The Sound of Snails

蝸牛 katatsumuri

1.

A few months ago, I was walking around in the Huntington gardens in Pasadena when I saw a lone snail slowly making her way across the sidewalk, leaving a slimy trail in her wake.

When I was a little girl, I remember having to avoid the multitude of snails that appeared every morning on the sidewalks on my way to school. There were so many of them back then, and I used to love hopscotching around them to avoid accidentally harming one… But these days I can’t remember the last time I saw one. I’ve never seen a snail in our garden in Pasadena, though I suspect they are there based on all the little munch marks in my basil.

In this wonderful book called How to Speak Whale, there was mention of a tree snail in Hawaii that was supposed to make a beautiful sound. I think it’s just a legend but it’s incredible to imagine the forests reverberating with the song of snails!

How to evoke that sound in a poem?

2.

In Japan, snails are a summer word (kigo)—so it was fitting I noticed and was so charmed by the sail in the garden in the watery world of early summer.

Katatsumuri 蝸牛 is such a cute word.

The first kanji 蝸 has the radical for insect 虫 plus the kanji for swirl —how the shell swirls around the body of the “insect” 殻が渦(うず)を巻き.

The second kanji means “cow” since snails have tentacles like cows’ horns.

Before I learned the word katatsumuri, though, I first learned what children call snails: den-den-mushi, which is a diminutive, like calling a dog wan-wan…. In Nakanishi Susumu’s The Japanese Linguistic Landscape: Reflections on Quintessential Words—translated wonderfully (!!!) by Ryan Shaldian Morrison— a book I have mentioned a million times or so in these pages, the author describes a lovely poem or song from the Heian period about a child trying to get a snail to dance":

“And if you dance beautifully,” sings the child, “I will take you to the flower garden to play…”

3.

When I mentioned the sweet snail in the garden on facebook, two friends reminded me of a book called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey.

On a trip to Europe, the woman contracts a virus. While it doesn’t kill her, it keeps her bedridden for a decade. She is very ill… all she can do is look out the window, until one day a friend brings her a small frog. Setting up a terrarium at her bedside, Bailey begins to start noticing things. In some sense, this is a kind of Zen parable —or Buddhist story?— in the way the macrocosm exists in the microcosm. The universe in a bowl of tea? Or the glory of the world in small things—if only you stop and notice.

One of my friends wrote a moving post called The Wonder of Observing Another Species about the book and also about seeing a slug—oh the charms of those antennae.

4.

And one more book for you.

I was not surprised to find that Bailey, in her book on snails, included so many wonderful translations of Issa’s haiku. Issa, who is known perhaps more than anything for his respect and love of all creatures. One of my favorite Issa translators is David G. Lanoue. A professor of English at Xavier University, he is also the president of the Haiku Society of America. His book, Issa and the Meaning of Animals: A Buddhist Poet’s Perspective, has many snail haiku… here is one (but with my translation)

足元へいつ来りしよかたつぶり

when did you arrive?

here at my feet— little snail

And one more:

かたつぶりそろそろ登れ富士の山

katatsuburi   soro-soro nobore   fuji no yama

little snail

inch by inch, climb

Mount Fuji!

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The New York Times continues to publish articles about the joys of terrariums…