Following Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374)

The following translation, from a language that I can muddle through with the help of a dictionary but in which I am not and never have been close to even literarily fluent, is something that I decided to undertake in order to demonstrate a point about translation generally. My views on translation are in a tradition that, as I see it, includes Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the point is to invite an understanding of the original writer on the part of the reader of the translation, not simply to make the material seamlessly understandable in the target language. Sometimes this means that a good, from this standpoint, translation will seem unidiomatic or even deliberately exoticized by the standards of the target language.

But wasn’t there, especially among the Victorians, an alternative practice of translating Romance-language poets very differently, to the point that the resulting style was clearly that of the translator’s own poetic work in English? Elizabeth Barrett Browning has a whole collection of Sonnets from the Portuguese that are her own work plain and simple, based only on the vague ambiences of actual Portuguese poetry. You also see this with Rossettian translations of authors like Dante and Villon. Petrarch commonly came in for this treatment, so when I found an Italian-language edition of Petrarch on the one-dollar shelf of a local used bookstore, I decided that it might be interesting to try my hand at the same general approach using one of the sonnets that this book provided me.

I chose a sonnet that is about Petrarch’s muse Laura and that has the abba-abba-cde-cde rhyme scheme with which English sonneteers tend to have so much trouble. I kept the rhyme scheme and meter of the original; this involved driving a coach and horses through some of the more direct and clearly-only-idiomatic-in-Italian renderings that I would normally have preferred (such as the puns on “Laura,” which it was a shame to lose entirely). Here’s the original (from Bietti’s “I Classici Popolari” series, published in Basiano in 1966), and here’s what I came out with:

Sonetto LXXXIX. A Valchiusa, patria di Laura, si sente al sicuro d’ogni bufera e il suo cuore arde d’amore.

Qui dove mezzo son, Sennuccio mio,
(cosí ci foss'io intero, et voi contento),
venni fuggendo la tempesta e 'l vento
c'ànno súbito fatto il tempo rio.

Qui son securo: et vo' vi dir perch'io
non come soglio il folgorar pavento,
et perché mitigato, nonché spento,
né-micha trovo il mio ardente desio.

Tosto che giunto a l'amorosa reggia
vidi onde nacque l'aura dolce et pura
ch'acqueta l'aere, et mette i tuoni in bando,

Amor ne l'alma, ov'ella signoreggia,
raccese 'l foco, et spense la paura:
che farrei dunque gli occhi suoi guardando?

❦

Sonnet LXXXIX. In Laura’s hometown of Vaucluse, he is at port in the storms; his heart burns with love for her.

Here in my half-life, Senuccio, half-self, friend,
Though would that I were altogether, entire,
I’ve come through storm, through tumult, foment, mire,
Which straightway and cruelly my course would bend—

—yet here I am in haven. Now attend
To why I fear not, as usual, storm and fire,
And to why, as well, ardent desire,
Has not in me waned, still less found its end—

—When I saw the palace where love reigns,
And felt its fair breeze, sweet and pure and calm,
Which cancels lightning-glares and thunder-cries,
Embers blazed in my soul, love’s joys, love’s pains,
And terror vanished in my heart’s burning balm.
How much more so, to look in Laura’s eyes?

A Poem by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

This year I’ve taken a challenge to try to memorize at least one (short) poem each month. I’ll do my challengers one better: whenever the poem is in a language I can read other than English, I’ll (do my best to) translate it.

I’ve started with this well-known poem by Masaoka Shiki, probably Japan’s best-loved and most influential exponent of the haikai or haiku form since the country rejoined worldwide political and economic systems in the 1850s and 1860s. Like many luminaries of his period, Shiki died very young of tuberculosis, a disease that he had for much of his writing period and living with which he saw as a key point of his personal identity; this perhaps renders his innovative handling of Japanese poetry’s traditional focus on sense-media especially poignant.

柿くへば鐘が鳴るなり法隆寺

Kaki kueba

Kane ga naru nari

Hōryūji

“At first bite of this persimmon, the bells toll—the Temple of the Waxing Law.”

(Hōryūji is customarily rendered “Temple of the Flourishing Dharma.” I’ve gone with a different translation of this seventh-century Nara landmark, which contains the world’s oldest wooden building still in use, to defamiliarize it for readers who may already know of it.)

“The Carp of My Dreams”—Ueda Akinari (1734-1809)

夢応の鯉魚 (“Muō no rigyo”) is, in my view, a standout in the influential collection of supernatural short stories 雨月物語 (Ugetsu monogatari, “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”). The collection is in a late and relatively pellucid form of Classical Japanese, and comprises reworkings of older Japanese, Chinese, and Indian material. Published in the midst of Japan’s isolationist Tokugawa period, the collection has occasional nationalist and nativist overtones, but, unlike certain later material, this has a tendency to enhance rather than sap its narrative and emotional strength. This story, which, following Anthony Chambers, I have translated “The Carp of My Dreams,” is a bit different from other stories in the collection for its relatively light tone; its story of a Buddhist monk who paints fish and his reward from a lake god has tensions and ambivalent points, but nothing like what appears in other Ugetsu offerings like “A Serpent’s Lust” or “The Kibitsu Cauldron.”

The Carp of My Dreams

Once upon a time, around the Enchō era, there lived a monk at Mii Temple named Kōgi. He was known far and wide for his skill as a painter, but he did not focus his efforts on typical subjects such as religious art, landscapes, or studies of flowers and birds. Rather, whenever he had a day off from his duties at the temple, he would go out on the lake in a little boat and pay the net-fishermen to return their catch to the water so that he could paint them as they disported themselves; over years of this, his paintings grew exquisitely beautiful and precise. One day, after pouring his whole heart into a particular painting and then drifting off to sleep, he dreamed of entering the water and disporting himself with the fish, great and small. When he woke up, he straightway painted what he had seen, put the painting up on the wall of his cell, and called it “The Carp of My Dreams.”

Moved by the beauty and skill of his paintings, people chomped at the bit to acquire them, but while he gave away his flower-and-bird studies and landscapes for a song, he held on to his carp paintings, fending off all comers.

“No way the fish that this monk has raised can be handed out to laypeople who kill living things and eat fresh meat.”

Word of the paintings, and of this jibe, spread all under heaven.

One year he fell ill and, after seven days, suddenly closed his eyes, stopped breathing, and passed out. His apprentices and friends gathered together to mourn, but, feeling a remaining warmth in his breast, they kept watch around him in the hopes that he might recover; after three days of this, his arms and legs seemed to stir, he suddenly let out a sigh, he opened his eyes, he got up as though merely waking up from sleep, and, facing the well-wishers, he said “I have long forgotten human affairs. How many days was I out?”

His brothers said, “Master, you haven’t breathed in three days. People in the temple first and foremost, but also all sorts of other people who knew you, came to make funeral arrangements, but seeing that your breast was still warm, we kept watch without putting you in your coffin; now that you’ve recovered, all we can say is ‘thank heavens we didn’t go through with the funeral.’ We’re very thankful.”

Kōgi nodded and said: “Someone go visit the mansion of the Taira lord, our lieutenant governor who supports the temple, and announce ‘Somehow that priest returned to life. Your Lordship, stop pouring sake and preparing sliced fish. Leave the banquet for a while and come visit the temple. You’ll hear a rare tale.’ Pay attention to what his people are doing. Tell him precisely what I just told you.”

A messenger went to the mansion, feeling a little fishy about it; he relayed the message and, looking inside, saw the Taira lieutenant governor, sitting in a circle with such people as his younger brother Jurō and his retainer Kamori, drinking sake. The messenger was shocked; everything was just as his teacher had said. When the people of the lieutenant governor’s household heard the message they were greatly alarmed; the lieutenant governor set down his chopsticks and made for the temple with Jurō and Kamori in tow.

Kōgi raised his head from his pillow and thanked his guests for visiting; the lieutenant governor congratulated him on his startling resuscitation. Then Kōgi said, “Listen, Your Lordship, to what I have to say. Have you ever bought fish from that fisherman Bunshi?”

Surprised, the lieutenant governor replied, “Yes, I certainly have. However did you know?”

Kōgi said, “He put a fish over three feet long in a basket and brought it in through your gate. You were in the south wing in the middle of a game of go with your younger brother. Kamori was seated to the side, eating a big peach as he watched you play. Rejoicing at the fisherman having stopped by with such a large fish, you offered him some peaches you’d put out on a plate, plus filling the cup and drinking three rounds of sake with him. The cook proudly took the fish and started cutting it up; everything this old priest has said so far is what happened, right?”

Such was Kōgi’s speech, and the lieutenant governor and his men, hearing it, felt suspicious, not to say troubled and confused; they pressed him on how he knew all this in such detail, and he explained.

 ❦

“Lately, my illness was causing me such unbearable suffering that I didn’t even realize I had died; hoping to cool my fever a bit, I made my way out the gate with my walking stick, and it was as if I had forgotten about my illness, feeling like a caged bird returning to the great open sky. I made my way through mountains and village until, like usual, I came to the edge of Lake Biwa. When I saw the beautiful blueness of the water, I felt like I was in a dream and, wanting to swim and disport myself, I stripped down right then and there, threw myself in, dove down deep, and swam all over; even though I’m not someone who’s been used to swimming since I was a child, I splashed around however I liked. Looking back now, it was an ill-considered dreamer’s fancy. Even so, it doesn’t feel as good to drift in the water as a human as it does for a fish. At that point I got more and more envious of the fish swimming all around me. Just then there was a large fish nearby; it said, “Your Worship’s wish is an easy one. Please wait.”

The fish disappeared for a while into the depths of the lake, but then a person in a crown and robes, riding that same big fish, with a retinue of all sorts of watery creatures veritably wafting around him; this person spoke to me.

“Hear the edict from the lake god Watatsumi. You, old monk, have accrued many merits for freeing living beings. Now you have entered the lake and long to disport yourself in it like a fish. We will clothe you in a golden carp for a while and allow you to enjoy the watery realm. Only do not let the smell of bait dazzle you, get caught on a line, and die.”

Having said this, the person vanished from my sight. I looked myself over in amazement, and before I knew it I had grown golden scales and become a carp. Without thinking of this as especially strange, I swished my tale and worked my fins and moved to my heart’s content. First I rode the waves whipped up by the wind from Mount Nagara, then, sportive along the edges of the Great Bay of Shiga, I got a start from the wet skirts of the people walking so close to the shore; I tried to dive in the deep places under high Mount Hira’s shadow, but it was hard to hide from the allure of the fishing fires of Katada at night. The moon sojourning on the waters in the lily-seed-black night blazed on the peak of the Mountain of Mirrors, and charmingly lit the eighty ports’ eighty corners. Oki Isle and Chikubu Isle, with their vermilion shrine fences floating in the waves, were wonders to behold. The winds swept down from Mount Ibuki and the Asazuma Boat put out, waking me from my dreams among the reeds; I ducked the skilled rowing of the Yabase ferryman and got driven off repeatedly by the bridge guards at Seta. When the sun shone I drifted in the shallows, and when the wind stiffened I disported myself in the many-fathomed depths.

Suddenly I felt hungry, downright greedy for something to eat, to the point where I thought I’d go mad if I didn’t find some, and just then, Bunshi was casting his line.

The food smelled so good. I recalled to mind the instructions of the lord of the waters.

“I am a disciple of the Buddha. I can’t be this desperate for food that I’m considering taking fish bait.”

So I reminded myself. But the hunger after a while grew worse, and again I thought, “I just can’t stand it now. Even if I take this bait, I can avoid getting caught. I understand well how this works; it won’t fool me.”

And so I took the beat. Bunshi immediately reeled in the line and caught me.

“How can you do this?” I cried out, but he did not hear me as he inspected my face, took a rope and pierced my chin, landed his boat at Ashima, heaved me into the basket, and went in through your gate. You were in the south wing at play with your younger brother. Kamori was sitting to the side, eating fruit. The huge fish that Bunshi brought in made a big impression on those present. At that time I raised my voice against those present.

“Has everyone here forgotten Kōgi? Have mercy on me. Let me go back to the temple!”

I was fairly screaming at them, but they treated me as a stranger, just clapping their hands happily. The cook grabbed me firmly with his left hand in both my eyes, while with his right he took up the knife; when he had me on the cutting board and was just about to start chopping me up, I cried out strenuously in a great voice, “I’ve never heard of such harm to a disciple of the Buddha! Help me, help me!”

I cried and screamed but nobody could hear me. Finally, just as I was about to be cut open, I woke up from my dream.”

 ❦

The people marveled at this. The lieutenant governor said, “Thinking on Your Worship’s story, it occurs to me that at one point I saw the fish keep opening and shutting its mouth, although there wasn’t any voice coming out of it. Such things are wondrous to see.” Saying this, he had a servant run back to his home and throw what was left of the fish back into the lake.

 ❦

Kōgi recovered fully from his illness and lived for another decade. When he was finally approaching his last moments, he took his various carp paintings and cast them off at the lake; the fish left their cocoons of paper to frolic in the water. Thus Kōgi did not leave any of his paintings to posterity. He did have a disciple named Narimitsu who had some fame as an inheritor of Kōgi’s miraculous skill. A rooster that he painted on a screen in the Kan’in Palace looked so lifelike that when a real rooster saw it he tried to kick it, as is related in an old tale.

“The Earth God and the Fox”—Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)

土神と狐 (“Tsuchigami to kitsune”) tells the story of an earth god who lives in rags, a fox who wears custom, and their rivalry, at least in their own minds, for the affections of a birch tree. Like much of Miyazawa’s fiction, it is a children’s story but has allegorical resonances relating to Miyazawa’s religious and sociocultural beliefs. In this case the usual reading is that the story sees Miyazawa working out his thoughts on indigenous culture and Western-dominated global culture, in the context of Japan’s own partial Westernization. The indigenous culture violently expunges the globalized Western-dominated culture, but it is not actually right to do so because Western culture has values and traditions and a worthwhileness of its own, even if it has a tendency to traipse about where it's not wanted. Commentators on Miyazawa often conclude that his implicit pro-Western stance was developed as a repudiation of an earlier stance that was strongly nationalist and imperialist, hence the allegorical criticism of indigenist attitudes seen in this story.

The Earth God and the Fox

1.

At the northern end of the Single-Tree Field, there was a slight rise in the ground. The raised area was full of wild boar, and in the middle was a lovely woman—a birch tree. She wasn’t very big, but she had a gleaming dark bole, winsomely spread-out branches, white flowers that bloomed like clouds in May, and leaves that fell in golds and crimsons in autumn.

            Therefore wandering birds would perch in the tree—cuckoos, shrikes, wrens, white-eyes. When a bold young hawk or the like would hie into view, the smaller birds would see it from afar and steer clear.

            This tree had two friends. One was an earth god who lived in a plashy fen just about five hundred strides away; one was a fox with tea-brown fur who always came from the south side of the field.

            If she had had to choose, the birch tree would have said that she liked the fox more. The reason for this was that, although the earth god had the name and title of a deity, he was extremely rowdy, his hair looked like a worn-out bunch of cotton thread, his eyes were reddish, his kimono was so tattered it looked like it was made of kelp, he always went barefoot, and his nails were long and black. The fox, on the other hand, cut a refined figure and seldom gave anyone any reason for anger or hard feelings.

            However, if one were to directly compare the two, the earth god might have come across as frank and aboveboard, the fox as a slightly suspect character.

2.

It was an evening in early summer. The birch was replete with soft new leaves and a good smell was all around; in the sky the Milky Way was pale and the wandering stars wavered and swayed, twinkling in and out.

            The fox went to relax under the tree, carrying a poetry collection. He wore a tailored blue business suit and squeaky red leather shoes.

            “Such a quiet evening.”

            “Yeah,” the birch replied softly.

            “The Scorpion Star is creeping along up there, see? The big red one; in China they used to call it just ‘fire.’”

            “Is it different from Mars?”

            “Totally different from Mars, yes. Mars is a planet whereas this one is a nice fine star.”

            “What makes a planet different from a star?”

            “It’s a planet if it doesn’t shine with its own light. In other words, it only looks like it shines when it reflects light coming from somewhere else. It’s a star if it’s one that does shine with its own light. The sun is, of course, a star, right? It’s huge, dazzling, but if you look at it from an enormous distance you can see that, after all, it looks like a small star.”

            “So the sun is one of the stars, huh? Well, when you look at it like that, there are any number of suns in the sky. It’s strange to think, isn’t it? There are the stars, and yet oh, look! They’re suns!”

