Characters

A short poem in English, French, and Japanese

by Andrew Milne

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The year before our child was born
We studied Japanese in French
At the Collège de Bois-de-Boulogne in Ville Saint-Laurent.
 
Our Francophone classmates struggled with modern Japanese,
With words like セントラルヒーティング  (sentoraruhiteingu, central heating)
   or  マガジンラック (magajinrakku, magazine rack).
 
Though パン (pan, bread) offered all of us some hope.
 
Together we learned the kanji (漢字, Chinese characters), using pictures of our own.
 
    休      Like 休む (yasumu) – to take a break.
               A man (人, 亻) resting by a tree (木).
 
    死      Or death 死 (shi).  Shinu – to die – it sounded like chez nous.
                Said one of the québecoises in the row by the window.
 
Was it La Disparition, as English disappeared them from their own homes?
Or something else I’ll never know?
 
     音楽      For me it was music, 音楽  (ongaku). Sound and joy.
 
Joy was a radiant white 白 above a tree 木.
The closing of Nightride and Sunrise by Sibelius.
The contemplation of snow in that nation of winter.
 
But sound 音 was harder. Stand 立 and day 日 together made no sense.
 
And then our baby came and it was all new words to learn and say.
 
Till many years later when I found our old notebooks.
Thought about the characters we’d formed
And how we might rearrange them,
In a different way, to tell a different story.  
 
    楽           Make joy.
    休           Find rest under trees.
    死           Hope to die at home.
    音           Break the silence.
    立日       Stand with daylight.

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Andrew Milne is a writer based in Vancouver. He was born in Epsom, just south of London, and  came to Canada with his parents at the age of four. He grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, and studied at the University of British Columbia, where he and his wife Brenda were married. Work took them north to Dawson Creek, east to Montreal, and then south to New York, where they and their children lived for many years in the welcoming community of Maplewood, New Jersey, forty minutes outside of Manhattan by train. In 2016, with their children grown and embarked on lives of their own, Andrew and Brenda left Maplewood and returned to Vancouver, along with Merlin, the Milne Family Cat.  

Andrew’s ideas about writing and written artifacts have three main influences: writing poems and letters to his wife, acting in community theatre, and making up stories and songs with their children and their friends. A text is the encoding of a performance. It needs the performers and the audience to give it life.

"Characters" is an unusual work for Andrew, since it depends on the visual form of the Chinese characters, which have to be seen as well as heard.

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