Translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander
“Ara-Mitama (The Wild Spirit)” who puts curses on people.
The sun burns
over this wasteland
and its few creatures,
the outline of some object coming clearer and clearer,
which you recognize as: “the default” of yourself.
Though there are those who yield it to others.
An “existence” akin to a phantom’s, like “The Flying Dutchman,”
for existence and non-existence
can both supply substantiation.
A theological “wasteland” yawns
open in the field of language.
Peaches rot,
mountains crumble,
reviving the fertile soil,
and like drafts on a canvas of “the nothing that is,”
they belong to “space,”
but also to “time.”
A part of “the other world,”
those trailing clouds
and the nimbus piled high to resemble “Kushi-mitama (The Spirit of Wisdom),”
message after unreliable message.
In such a way,
the year 1990 passes.
Some kind of “place,”
or “name,”
and the disappearance of that field where both interact, then,
“the void”?
Although driven by
a conviction riffled with fallacies,
the “mind” wanders.
Existence and non-existence
can both supply substantiation.
May sanity go sane, let sanity go insane
May insanity go sane, let insanity go sane.
May curses fall on those who keep running their mouths,
May curses fall on those who can’t
fathom silence.
Such are the words the dead speak.
Scaling the (construction) as though it were a tower
of vocabulary without dialects,
reading “scriptum (=inscriptions on a stone)”,
asking where those rows of geese are flying.
North is the way,
the
way due north,
that cursed direction.
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