Yosano Akiko Quotes

I can give myself to her In her dreams Whispering her own poems In her ear as she sleeps beside me.

Gently, I open the door to eternal mystery, the flowers of my breasts cupped, offered with both my hands.

Without returning... O my feelings In this gathering darkness of spring, And against my koto My tangled, tangled hair.

Lifting your head, my slender arm beneath the nape of your neck, I want, suddenly, to suck your feverish lips with mine

The little lamb's eyes, desperate for forest water, must resemble mine. O you whose love I long for, how can you understand me?

My shiny black hair fallen into disarray, a thousand tangles, like a thousand tangled thoughts about my love for you.

I have the delusion that you are with me as I walk through the fields of flowers, under the moon.

After twenty years of living the barren life, I want to believe that now all of my patient dreams will at last be realized

The day the mountains move has come. Or so I say, though no one will believe me. The mountains were merely asleep for a while. But in ages past, they had moved, as if they were on fire. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine with me. All I ask is that you believe this and only this, That at this very moment, women are awakening from their deep slumber. If I could but write entirely in the first person, I, who am a woman. If I could write entirely in the first person, I, I. —Yosano Akiko These are the first lines from Yosano Akiko’s longer poem Sozorogoto (Rambling Thoughts), which were first published in the inaugural issue of the feminist magazine Seit (Bluestocking), in September 1911.

その友はもだえのはてに歌を見ぬわれを召す神きぬ薄黒き

Come at last to this point I look back on my passion And realize that I Have been like a blind man Who is unafraid of the dark

Were I asked whether it would be desirable that The Tale of Genji be translated into the modern colloquial language, I would without hesitation answer yes. I am very keen to have a translation of this tale… . For translations of simple kanbun written by people of the Edo period, I see no need whatever. What I desire are translations of the truly ancient texts of this nation, such as the Kojiki. From a slightly later period, of the several fictions, a translation of The Tale of Genji is what is most needful… . Whenever I read The Tale of Genji, I always sense a certain resistance; and if that cannot be overcome, I cannot grasp the meaning of the words. The Tale of Genji, it seems to me, is written in a style that in itself, quite apart from the antiquity of the words, is by no means easy to understand.

Akiko, we might conclude, was decidedly a modern, but one with a private vision; a writer of her age, but by no means typical of her age. Fortunately it was an age in which her emulation of the life and work of a paragon of a millennium past struck her contemporaries (and many of our own) as the very height of both literary and academic modernity.