[Cover is a painting entitled Skyscape V by Jacob Jugashvili.]

This piece is a synthesis of three Sagawa poems: Visibility Through Green, Green Flames, and Opal. You can find them neatly translated in Sawako Nakayasu's "The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa" on Canarium Books.

In a recent interview in Asymptote, Nakayasu spoke of Sagawa's style and position as a poet in her then contemporary context of Japanese modernism: "What I think is interesting about Sagawa in this context is the way she takes in so many of these varying influences, while sticking to her own sense of craft and composition, which is apparently quite painterly, and deeply connected to the visual arts."

After the first version (which was one year ago), I took it upon myself to revise with a more refined focus on the visual. What struck me so profoundly about Opal was that it basically read as a piece of sheet music to me and from then on it took me no time to devise an alternative means of actualization for it as an experience. In the same interview, Nakayasu says:

"What it really comes down to, though, is that translation is an act of reading. If you try to follow your mind as you read, it goes to all kinds of places. For example, when you’re sitting at a poetry reading, your mind isn’t just focused on those words in the room. That’s always an experiment and experience for the reader. That’s the moment when the work is becoming, because it’s being read and received and becoming actualized. Translation too, I think, works equally interestingly on both ends of that spectrum between possibility and actualization. I can be creating a translation that looks like it’s a one-to-one of some kind—same quantity of stuff in the original and the translated version—but it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t worked its way through all those choices and possibilities."

My attitude is the same. My favorite part of her book Night Eats Color is that Nakayasu delights in creating new versions that are fractal branches of the same core. I wasn't content with the first Opaline Y Hyalite as the sole version of my permutations, as the first, definitely, but not the last. This is the second, and it will not be the last. The last is after this one, and then I'll stop there until I feel like picking it up some other time in my life. This one is definitely the best one yet, and I managed to do more of my own thing on this.

This is the Triadele version, the word stemming from Triadelphous (A flower who, "having its stamens fused together at least partly by the filaments so that they form three separate groups, some of which may contain a lone stamen.") This is the center from which the other two branch away. These aren't brothers but sisters.

I think that's it, besides these liner notes: