There is a strange sense of despair in the poems of Sagawa Chika a lost voice a sound from the other side invisible flowers and summer, already distant but they are enrobed in a seductive elegance mostly with the appearance of a dignified thing thorns infused with the slightest amount of poison smirk at an old person plant emptiness in the fingertips of young girls and sting me
“One Other Thing” is a poem that holds many of Sagawa’s unique qualities as a poet working with surrealist imagery, short lyric lines, brilliantly realized via the song composition by Miyoshi Akira, cubist assemblage, iconoclastic use of color, odd, ominous relationship to nature, and a slightly hopeful ending. There is even a very subtle torque in the title, that is not just “another” thing, as might be standard phrasing, but “one” other thing, a specificity that evokes mystery and points towards expansiveness in factuality. It packs a lot of Sagawa poetics in one small poem.
Handwritten manuscript paper in Sagawa’s handwriting
“One Other Thing” (Song)
0:00
Notes on composition:
One Other Thing
Translated by Miryam Sas
A group of asparagus
Dives into the afternoon sun, dirty
Their stems are severed by glass
Blue blood running down the window
On the other side
The sound of a fern unwinding
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Sagawa Chika Shishū (Poems by Sagawa Chika) (Shōrinsha, 1936)
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Kōdō, Vol. 1 No. 3, December 1933
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Shī no ki, Vol. 1 No. 8, August 1933
One Other Thing
Translated by Sawako Nakayasu
A thicket of asparagus
Dives into the dirty afternoon sun
Their stems cut off by glass
Blue blood streams down the window
And on the other side
Is the sound of a fern unfurling