            The fox laughed indulgently. “Yes. Neat, isn’t it?”

            “Why are there red, yellow, and green ones amongst the stars?”

            The fox laughed indulgently again and crossed his arms high on his chest. The poetry collection fluttered in the air, but did not even come close to falling from his paws.

            “Is there a reason why there are different colors, citrusy colors and blues and so forth, in the stars? Of course there is. In the beginning all the stars were just an indistinct cloud. Now, though, there’s so much in the sky. For example, Andromeda, Orion, Canes Venatici…all up there. Canes Venatici has something in it called the Whirlpool Galaxy. Then there’s the Ring Nebula, which is also known as the Fish Mouth Nebula because it looks like a fish’s mouth. There are many different things in the sky today.”

            “Well, I would love to see some of it some day. How fine it must be to see a star shaped like a fish’s mouth!”

            “Yes, very fine. I saw it at the Misuzawa Observatory,” the fox said.

            “Well, I’d love to see it too.”

            “Let me show it to you. I’ve actually ordered a telescope from the Zeiss company, in Germany. It’ll be here by next spring, so why don’t I show you as soon as it arrives?”

            The fox said so without thinking. Immediately he thought Ah, so now I’ve also lied to my only friend. What a no-good jerk I am. Yet I didn’t say so maliciously. I wanted to say something to make her happy. I’ll clear things up later. The fox sat thinking in silence for a while. The birch tree, unaware that he had lied about the telescope, was overjoyed and said “Well, I’m glad of that. You’re always so kind.”

            The fox answered, not in very high spirits, “Yes, and I’d be happy to do pretty much anything else for you as well. Won’t you look over this poetry collection? It’s by a person called Heine. It’s a translation, but a pretty good one.”

            “Well, might I borrow it?”

            “Go ahead. Please take your time looking over it. –Excuse me, but I think there was something I’d been meaning to say.”

            “It was about the color of the stars, right?”

            “Yes, that’s it. Let’s save that for next time I see you, though. I don’t want to intrude on you for too long.”

            “Of course. That’s all right.”

            “I’ll come again, so fare thee well for now. Here’s the book. Goodbye.”

            The fox hurried on home. The birch tree, rustling her leaves in the south wind that was soughing through her just then, picked up the poetry collection that the fox had left and began turning its pages by the faint light of the Milky Way and the trembling stars in the sky. That Heine collection was replete with beautiful poems, “Die Loreley” and others. And so the birch tree read the whole night through. It was past three o’ clock when she dozed off, with Taurus rising in the east.

            The night ended. The sun rose.

            Dew gleamed on the grass and the blooming flowers were out in full force.

            From the northeast the earth god came slowly, drenched in morning sunlight as if in a bath of molten copper. He came slowly, prudently, arms folded.

            The birch tree felt vaguely concerned but still turned to meet the earth god, her green leaves glistening. Her shadow on the grass swayed to and fro, to and fro, moment to moment. The earth god came up to the birch tree quietly and stood in front of her.

            “Birch tree. Morning.”

            “Good morning to you as well.”

            “You know, no matter how much I think about ‘em, there’s many things I don’t understand. Aye, quite a number of things I don’t understand.”

            “Well, what sorts of things do you mean?”

            “Take this example—this here grass grows from this black soil, but then, why does it come up so green? Blue almost. There are even yellow flowers blooming, white flowers blooming. I just can’t figure it.”

            “Isn’t it because the grass’s seeds have the blues and the whites in them?”

            “Yes. Well, that being the case, I still don’t get it. For another example, mushrooms in the autumn don’t have seeds; they just come right up out of the soil, don’t they? But they come up all colors too, reds, yellows…I just don’t get it.”

            “Why not ask the fox and see what he has to say?”

            The birch tree could not help but suggest this, so rapt had she been at last night’s stories of the stars.

            Hearing these words, the color of the earth god’s face suddenly changed. He clenched his fists.

            “What? The fox? What did the fox say?”

            The birch tree’s voice became flustered.

            “It isn’t that he said anything particularly noteworthy. That is to say, you have known him for some time, have you not?”

            “What’s there for a fox to teach to a god, then?”

            The birch tree, already most out of sorts, swayed to and fro, to and fro, in a huff. The earth god ground his teeth and stormed around the place. His pitch-black shadow fell on the grass, and the grass, too, quaked with fear.

            “People like the fox are a plague on this world. They’re grudge-holding, cowardly, underhanded liars. They’re wrong ones, the stupid animals.”

            The birch composed herself and said “It’s almost time for your festival, is it not?”

            The earth god’s livid face settled a little. “Aye. Today’s already May 3, so six more days to go.”

            The birch tree became flustered again; the earth god thought for a while, then, in another sudden outburst, said “However, human beings are an insolent lot. They don’t bring so much as a single offering to my festival these days. Next time the first one of them to set foot on my turf I swear I’ll drag down into the mud.” The earth god ground his teeth again.

            The birch tree had gone to great lengths to calm him down, and now that he was in this state again she did not know what else she could do. She just swayed and rocked her leaves in the wind. The earth god, blazing in the sunlight, crossing his arms up high, wandered about. He found that no matter how much he thought about matters they kept galling him. Finally he could not take it any more and he stormed back to his own fen with a beastlike roar.

3.

The place where the earth god lived was about the size of a small racetrack. It was a chilly wetland full of mossy things, grass, stunted reeds, and here and there thistles and low, twisted willows.

            There was something unwholesome about the water; iron that had leached into it kept bubbling up redly to the surface, making it cloudy and disquieting to look at. In the middle of it, in a relatively solid bit like a little island, stood the earth god’s shrine—small, only about six feet high, and made of unsawn logs.

            The earth god returned to his island and sprawled out next to the shrine. He scratched his dark, skin-and-bone legs. He saw a bird fly right over his head, sat up abruptly, and shouted “Shush!” The bird, startled, almost came tumbling out of the sky; it fell lower and lower, as if stunned, then flew off.

            The earth god chuckled and stood up. However, when he looked over to the hill where the birch stood, his face colored and he stood ramrod-straight. Then with both hands he ruffled his hair as if a tempestuous wind was passing through.

            At that time a lone woodcutter came towards the fen from the south. He was on his way to Mount Mitsumori to earn his living, and he took long strides along the narrow path that skirted the fen. Yet it seemed he was aware of the earth god, and sometimes he looked at the shrine with a sense of recognition. The earth god’s own form, however, he could not see.

            Seeing him, the earth god was delighted, his face now flushed with joy. He stretched out his right hand towards him and, left hand bracing against right wrist, dragged him towards him. The woodcutter, strangely enough, although he thought that he was still proceeding along the path, found himself gradually walking into the fen. He was astonished. The woodcutter started walking faster, his face went pale, and he began to gape for air. The earth god slowly turned his right wrist all the way around. The woodcutter began to walk in circles, covering the same ground over and over, gasping with fear. It seemed he was trying to escape from the fen as quickly as possible, but no matter what he did he just kept going around and around the same spot. Finally the woodcutter broke down crying. He threw up his hands and ran. The earth god, lying down, kept grinning happily at the sight. Before long the woodcutter, lightheaded with exhaustion, splashed down into the water. The earth god slowly rose to his feet. He lurched over and hurled the collapsed woodcutter into a patch of grass. The woodcutter thudded down into the grass. He moved slightly, groaning, but the earth god took no notice just then.

            The earth god laughed loudly. His voice became an ominous wave and rose into the sky.

            That voice that had risen to the sky soon rebounded and rustled back down to where the birch tree was. The birch tree suddenly blanched and trembled in the sunlight.

            The earth god brooded, yanking at his hair fretfully with both hands. First and foremost the reason no one cares about me is on account of that fox. No, the birch tree more so. No, the fox and the birth tree. But I’ve no quarrel with the birch tree. I’d endure a lot of heartbreak so as not to offend the birch tree. If I needn’t be concerned for the birch tree then all the more I needn’t be concerned for the fox. I’m a low-down brute but, after all, I’m still a god. It’s a deplorable thing that I need to worry about things like foxes. Even so I can’t help being concerned. I’d do well to put the birch tree out of mind but I just can’t get her out of my head. This morning I was pale and shuddering and I’ll never forget how fine it all was. I’m in such a foul temper I tormented that poor human. It can’t be helped, though; no one really knows what to do when they’re that out of sorts.

