Writer + Educator + Translator – Explorations in Japanese Literature, Folklore, and Pop Culture
Wild Lines and Poetic Travels: A Keijiro Suga Reader Edited by Doug Slaymaker This volume of essays and translations analyzes the prodigious and wide…
Book Announcement: Wild Lines and Poetic Travels: A Keijro Suga Reader
Rhythmic swells reverberate through your lungs. The black streets of Valencia.
Backstreet Europe.
Romani enclaves, gypsy-parts of town.
We’ll sit here in the Plaça de la Virgen with our stiff drinks. Sangria. Smartly bashful we’re red-faced, delirious.
For it is Spring, the blossoms sing
Nodding in the wind.
Blanco bells of nerium ring.
INVOCATION
We are
Granular stars, a celestial remark
Of
Demeter and thyme
A cornucopia buried inside…
You are, underground
Illumination, hive mind set free
Vibrations, the breeze
Oh, the buzz-buzz of the bees.
Thundering.
Will you embark upon our honeyed rendezvous?
Will you drink this strange brew?
Inhale the perfumery of day glow grain?
Heed the invitation East?
For the goddess sings, and
The Oracle of time, umami and sweet, has brought you to me.
So take this invitation. Roam. Let’s rove to the land of the rising sun.
Hunt. Breathe in, sensual eclipse of epicurean delights.
All support contributes to my upcoming chapbook. An assemblage of essays, poems, and short stories. More info coming soon. Tremendously thankful for all those of you who've supported me along the way.
Rambling Without Destination, or Paradise Lost
I
I bit into an anchovy. Brine dissolved across my tongue. Salt and sea marrying into the myriad effervescence of it all. The wine settling deep within my belly, then rising, awakening the uninhibited within. I raised my head back and sucked at the sharp edged mother of pearl, plunged my knife into the spine of another, and shot down a lick of Tabasco. The waiter smiled, proffering a damp towel.
“Kalismera”, she said, nodding east. The sunrise cast hazy projectiles of gold leaf into the
A beautiful morning it was, I smiled agreement.
II
But I hadn’t come here for the sunrise. Certainly not for the oysters or the Seabreeze.
It was a sort of literary pilgrimage. Or so I insisted. Let’s rephrase that: it was an attempt to escape my life, disguised as a literary pilgrimage…
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The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is offering an Emerging Translator Mentorship Program for 2022, the deadline for which is …
Emerging Translator Mentorship Program (deadline 11/30)
Splinters of the moon
Autumn waters take delight
Ducks on bridge, now fly
Happy Autumn. Happy Fall. Happy Hop–tu–Naa! Happy Harvest. Happy Samhain. There is something stirring in the airs of Autumn. Gets me every year. To celebrate the skies of an ever shifting twilight, when the spirits soar through the liminal film between this world and that of the beyond. When the night parade of daemons and tricksters travel and trove.
My annual foray into the Book of Thoth and dance with divination begins with a casting of cleromancy, the coins scatter in scaffolds of yin (陰 yīn) and yang (陽 yáng) of what’s to come. See, my family comes from a line of card dealing Romani. Shuffling the tarot into our genes for centuries all across Eastern Europe as they roamed about. Eventually landing in Augsburg, Germany then making their way to the United States. Despite our losses we never abandoned the cards. So every Autumn, when the world takes but the slightest interest in this history of pagans and the uncanny… ah, well I drink it up with absolute delight.
A healthy reminder of the impermanence and suchness of things.
A reminder that everything is…
Cheers,
Nicholas
Nicholas Andriani