuo
Kodansha Shuppan Service Center
1-17-14 Otowa
Bunkyo-Ku
Tokyo
Japan
ISBN 4 87601 598 8
¥1200

email Reiko Nakagawa
read a review of a book by Satarô Satô

www
NHI review home page
FAQ page
Notes for Publishers

book reviews
anthologies
magazines
other media

Web design by Gerald England
This page last updated: 11th December 2007.
SHIMA SATÔ: LAST RAYS OF LIGHT

LAST RAYS OF LIGHT is a collection of 100 Tanka. The author was born in 1913. She married Satarô Satô in 1938 and was widowed in 1986. These tanka were written between 1955 and 2000.

As her translator writes

The soul cannot count. It does not cast a shadow of thirty-one — or any other number of — syllables. Rossetti found it in "a cup of three", many haiku poets find it spread out in sixteen or eighteen petals and Satarô's soul sometimes cast thirty- or thirty-two-petalled shadows; nor does Shima's soul calculate what effect a tanka ought to have in translations down the line. Her tanka are already translations of her soul, the English becoming a translation of a translation and thus at three Platonic removes from reality. She would concur that we readers and translators (and writers) should not lose sight of the soul for the syllables.
You cannot just read through a book like this from end to end. It is one of those books you must keep by you for months and open every so often. Read just two or three tanka at a time, let them stay with you for a day. This way the poet's soul will reach out to yours and make a difference to your day.

Here are a few for today

	The ocean
	off the vast beach
	of Oristu roars
	exactly
	as an ocean should roar

		Whenever I come
		to the restaurant
		of the department store
		I observe others like myself
		dining alone

	Scads of magnolias
	loomed and lingered
	until
	at last
	autumn came

		From the hill
		the gale I thought raging
		turned out to be
		the sea's
		roaring

	Having still
	something to fret over
	goes to show,
	at least,
	that I'm not in my dotage.

reviewer: Gerald England