            The earth god, suffocating in misery, thrashed around on the ground. Another hawk soared through the sky overhead, but this time he watched it without saying anything.

            Far off in the distance sounded the claps of firing guns, crackling like breaking rock salt, perhaps for some cavalry exercise. Blue light gushed down over the field from the sky. Maybe because he was somehow drinking up the light, the woodcutter who had been thrown into the grass finally came to. He picked himself up to his feet and looked around.

            Then all at once he stood up and hightailed it away, making his way at top speed towards Mount Mitsumori.

            The earth god saw this and laughed loudly again. Once again the sound of his voice traveling through the blue sky rustled down to where the birch tree was. The birch tree once again colored in her leaves and shook them too minutely to be seen.

            The earth god seemed finally to calm down after pacing over and over and over and over around his shrine. He disappeared into the shrine, as if his form had melted away in a thaw.

4.

It was an August evening of deep fog. The earth god was too lonely for words, and could not help but leave his little shrine in an ill humor. Before he knew it he found his feet taking him towards the birch tree. He had been finding for some reason that his heart throbbed in his chest whenever he thought about the birch tree. It was incredibly trying for him. Thus he was trying his best not to let his thoughts and feelings turn to the fox, the birch tree, or any other such subject, but he simply could not help thinking about them. Day after day, he kept brooding on it. Aren’t I still a god? Of what importance to me is this one birch tree? Even so he could not help his sadness. Especially when he thought even for a moment about the fox, it was so painful that he felt as if his body would burn up.

            The earth god, deep in thought about many things, slowly came closer to the birch tree. At last he realized that he was walking right up to the birch. Then suddenly his feelings began to dance. Since he had not been there for quite some time, the thought occurred to the earth god that perhaps he had kept the birch tree waiting. He felt strongly that if this was so then it was a crying shame. He took long strides up to her, treading on the grass and feeling his heart dance in his chest. Yet eventually even his strong legs began to quaver, and the earth god had to simply stand there, as if pale blue sadness was pouring from his head. The fox was coming. Night had already fallen, but the fox’s voice could be heard through the still mist, lit indistinctly by the moon.

            “Yes yes, naturally. Something isn’t beautiful just because it follows some mechanistic law of symmetry. That’s dead beauty.”

            “That is exactly so!” the birch’s soft voice replied.

            “Real beauty is nothing like some fixed, fossilized model. Even if something complies with the laws of symmetry, one still hopes that it has the spirit of symmetry.”

            “Yes, I think that’s exactly right,” said the birch’s kindly voice again. The earth god now felt as if his body was blazing with a chattering peach-pink flame. His breath came quick and painful. What is it that’s making me so miserable? It’s just a short conversation between a birch tree and a fox in a field. To let my heart be troubled by something like that…and aren’t I a god? the earth god upbraided himself.

            “So,” the fox went on, “in any book on aesthetics, there’s some discussion of this issue to be found.”

            “Have you many books on aesthetics?” the birch tree asked.

            “Oh yes. There’s nothing better. Right now, though, they’re mostly available in Japanese, English, or German; there seem to be new Italian ones too, but they haven’t arrived yet.”

            “How fine must your study be.”

            “Not really; they’re all a bit scattered about, since I use it as a laboratory too. A microscope in the corner, the Times of London here, marbles and marble scissors rolling around there—it’s a mess.”

            “Well, it’s fine even so; I think that sounds really fine.”

            There was a sound of breath, like the fox’s humility or pride, then a span of silence.

            The earth god could no longer stand still. When he heard what the fox was saying, he realized that the fox really was more eminent than he. He could not longer tell himself aren’t I a god? aren’t I a god? It was so painful, so painful; couldn’t he just dash out and rend the fox in pieces? But it wouldn’t do even to dream about that; wouldn’t he eventually get outstripped by the fox even then? What in the world am I supposed to do? the earth god agonized as he tore at his chest.

            “That telescope that was supposed to be here someday hasn’t arrived yet,” the birch tree observed by and by.

            “Right, yes, it was supposed to get here eventually, wasn’t it? It’s not here yet. It’s not even close. There is a lot of upheaval with the sea lanes from Europe, you know? I’ll bring it and show you the minute it arrives. The rings of Saturn are so beautiful, you know.”

            The earth god slammed his hands over his ears and ran off northward at speed. He had started to be afraid of what he might do if he just kept silent.

            He kept running at full tilt. It was at the foot of Mount Mitsumori that he flopped to the ground, his lungs unable to take any more.

            The earth god tore at his hair and thrashed around in the grass. Then he bawled. In no time at all that voice rose to the sky and could be heard even all over the fields. The earth god cried and cried to the point of exhaustion, then returned vacantly to his little shrine.

5.

Autumn came to the field. The birch tree was still green, but the spike-eared grasses around her had already reared their golden heads, and here and there the ripe red berries of lilies-of-the-valley glowed in the wind.

            On one bright clear golden autumn day, the earth god was in an exceedingly good mood. All of the hurt feelings from the summer seemed to everyone to have turned into something like a fine haze, settling into a ring over one’s head. Now that his strangely nasty disposition was gone, the earth god thought that if the birch tree wanted to talk to the fox, that was fine, go ahead and talk to him; it would be a very good thing if they were to just talk to each other happily. The earth god lightheartedly walked up to the birch tree, thinking that he wanted to tell her so today.

            The birch tree saw him coming from afar. And she waited for him trembling with concern.

            The earth god went over and greeted her lightly.

            “Miss Birch Tree. Morning. Fine weather, isn’t it?”

            “Good morning to you as well. Yes, it’s a beautiful day.”

            “I’m grateful,” the earth god said, “for the way the heavens go. Red springs, white summers, yellow autumns, autumn turns yellow and the grapes turn purple. I’m truly grateful.”

            “Goodness gracious.”

            “I’m in a really good mood today. I’ve had a hard time of it since the summer, but this morning I woke up and things just felt lighter.”

            The birch tree tried to reply, but for whatever reason the situation felt so awkward that she couldn’t think of anything to say.

            “Now I’d even give my life for anyone. If a little earthworm had to die, I’d change places with it.” The earth god looked off into the distant blue sky as he spoke. His eyes too were pitch-black and splendid.

            Once more the birch tree tried to reply, but the situation was still so awkward that all she could do was sigh.

            That was the point at which the fox arrived.

            The fox’s face suddenly colored when he saw the earth god. Yet he couldn’t just leave, so he came up to the birch tree, trembling a little.

            “Miss Birch Tree, good morning. And you there are the earth god, correct?” the fox said, wearing his red leather shoes, a tawny-colored raincoat, and an increasingly unseasonable hat.

            “Yep. I’m the earth god. Nice day out, no?” The earth god said so with a truly bright heart.

            The fox addressed the birch tree, his face going pale with jealousy. “Excuse me for bothering you while you’re entertaining a guest. Here is the book I promised you. So, then, let’s look through the telescope some clear evening. Goodbye.”

            “Well, thank you very much,” said the birch tree. The fox, meanwhile, did not take his leave of the earth god and began to hurry back home. The birch tree blanched and once more shivered slightly.

            The earth god just stood there absentmindedly for a while seeing the fox off, but then suddenly he was startled by the gleam of the fox’s red shoes where the light hit them in the grass. Just when I thought I’d returned to my senses, the earth god thought, my head is spinning. The fox strode away, setting his shoulders stubbornly. The earth god fumed with an inexorable anger. His face turned a terrifying black. “Let’s see what you can do with your aesthetics book and your telescope, you S.O.B.!” he roared as he ran after the fox.

            The birch tree’s branches shook in a panic, and the fox glanced offhandedly behind him to see if anything was troubling her, only to see the earth god, dark of countenance, chasing after him like a thunderhead. The fox snarled, bared his fangs, and took off like the wind.

            The earth god felt as if the grass all over the field was blazing with a pure white fire. Even the bright blue sky had suddenly become a pitch-dark hole, and he thought he could hear red flames roaring at the bottom.

            The two of them roared and dashed like a steam train.

            I’m done for, I’m done for, telescope, telescope, telescope…

            The fox ran as if in a dream, thinking these thoughts in the depths of his mind.

            Over yonder was a small scab-red hill. The fox whirled around its base to get to the hole that went down to his den underneath it. He lowered his head and tried to leap down inside to safety, but when he lifted his hind legs, the earth god was already leaping at him from behind. By the time the fox was able to think about what was happening, he was already having his body wrung by the earth god. Pursing his lips and laughing a little, he hung his head over the earth god’s hand.

            Suddenly the earth god threw the fox to the ground and stamped on him four or five times.

            Then the earth god dashed down into the fox’s den. The inside was empty and dark as a monastery, nothing but neatly compacted red clay.

            The earth god, gaping wide, came back out with a queasy feeling. He put his hand in the pocket of the raincoat on the fox’s limp corpse. In the pocket were two ears of light brown cock’s-foot grass. The earth god, his mouth still wide open, burst inconsolably into tears.

            His tears fell on the fox like rain, and the fox was dead, his neck twisted and broken, a faint smile on his face.

Some Poems by Chiyo-ni (1703-1775)

Chiyo-ni is the name by which posterity knows the eighteenth-century poet Fukuda Chiyo or Kaga no Chiyo; surnames were more mutable in those days. Chiyo is probably the foremost female practitioner of the haiku form, whose work maintains haiku’s traditional strong seasonal focus but shows more of a concern for human affairs than was typical for much of her writing period. Below I have translated seven of her poems on late winter and early spring; I hope to translate more of her oeuvre in the future.

I’m indebted to Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi's work on Chiyo-ni for bringing her to my attention. All of these poems can be found in their writing on her, some with slightly different orthography in the original.

❦

物ぬひや

夢たゝみこむ

師走の夜

My dreams

On a December night

I sew into my mending

❦

行く年や

もどかしきもの

水ばかり

O the passing years—

Troublesome things

Like so much water

❦

吹く風の

はなればなれや

冬木立

The cold wind doth blow

And breaks itself on

The winter treeline

❦

名月や

雪踏み分けて

石の音

Under the full moon

Stone-footsteps

Snow-echoing

❦

一人寝の

さめて霜夜を

さとりけり

Sleeping alone

A chill night of frost

Brings me to—

❦

ころぶ人を

笑ふてころぶ

雪見かな

Going to see the snow

People laugh seeing others fall over

And fall over themselves

❦

世の華を

丸うつゝむや

朧月

How the hazy moon

Wraps itself around

The flower of this world

(In this last poem, might maruu tsutsumu, “wraps around,” imply a pun on utsutsu, “reality” or “consciousness” as opposed to dreaming?)

“Aomori Elegy I”—Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)

Miyazawa wrote several versions of “Aomori Elegy” (青森挽歌 Aomori banka), of which this is the best-known. I did a translation of another version almost a decade ago, as part of my final for an upper-level undergraduate course called Readings in Modern Japanese II. That translation can be found here. Translating this version has been a longstanding personal goal of mine.

“Aomori Elegy” is a Modernist poem that in some versions has pronounced Buddhist themes; in all of its forms, it represents Miyazawa’s efforts to come to terms with the early death of his younger sister Toshiko. This version is probably the most explicitly Buddhist of the lot, although some of that might be lost on any reader accustomed to the “philosophy, not a religion” view of Buddhism, since Miyazawa’s Buddhism was expressly supernatural and intensely pietistic in character.

All versions are in the public domain in Japan, whose copyright regime is the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. This version is on Aozora Bunko, an excellent Japanese public domain online library somewhat along the lines of a Japanese Project Gutenberg, as part of Miyazawa’s Spring and the Asura (春と修羅 Haru to shura) collection. I’m electing to put this translation under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on this translation only if they attribute the translation to both Miyazawa Kenji and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

Aomori Elegy I

When the train passes through the fields on such a dark night as this,

The passengers’ windows all become the windows of an aquarium.

            (Like the ranks of dried telegraph poles

            That are passing swiftly by,

            The train races through a great hydrogen apple,

            The lambent lens of the galaxy.)

It runs through an apple,

But where on earth are we? What station is this?

There’s a fence made of torched railroad ties.

            (The silent agar of an August night.)

A single row of cross-barred poles

Is made up only of old familiar shadows

And two yellow lamps are lit.

The tall, pale stationmaster’s

Brass rod is nowhere to be seen,

And, in fact, he casts no shadow.

            (That entomology adjunct there

            In such fluid as fills this passenger car,

            Lusterless red hair aflutter,

            Is sleeping leaning on his luggage.)

My train is supposed to be northbound, but

It is running southward here.

The burnt fenceposts have fallen here and there,

The faroff horizon traced in yellow.

It muddles together—those stagnant beerlike dregs

Of heat haze on an ominous night,

The flickerings of lonely minds,

The Pale-Blue Station on the Pale-Blue River.

            (What a terrible pale-blue void!)

I can’t but soar up swiftly

From such a lonely fantasy

That the train’s switchback is at the same time a reciprocated desire.

Up there the roads are strewn with countless blue peacock feathers

And sleepy fatty acids of brass

And the five electric lights in the compartment

Liquefy at colder and colder temperatures.

            (Because it hurts, and because I am exhausted,

            I try not to remember

            Things I cannot but think about.)

Today, around noon,

Under the light-scorched clouds,

I swear, we congregated and pawed idiotically

Around that heavy red pump.

I commanded us, dressed in yellow.

So I can’t help but be exhausted.

             (O! du, eiliger Geselle,

             Eile doch nicht von der Stelle

             (A German first-grader)

             Who is it suddenly crying out

             So wickedly?

             But surely it is just that first-grader.

             Opening his eyes so wide

             Now, in the wee hours,

             Is that German first-grader.)

Did she pass through such a lonely station

Alone, and continue her journey?

In some direction that nobody knows,

Along an unknown path, to what kind of world

Did she take that lonely walk?

            (There are grasses and marshes.

            There is a single tree.)

            ((Giru-chan was sitting with a ghastly pale face.))

            ((Her eyes were wide open, but

            She didn’t seem to be seeing us.))

　　　　((Oh, I dare say, she, eyes glaring red,

            Narrowed the circle like so.))

            ((Shh. Break the circle and give me your hand.))

            ((Giru-chan looked so pale you could see right through her.))

            ((Oh, so many birds, so many birds burst across the sky

            As at sowing-time

            But Giru-chan maintained her silence.))

            ((The sun was a strange, toffee-like color.))

            ((Giru-chan didn’t look at us even a little

            And I felt horrendous.))

            ((She ran too fast through May’s three-leafed arrowheads.))

            ((Why didn’t Giru-chan look at us?

             ((Did she forget even us her playmates?))

But if I have to think about it

Then I have to think about it.

Toshiko passed in that manner

That everyone calls death.

I don’t know where she went after that.

It can’t be measured in our customary spatial directions,

When we try to sense that insensate direction,

Everyone whirls around giddily.

            ((A tinnitic roar, and I can hear no more.))

Having said this so kindly

It was clear that she could not hear the old familiar voices

Of the people around her whom she could still plainly see.

Suddenly she stopped breathing and her pulse failed,

And afterwards, when I ran to her,

Her beautiful eyes

Roved in vain as if looking for something.

They could no longer see our space.

What could she sense after that?

Surely she still had visions of our world

And hallucinated that she could hear it

As I, right by her ear,

Brought to her voices from far places.

The sky, love, apples, wind, the joyful origin of all the powers—

When I screamed, at the top of my lungs,

The name of the living being to whom all things return,

She took two breaths like little nods,

Her pointed white chin and cheeks trembled,

Coincidentally, the same face she made

When she was a little girl and had done something goofy.

But she definitely nodded.

            ((Dr. Haeckel!

            I would be greatly honored if you entrusted me

            With the peerless task of proof, of verification.))

From within the clouds of the silicate siesta,

That cowardly scream, as if being frozen…

            ((The evening we crossed Soya Strait,

            I stood on the deck all night.

            My unhelmed head cauled in a devious mist,

            My body filled with corrupted wishes,

            And so I decided to be truly defiant.))

Certainly she did nod.

And since, until the next morning,

Her chest remained warm,

After we cried out that she had died,

Toshiko could still sense the shape of this world.

And in that faint sleep, away from mania and pain,

She may have dreamed the way she dreamed here,

And I can’t help but feel that those serene dream-visions

That lead on to the next world

Might have been shining and fragrant.

You have no idea how much I wish that.

In fact, a piece of that dream

Drifted into that sunrise

Where Shigeko, among others,

Dozed exhausted from solicitude and sorrow.

             ((I’ll bring yellow flowers too…))

Surely Toshiko, in that daybreak,

Still within dreaming distance of this world,

Walked alone in an open field

Strewn with windblown leaves. As she so did,

Muttering as if she were someone else,

Going likewise into a lonely wood,

Did she turn into a bird?

Listening to l’estudiantina in the wind

In a dark grove of running waters

Did she fly off singing sadly?

And then, before long, did she wander aimlessly

With new friends who sang innocent songs

And sounded like little propellers

As they flew?

            No. I don’t think so.

Why isn’t some communication allowed?

It is allowed. The communication I got

Is the same as what our mother dreamed, caring for her on summer nights.

Why don’t I think that’s the case? It manifestly is.

Her dreams of the human world fading,

She senses a sky of rose-colored dawn,

Senses with her fresh new senses,

Senses smoke-like gossamers in the sunlight,

Glimmering, with a faint smile,

Passing the poles of light that crisscross

The glittering clouds and the frozen aromas,

Going that mysterious direction we call Upward.

Amazed that that is what it is,

She climbed, faster than Coriolis winds.

I can even trace those tracks.

There, looking out over a tranquil blue lake-surface,

Too smooth and too bright,

Seeming in some way to reflect absolutely everything,

A treeline shaken by sorrowful light…

I found such accurate transmission suspect,

And in time I became able to see,

In trembling joy, that it was the lapis lazuli surface of Heaven.

The music of the sky, flowing like ribbons,

Or like necklace pendants, or like dubious gossamer,

The living creatures with big feet,

Which aren’t going to leave, but do come and go,

The scent that flowers have in far-off memories—

Did she stand calmly amidst all this?

Or, after not hearing our voices,

A deep, bad, empty, dark-red cave,

Voices like sentient proteins being crushed,

The stench of sulfuric acid and laughing gas—

If she saw those in that place,

She would stand amidst them, pale with horror,

Not knowing if she was standing or staggering,

Hands on her cheeks, as if the dream itself were what was standing.

(Is it really true

That I feel this way these days?

Is it really possible

For such a one as I to see such things?

And yet I really am seeing.) thus

She might be brooding to herself…

These lonesome thoughts of mine

Come to everyone at night.

When day breaks and we reach the coast

And the waves are awash in sparkling light

Maybe everything will be all right.

But Toriko having died

Is no longer something I can think of as a dream

But a cruel reality,

Thinking on which I feel uneasy anew.

When sensing something is too raw,

Conceptualizing it instead

Can stop one from going mad.

It is certainly one of the defense mechanisms we the living have,

But one should not expect it to work forever.

After all, since she’s lost this world’s sense faculties,

What kind of body did she get?

And with what kind of sense faculties does she feel?

How often I think about this!

After so many experiments conducted once upon a time,

The Abhidharma tells us (see above)

“Don’t try this a second time.”

Ahead, monads of nephrite and silver

Are filled with gases emitted from the half moon.

The moonbeams permeate

The guts of the cirrocumulus,

Form a strange fluorescent screen,

Emanate more and more a bizarre scent of apples,

And seamlessly pass even through the cold windowpanes.

It is not just because this is Aomori;

Something like this tends to happen when the dawn moon

Enters the cirrocumulus…

            ((Oi, oi, that face of hers went pale))

Shut the fuck up!

Whether my dead little sister’s face

Went pale or went dark,

How can you speak of it?

Wherever she’s fallen

She already belongs to unexcelled enlightenment.

Whosoever advances there, full of strength,

Can bravely leap into any dimension.

Soon the steel of the east will shine.

In fact, today…or maybe yesterday, around noon,

At that heavy red pump, we…

            ((Listen up once more, please.

            Uh, actually,

            Her eyes then were white

            And didn’t want to shut right away.))

Do you ever shut up?

Soon, when the night’s egress opens,

Everything that is what it is,

Everything that sparkles how it sparkles,

Your weapons, and everything else of yours that isn’t a weapon,

All of which terrify you,

Will be shown in truth to be joyous and bright.

            ((Since from the beginning we are all siblings,

            You must never pray only for one.))

Oh, I have never done that.

Day and night, since she went away,

I do not think that even once

I have prayed that her, and only her,

Going to the good place would be enough.

A Poem by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

Matsuo Bashō is one of the most famous, popular, and influential poets in Japanese history, one of the early masters of the haiku form as a sort of truncated waka (5-7-5 rather than the traditional 5-7-5-7-7). He is a philosopher of some stature due to his poetry’s tendency to capture the sublime in the particular and immediate. His best-known writing is probably found in Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to Oku), a prose travelogue interspersed with haiku about the sights and culture of what was at the time far northeastern Japan.

Currently I miss my parents’ cat, Papako, herself named after a cat whom we met at a hotel in more or less the same part of Japan in 2013. (I highly recommend visits to Aomori especially for people who, like me, like snow, apples, and dramatic seaside landscapes.) Thus I decided to translate a Bashō haiku about a cat. This one touches on cats’ tendencies to be finicky about their food, one of the first things I ever noticed about them when my family got our first cat in my early childhood. It’s also arguably a bit sexist, but that’s a problem with most older literature in general, Japanese or otherwise. The poem appears in Aya Kusch’s lovely collection Cats in Spring Rain: A Celebration of Feline Charm in Japanese Art and Haiku. Her translation philosophy is a bit different from mine but still well worth a look.

麦飯にやつるる恋か猫の妻

A cat’s wife—has a lean diet worn thin her love?

Three Sea Poems by Kaneko Misuzu (1903-1930)

Kaneko Misuzu was a Japanese poet of the early twentieth century who specialized in children’s poetry, but the kind of children’s poetry that rips out one’s guts when one rereads it as an adult. She has been described as a sort of Japanese Christina Rossetti, but instead of Rossetti’s explicit and orthodox religious sensibility she shows a more characteristically Japanese grounding of religious ideas and religious meaning in the world around her. In particular, since Kaneko was a lifelong resident of a small fishing town until her suicide during a custody battle with her abusive ex-husband, her poetry shows a special love of the sea. I have translated three of her “sea poems” below.

The copyright situation for Kaneko’s work is somewhat more complicated than for other Japanese writers of her period, for reasons that I do not fully understand. For that reason, I’m putting these translations under a complete Creative Commons free-for-all provided they aren’t used for any commercial purposes; commercial purposes are what the current Japanese rights-holders explicitly advise against. My only motivation for posting these translations is a desire to share Kaneko’s poetry with the world, an altruistic approach that I think one owes her perhaps more than any of her contemporaries.

“The Whale Memorial Service” can also be found in the excellent collection Are You an Echo? by David Jacobson, Sally Ito, and Michiko Tsuboi, but I did not consult Are You an Echo? before translating my own version, in order to avoid rights issues in English.

To Sea

Grandpa went to sea.

Dad went to sea.

Big Brother went to sea.

Everyone, everyone went to sea.

Over the sea

Is a good place.

Once they've all gone out that way,

There's no coming home.

I, too, will soon

Grow up,

And go out to sea

In my turn.

❦

The Whale Memorial Service

When the late-spring flying fish season comes around,

They hold the Whale Memorial Service.

While the booming of the bells of the beachfront temple

Goes out over the surface of the water,

While the village fishermen put on their nice coats

And hurry to the beachfront temple,

As a whale calf all alone out on the water

Listens to the sound of those bells,

It weeps, weeps, heartsick

For its dead father and mother.

How far does the peal of the bell resound

Over the face of the sea?

❦

The Very End of the Sea

Over yonder’s where clouds spring up,

And where the rainbow has its root.

I want to get on a boat someday

And go to the very end of the sea.

It’s so far away, and it’s getting dark

And now I can’t see any of it…

You can harvest beautiful stars by hand,

Like picking red jujubes.

I want to go to the very end of the sea.

“Iroha”—Japanese poem, Heian period (late 8th through Late 12th Centuries)

I’m continuing my experiments with recapturing emotional and tonal effects in translation (see here and here) with this rendering of the Iroha poem, a Heian-era Japanese pangram (piece of writing containing every item in a writing system—in this case, every kana then in use in Japanese). This is actually not my preferred approach to translation—that hews a little bit closer to word-for-word rather than thought-for-thought or feeling-for-feeling—but it is one that interests me very much, especially when it comes to source material with which I am very familiar.

