Three Bilingual Tanka

by Gabriel Rosenstock

Kerouac 1 was written in response to a seldom-cited socialist manifesto by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), novelist and haiku master:

Shorter hours will provide the labourer with a new desire to live, not to be a productive animal, but to have time to be a man, to have time to enjoy the rights of man in the use of his divine intellect, a gift of God that is overlooked by our overlords of the present Industrial Era.

giorraigh an lá dúinn,
a Thiarna, chun go bhfeicfí
ré nua Kerouac:
sciatháin aingil ag péacadh
trínár gcraiceann ainmhíoch!

~
Lord, shorten these hours
so that a new era dawns
as Kerouac dreamed:
angelic wings come, sprouting,
from this brute animal skin!

.

Kerouac 2 was written in response to an early story by Kerouac,
The Mystery, in which he speculates on the nature of ownership:

As I was approaching the rail crossing near the old depot that we have in my home town, I had to lean against a sagging fence (black with soot-years) for fully ten minutes while a mighty locomotive went by freighting ninety-six cars...

....and the thought arose, why didn’t this locomotive, its cars and its cargo belong to him and to his fellow men? He asks, as a child might ask:

Who covets these great things, so that myself and my fellow men are not heir to their full use?

mistéir is ea é
conas nach bhfuil sciar againn
de gach a bhfuil ann
cén fáth a dtaisceann daoine
níos mó ná a ndóthain mhaith?

~

it’s a mystery
why we all don’t have a share
in God’s great bounty
why do men squirrel away
more than they’ll need in one life?

Kerouac 3 was sparked off by the following passage from an early short piece by Kerouac, The Wound of Living:

I am a New Englander . . . a New Englander removed. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, my real roots are not set in New England, though I was born there; my roots come from Brittany, and my people were hardy fishermen, like those in Synge and Loti . . .

an smaoiním orthu –
mo shinsir? deacair a rá
conas iad a bhrath
a ngnásanna a shamhlú
a dteanga, a dteacht i dtír

~
do I think of them –
my ancestors? yes and no
how to conjure them
imagine their existence
how they spoke, all their struggles

Gabriel Rosenstock’s bilingual edition of Kerouac’s haiku, sioc maidine/ morning frost was published by Arlen House in association with IMRAM literature festival