Ito Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 "Nashite mounen (Nasty Morning)"「ナシテ、モーネン」

This film shows the Japanese poet Ito Hiromi reading her poem "Nashite mounen 「ナシテ、モーネン」" at Western Michigan University on October 3, 2008. The translation is by Jeffrey Angles and appears in the collection _Killing Kanoko_ (Action Books, 2009). For more info, see http://alturl.com/khkd.

This poem borrows quotes from the journal of Koizumi Setsu, the Japanese wife of the nineteenth-century, European-born writer Lafcadio Hearn. Her journal contains phonetic transcriptions of the English her husband attempted to teach her. Although she never successfully learned Hearns language, he learned hers, took a Japanese name, and became a Japanese citizen, and wrote many bestselling books introducing Japanese culture to the English-speaking world. Several of the works that he wrote, including some stories of ghosts and other impish creatures, are believed to have transcriptions of stories that Hearn learned from his wife. In other words, the flow of language and learning between the two was a two-way street, as this poem suggests. Koizumi Setsu wrote her journal while living in Kumamoto, the same southern city in which Itō spends part of each year. Kumamoto dialect is known for having few accentual modulations, yet to Koizumi Setsu, her husbands English sounded as if it had even fewer. Like several other poems that Itō published in the late 1980s and 1990s, this poem deals with the theme of the imperfect communication of language and that ways that language affects bodily experience.

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