Since composing an English pangram that adequately translates any particular piece of foreign-language writing is probably impossible, I have gone with another venerable bit of formal wordplay, the acrostic. Acrostics, as well as their somewhat more freewheeling cousin alliteration, have been part of the English poetic tradition since the salad days of Cynewulf and Caedmon; they are currently not usually taken very seriously, but then, neither are pangrams. Cynewulf and Caedmon were religious poets; the Iroha is a religious poem; religion generally is not taken as seriously as it used to be in much of the world; these things happen.

A literal translation appears below my acrostic translation.

Iroha

Although the fragrant colors flourish

Loveliest flowers fade.

People, too, are of this world;

How could we endure?

Across the deep karmic mountains

Boldly we set out today,

Empty of deluded dreams—

Teetotalers we.

Colored flowers are fragrant, but will eventually scatter. Who in our world will exist forever? Karma’s deep mountains—we cross them today, and we shall not have frivolous dreams, nor become intoxicated.

いろはにほへと

ちりぬるを

わかよたれそ

つねならむ

うゐのおくやま

けふこえて

あさきゆめみし

ゑひもせす

A Case Study in Translation: The Tale of the Ring

Recently I had the opportunity to read Yubiwa monogatari, the Japanese translation of The Lord of the Rings.[1] The translators are Tanaka Akiko and Seta Teiji, apparently working in tandem the way Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky do in translations from Russian into English. The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite books and one that has had an enormous influence on my tastes, interests, and even personal relationships (I’ve met more than one close friend through Tolkien fandom) for almost my whole life. The Japanese language is another longtime passion of mine—yes, because I grew up in the stateside anime and manga boom of the 2000s, but for other reasons as well, ranging from its lambent sonic qualities to its astoundingly deep and rich poetry and travelogue traditions. Reading Yubiwa monogatari has thus been a long-term goal of mine for years; I’m enormously glad that I was finally able to. But is the translation any good?

Any assessment of a Lord of the Rings translation should, in my opinion, start with the poetry. This isn’t necessarily the case for all of Tolkien’s work—it would be a lot less relevant with the Silmarillion, for instance—but the poetry in The Lord of the Rings is extensive, controversial, and sometimes confounding. Apparently Seta was an academic specializing in traditional Japanese poetic forms, so when the Tuttle-Mori Agency arranged for the Japanese translation they must have seen this as an important point to get right as well. (The Japanese publisher is Hyōronsha; I’m not sure how exactly the arrangement between them, Tuttle-Mori, and the English-language rights-holders like the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins works or worked.)

Seta and Tanaka’s translations of the poems—poetry, in general, does not translate easily; I was the only person in my Japanese cohort in college who preferred translating poetry to translating prose, and even then only because my idiomatic English composition was stronger than my actual Japanese reading comprehension—are instructive in understanding how poetry in Tolkien works in general, even in the original. During the period from 1954 until around 2001 in which mainstream literary critics were almost uniformly hostile to Tolkien’s fiction, it was an orthodox view almost the point of being axiomatic that his verse was one of the weakest links in his already weak style. I have always disagreed with this entirely and the translation into Japanese does shed some light on why.

Some of the poems, like (just to name two from The Fellowship of the Ring) the Barrow-wight’s chant in “Fog on the Barrow-downs” and Galadriel’s “I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold” in “Farewell to Lórien” translate fairly well, as does the “Three rings for the Elf-kings under the sky…” rhyme that is so iconic of the story as a whole. (It doesn’t rhyme in Japanese, but then, very little Japanese poetry does.) The Hobbit walking-songs and anything Rohirric also survive the translation process more or less intact. Tom Bombadil’s songs, on the other hand, suffer immensely, and unfortunately “In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the spring” loses something as well. The failures of these translations make it very clear that these poems work in English, to the extent that they do work in English, because of their sonic qualities, whereas something like Galadriel’s lament, or even “The Ent and the Entwife,” can be effective in languages other than English due to relying less on sound and more on meaning. The fact that some of Tolkien’s poems and songs in The Lord of the Rings are much more semantically dense and substantive than others, and that those others are conversely more adventurous in their exploration of the English language’s fundamental sound and feel, for some reason has eluded most Tolkien critics. Even in the twenty-first century when most critics at least grudgingly acknowledge that Tolkien is a major force within this language’s popular literature, one still seldom sees the internal diversity of his diegetic verse acknowledged except in the form of banal observations about, say, Treebeard’s songs being a lot more depressing than, say, Sam’s.

Tolkien’s poetic forms are not the only aspect of his style on which the translation sometimes falls flat due to his deep familiarity with and focus on the rhythms and quirks of English. In the early chapters of The Return of the King Tanaka and Seta preserve or even improve on one well-known scene, but ruin another entirely. To their credit, the improved scene involves an actual translation choice whereas the ruined one is almost unavoidable given differences between Japanese and English. In the improved scene, Pippin’s unusually casual manner when speaking to Denethor, which in English is something of which the reader is simply informed when the appendices discuss the Shire’s informal dialect of Westron, is actually represented using Japanese politeness registers. Pippin’s language with Denethor is not exactly casual—he tends to end sentences with -masu and desu forms rather than -ta and da—but he talks around himself, starts more sentences than he finishes, and in general speaks to Denethor slightly but significantly less deferentially and more like an equal than does anybody else except Gandalf.[2] (Gandalf has probably the most consistently informal and impolite dialogue of any character in the translation.)

In the ruined scene, Éowyn and Merry’s slaying of the Witch-king of Angmar, Tanaka and Seta are unable to adequately represent the prophecy “no living man may hinder me” because Japanese lacks a word with the range of meanings that “man” has in English. In order for the Witch-king’s hubris to make sense the word used has to be at least potentially applicable to any plausible foe, yet in order for Éowyn and Merry to succeed in killing him it also has to have a more restricted meaning limited to male humans. Tanaka and Seta are clearly aware of this problem but resolve it through a brute-force decision to go with “male human” throughout the scene, raising the question of why on earth the Witch-king was so confident given that the Japanese version of the prophecy appears to pointedly avoid any assurances about huge sectors of Middle-earth’s population. Since Japanese simply lacks an English word with the suite of meanings that “man” has in English, Tanaka and Seta could not realistically have avoided needing to make this choice; however, the lack of a translators’ note to explain the scene is difficult to justify, especially since they are unafraid to use translators’ notes elsewhere, like when long stretches of Sindarin or Quenya (which they, correctly in my view, transliterate into katakana rather than actually translating into Japanese) appear.[3]

Some of the language most effective in Tolkien, like the sudden shift into an almost Lovecraftian “ectoplasm gothic” register in the last three chapters of The Two Towers when Frodo and Sam must pass the Witch-king’s stronghold of Minas Morgul,[4] is also effective in Japanese, but not as markedly so as in English. Tanaka and Seta might by conventional standards be “better” or at least more consistent prose stylists in Japanese than Tolkien is in English, since what those chapters are elevated from in the original is an idiosyncratic English that many readers and, infamously, many critics find or used to find repellent. I’ve run into similar problems translating from Japanese to English—the temptation to “correct” stylistic quirks or even replace them with my own. Sometimes a translation is deliberately transformative such that this sort of process is called for. For instance, I’m currently sitting on a translation of Yosano Akiko’s imperialist poem “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” that highlights Yosano’s abdication of her reason in her late rightist phase by rendering the original’s canned nationalist clichés as Capitalized Phrases With Trademark Signs After Them™.[5] However, I don’t think Tanaka and Seta have this kind of “vision” for commenting intertextually on what they’re translating, so the “normalized” style is likelier to just be an unfortunate byproduct of the translation process; not much more need necessarily be said about it.

Conversely, one point in the narrative that Tanaka and Seta do seem to feel, correctly, calls for a more heightened and more lyrical style is the very last chapter of The Lord of the Rings, “The Grey Havens.” The chapter in the original has an elegiac swoon to it: revisitations of settings and characters we haven’t seen in almost a thousand pages, an overpowering feeling of evening calm and cool mediated by the color-words “grey” and “yellow,” and the famous last paragraph with its flurry of run-on sentences snapped together with coordinating conjunctions. People have their lives changed by “The Grey Havens,” sometimes even if they weren’t enjoying The Lord of the Rings to begin with; reading the chapter is an overwhelming experience, even thinking about it sometimes reduces serious fans to tears, and if there is true sanctity to Tolkien’s life and writing then I think that much of it can be found in those last nine or ten pages of his best-known work.

