Picture in my memory

The harvest season has finished here in Japan.

This is my deceased mother's work of embroidery,cross-stitch, during her late life.
I remembered that she made the stitch one by one sitting hunched up over the cloth. Her figure like this overlapped in my mind with the women who are gleaning crouching their back onto the field.

根つめて描（か）かれしならむ　腰かがめ女の指は落ち穂を掴む


It must be a pain taking labour

and the depiction, too

The women bending down

to do "Gleaning"

just have clutched some of the wheat-ears

The design of the embroidery is from a famous picture, "Gleaning"by Jean-Francois Millet.(1814-1875)



Regarding to Millet, there is an unforgettable article for me that said about his works. It was like this: Millet chose labour as his subject for his drawing and people in the Salon des Beaux Arts at that moment(19C ) astonished and rejected his works with sense of avertion, because such subject had never chosen by painters up to that time.


That description made me get a jolt, as I had thought works by Millet were in the category of classic paintings.
While new point of views and ideas as well as some technical innovation are required for artists in every genre, some unprecedented ones tend to be alienated.
It seems that Millet's ones were not exceptional, and it took long time to be finally accepted by the people in Salon des Beaux Arts.


He depicted scrupulously, as it is well known, the daily lives of farmers, their struggling with cattle, taking care of children by wives, and so on. These pictures make viewers feel his exact and warm eyes.

(image from Wikipedia) The first experience for me to see some showpiece was the one by him,
"The Angelus", not a genuine one but a copy in retrospect.

Despite the picture was filled with tranquillity, I certainly heard the evening bell, beeing overwelmed and seeing it.
I was the fourth grade student of elementary school, and the picture was hanging on a wall of a corridor that led to a music room.

Sound of Something

We are surrounded by so many kinds of sounds in our daily lives, rough ones, gentle ones, out of doors and in doors.
Besides, usually we are not conscious so much about the sounds we are familiar with.


踏切をわたり終えてもまだ残る
　　　　　　　　　 急に止みたるカンカンのおとIt ceased all of a sudden
and is still ringing in my ears
after I have done to cross over the rail road,
"kan kan kan...."
I came mind out the alarm signal of railroad crossing when I will cross over, after I read a short writing about James Kirkup (1918-2009), a writer,a poet and a translator who is famous in Japan for having translated many lyrical poets especially tanka, which has 31syllables in Japanese, into the same number of syllables English verses.
He is known as a writer of haiku and tanka, as well.

It said that he was very sensuous about various sounds and when he came to visit Japan he was particularly interested in the sound of the alarm signal, during his sojourn.

In the short verse, tanka which I wrote above, I tried to express the alarm sound as "kan kan", but actually I have no way to know how he did listen to the sound for himself.

In fact, it is said that the sound of a barking dog has variant depending upon countries.
At any rate,why the barking dog sounds differently country to country?
As the difference between countries is self-evident concept, then, it maybe that each person could hear a specific sound differently.
Though it is a little side journey,once my dog cried "Gu-wan", staring at me, at the exact time for food and it surprised me because I heard it as "gohan"which means food.

Well,back to the topic of sound, some sound is often expressed by some onomatopoeia on writing.
Verses are belonged to comparatively short genre of writing, and if the onomatopoeia is ordinary one, the verse would be enable to escape mediocrity.
So, some uncommon onomatopoeia is quite important for writing not least for verses.
What does seem sure is that alarm signal was curious thing for Kirkup, for his sense, as a writer and a poet.

I'm afraid of his might have been bothered by a feeling of strangeness, if he read such a banal onomatopoeia as "kan kan"in a tanka verse.
Aside from my insensitivity to sound, the sound of alarm signal in Japan must be yet too familiar with me.


I really wish I could find out some specific sound for me somewhere in some country, someday.

by Kelly's Pics(haydillgirl), Flickr

この森に弾痕のある樹あらずや記憶の茂み暗みつつあり

Within this forest,is there not a tree that bears

the mark of a bullet

In thickets of memory

undergrowth keeps darkening

from"Thickets of memory" by Fumi Saito 斎藤　史(1909-2002)
translated by J. Kirkup