Translation: Winter, Spring, Summer (Chu Kosaka)

This has been another of those periods where I've gone on translating but lacked the time to post anything. I spent the better part of a week addicted to Chu Kosaka's 1971 Arigatou album (the production credit for Mickey Curtis is a nominal one; Curtis owned the Mushroom label that put the record out, but the actual producer at the sessions was Kosaka's best friend, Haruomi Hosono) and now I'm addicted to the 1972 Sons of Sun album, Kaizoku Kid no Bouken, most of the lyrics on which are by Takashi Matsumoto, fresh off of writing Kazemachi Roman. So I've got a backlog of Kosaka and Sons of Sun translations to put up, alongside other things.

To start with, then (and I'll try to put up something new daily), here's Winter, Spring, Summer, track 3 on Side A of Arigatou, lyrics and music both by Kosaka. 

I wasn't originally planning on translating Kosaka songs, but I got curious what kind of material Hosono had deemed worthy of Horo, so I translated The Locomotive, which — like Kosaka's other originals, it turns out — is simple and straightforward, but winning. Kosaka's lyrics remind me of Graham Nash's, if considerably more affecting. Think the best of Nash — Our House, say, or the first verse of Military Madness — but with a thematic focus on nature and the outdoors, like in Bruce Cockburn's High Winds, White Sky — at least, that's what the Arigatou songs are like. 

The three Hosono originals were the only reason Arigatou was on my radar before last week, but now that I've realized Kosaka writes great songs too (the chorus on this one is killer), I'm eager to delve into 1973's Hazukashi Sou Ni. It's the only '70s Kosaka album that Hosono didn't have a hand in making; Kosaka wrote, or co-wrote, all ten tracks. Come Horo, two years later, Kosaka had shifted out of singer-songwriter mode, focusing more on singing itself. It mattered less by then whose songs they were, his own or others'. It makes Hazukashi Sou Ni an interesting outlier.

For kotatsu, see the wiki entry. For a cat inside a kotatsu, see here.

:::



The cat forms a perfect circle

inside the kotatsu.

Cold winds descend

from the winter mountains.

The school of the rice fish is

inside the stream.

The buds of the willows

sprout in the spring.

The dragonfly I kissed

flies over the fields.

I'm wiping my sweat

in summer's furious heat.

(Back to: List of Translations)