Ayukawa Nobuo / 鮎川信夫 – Ⅰ
Ishmael
Why were the laws of earth broken?
Why were the ties of blood cut?
Why were the green pastures lost?
He, who didn’t say at all
from where and why he came,
was the chosen one.
Ishmael, who wandered barefoot
strongly believing in the heritage of the human soul,
he was the chosen one.
Even a soul needs a complete set of tools:
mast, rudder, chart, compass, lifebuoy and harpoons…
He, driven by the illusion of the ocean—
unlike the profligate American
sent off with a farewell party of friends to leave for Paris or Venice—
is not the same as Ulysses in Cinemascope,
an adventurer clad in head-to-toe armor
or a crude admirer of the flesh.
He was going to ride to Victory buoyed by a dream
that couldn’t be castrated by climate or custom,
much heavier than anything else in the Old Testament.
His destination is neither Europe
with an ominous cloud hanging over it
nor a remote region of Asia closed off by land.
It is the very center of a tale of the ocean
entrusted to the hand of the waves, winds and destiny.
A world where terrible illusions and Leviathan remain.
Ishmael,
at tragedy’s end, the one eddying current
is to swallow up human fate.
The great deep nothingness you saw
pulls us in.
(1955)
– after Moby Dick
Why were the laws of earth broken?
Why were the ties of blood cut?
Why were the green pastures lost?
He, who didn’t say at all
from where and why he came,
was the chosen one.
Ishmael, who wandered barefoot
strongly believing in the heritage of the human soul,
he was the chosen one.
Even a soul needs a complete set of tools:
mast, rudder, chart, compass, lifebuoy and harpoons…
He, driven by the illusion of the ocean—
unlike the profligate American
sent off with a farewell party of friends to leave for Paris or Venice—
is not the same as Ulysses in Cinemascope,
an adventurer clad in head-to-toe armor
or a crude admirer of the flesh.
He was going to ride to Victory buoyed by a dream
that couldn’t be castrated by climate or custom,
much heavier than anything else in the Old Testament.
His destination is neither Europe
with an ominous cloud hanging over it
nor a remote region of Asia closed off by land.
It is the very center of a tale of the ocean
entrusted to the hand of the waves, winds and destiny.
A world where terrible illusions and Leviathan remain.
Ishmael,
at tragedy’s end, the one eddying current
is to swallow up human fate.
The great deep nothingness you saw
pulls us in.
(1955)
