中国大好き

Jianghu Hai
TOKYO PASTA

Across the road from Tokyo Prince Hotel
in a train station basement
I ate a pasta I had never tasted
outside of my family’s home Matoushan
deep in China.
The flour is ground, dried in the sun,
beaten into a dough, pressed into strings,
these are dried again.
To the sound of the big village drums,
the pasta is born in a fine-tuned process.
It’s very resilient, every bite fills your mouth
with the scent of the grain.
I left home when I was 14,
had all sorts of pasta, sweet sour spicy,
strong kinds of taste, made very fast,
so the scent of my hometown
went very far away in the distance.
Never thought I would find it at this moment in Tokyo.
Above there are trains arriving and leaving,
producing a rhythm of deep and high notes
very much like the drums
of Matoushan.

7/25/18
Translated by MW, August 2018

标签： childhood, china, city, drums, family, food, history, home, Japan, Jianghu Hai, life, memory, music, noodles, NPC, pasta, poetry, station, taste, time, town, tradition, traffic, trains, travel, work, youth, 新世纪诗典

This entry was posted on 八月 6, 2018 at 8:06 下午 and is filed under 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2018, 20th century, 21st century, August 2018, July 2018, NPC, poetry, Translations, Uncategorized, 新世纪诗典, 江湖海. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.