So what do Tanaka and Seta do to pay honor to this ending? Felicitiously, for much of the chapter they don’t have to do much other than attempt to replicate in Japanese what Tolkien is doing in English. A happy accident of the development of these two otherwise very dissimilar languages has endowed Japanese with plenty of ways, such as independent clauses ending with unconjugated verb stems and sentences beginning with the word soshite, to parallel the “and” constructions in Tolkien's original English both grammatically and tonally or emotionally. The allusive thicket of Tolkien’s Shire place names—Bywater; Woody End—is also simply calqued into Japanese, which is the case in the early parts of the translation as well but takes on a new resonance of naturalistic imagery here, especially given Japanese literature’s famous sensitivity to seasonal changes within the natural world. Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin go into Woody End—Suetsumori—and enter into an eschatological end, the end of an era or a way of life, as much as into a geographical one. The double meaning is present in English but in Japanese it is even more strongly asserted.

Does Tanaka and Seta’s translation “succeed,” overall? The professor who taught me basic translation practice, a decade ago now almost to the week, told my class first and foremost that “the purpose of translation is to faithfully reflect the original sense of the text, not to come up with something random and completely unrelated”—a more difficult mandate than someone who’s never tried to translate anything might think, but still broad enough that success or failure of a particular translation is often a matter of opinion. In my opinion, Tanaka and Seta succeed as far as anyone translating Tolkien into a language like Japanese can succeed. Their failures—the scene with Éowyn; the fact that the Japanese color-words haiiroi and kiiroi lack the primal quality that “grey” and “yellow” have in English—are either unavoidable or would have required heroic measures to avoid. Their successes, especially the fact that so many of Tolkien’s poems still work in Japanese, are remarkable.

 ❦

Finally, a personal note, by way of a postscript: One thing I especially appreciated about the experience of reading Yubiwa monogatari was the renewed defamiliarization, the renewed sense of encountering the unalike and, through it, the alike. This was something that Tolkien wanted people to get out of The Lord of the Rings when they first read it, and indeed, as a child, I did; however, now I’m so intimately acquainted with the English text that I find little new to discover within it (although I still think it holds up well when reread). I know the geography of northwestern Middle-earth better than I know that of some parts of the United States. That being the case, it was a rare treat for me to read the text through a new lens, that is, the lens of a new language, and encounter Tolkien’s “secondary world” all over again. I would highly recommend that all bilingual or multilingual Tolkien fans find a good translation of The Lord of the Rings to reread and see if the story communicates anything anew to them as it did to me.

❦

[1] The title means “The Tale of the Ring”—cf. classical Japanese literature’s Genji monogatari, Heike monogatari, Konjaku monogatari, Taketori monogatari, Ugetsu monogatari, Torikaebaya monogatari, Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari—many such cases, obviously being evoked here to “elevate” the text and at the same time cast it as an archaic, heroic yarn of old.

[2] Having said this, Pippin’s way of speaking to Denethor does get more deferential over the course of their scenes together, which reflects the text of The Return of the King proper better than it reflects what we are told in the appendices—itself a more than defensible ordering of priorities, of course.

[3] A comparable issue involving gender in translation, concerning a somewhat “higher” text, appears in Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho into English. Carson makes the, in my view, odd choice, considering what’s at stake with Sappho translation in general, to render παιδός as “boy” in fragment 102. παιδός looks like a masculine noun and is often used that way, but it is the third-declension genitive of a word that at Sappho’s point in the development of Greek could be either masculine or feminine. Moreover, Carson translates the same word neutrally in other fragments. It’s possible that Carson is of the school of Sappho scholarship that actively and deliberately reads her as bisexual, which is frustrating to me because I think that many people adopt that stance for ideological reasons with which I strongly disagree. What I would have done here would have been to translate it as “youth”—or even as “servant,” which would be a daring but defensible choice, particularly since the immediate context concerns domestic work.

[4] I’m indebted to my friend and writing partner Meredith Dawson for the “ectoplasm gothic” shorthand to describe what makes these chapters so spine-tinglingly effective.

[5] Before I publish or post this translation I want also to translate Yosano’s much earlier poem “O Do Not Give Up Your Life” in a more respectful way to underscore the deterioration of her style as she succumbed to socially normative and uncompassionate political non-thinking.

Ten poems from the Kokinshū

Ki no Tomonori (850-904) and Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945), the cousinly dynamic duo behind the Kokin Wakashū or Kokinshū (古今和歌集, “Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems,” the first of the Imperial Poetry Anthologies), were no strangers to brutally hot and humid summer weather. These men lived in Kyoto, where I have been in July and where you could not pay me to go in July again. In the Kokinshū they have many seasonal poems attributing to summer imagery a certain cruelty and brutality; often these poems are about cicadas, symbols of both summer and impermanence. In the interests of making Classical Japanese poetry timely and relevant to those of us who are beginning to experience summer as a somewhat apocalyptic time, I have translated all ten of these cicada poems. They are numbers 73, 448, 543, 715, 716, 831, 833, 876, 1,035, and 1,101 in the anthology. 73, 448, 543, and 716 are anonymous; 715, 833, and 876 are by Ki no Tomonori himself; 831 and 1,035 are by other named individuals. 1,101 may or may not be by Ki no Tsurayuki himself; I’ve seen manuscripts attributing it to him and manuscripts in which it is unattributed.

Note that the death, rebirth, and apocalypse-related overtones of the cicada poems gradually diminish throughout the anthology. The second-to-last cicada poem in the book, number 1,035, is outright sentimental, but can be taken seriously to provide something of a way forward in hard, seemingly impossible times: put simply, people can get used to an awful lot.

73.

空蝉の世にもにたるか花ざくらさくと見しまにかつちりにけり

What, O cherry blossom, are you so like this cicada shell of a world?

I see you bloom, and in that moment already you scatter.

448.

Bush Clover*

空蝉のからは木ごとにとどむれどたまのゆくへを見ぬぞかなしき

As empty cicada shells cling to trees, thus the body is left in this world.

Yet how sad it is not to see the soul’s destination.

*Evidently “karahagi,” “bush clover,” the title of the poem, is a pun on からは木“kara ha ki,” “[something] empty [acting on] a tree.”

543.

あけたてば蝉のをりはへなきくらしよるはほたるのもえこそわたれ

From daybreak I spend the day crying without cease like a cicada.

By night my heart wavers and blazes like a firefly.

715.

By Ki no Tomonori. From a poetry contest held by Empress Dowager Tōin in the days of Emperor Uda (r. 887-897)

蝉のこゑきけばかなしな夏衣うすくや人のならむと思へば

A cicada cries; what a mournful sound.

I feel that person will become fickle, thin as summer clothes.

716.

空蝉の世の人ごとのしげければわすれぬもののかれぬべらなり

Hearsay leafing out verdantly in this cicada shell of a world

Will wither even the bonds I won't forget.

831.

By Monk Shōen. Composed after the Horikawa Chancellor’s (836-891) death and funeral at Mt. Fukakusa.

空蝉はからを見つつもなぐさめつ深草の山煙だにたて

Just viewing the empty cicada shell of his body was some consolation.

O Mt. Fukakusa, at least let the smoke rise high.

833.

By Ki no Tomonori. Composed after the death of Marquess Fujiwara no Toshiyuki (d. 901 or 907) and delivered to his house.

ねても見ゆねでも見えけりおほかたは空蝉の世ぞ夢には有りける

Sleeping and waking, I see him still.

It is true what they say—this cicada shell of a world is as a dream.

876.

By Ki no Tomonori. Once when he stayed over at someone’s house to avoid going in an unlucky direction, his host lent him a robe to wear at night, and he composed this poem upon returning it the next morning.

This night garment is as light as a cicada’s wings.

Yet how heavy hangs and spreads the lingering fragrance.

1,035.

By Mitsune, either the famed poet Ōshikōchi no Mitsune (859-925) or another man or woman with the same (unisex) given name.

蝉の羽のひとへにうすき夏衣なればよりなむ物にやはあらぬ

A bond grows more comfortable with wear, like an unlined summer garment

With nothing under it, the thinness of a cicada's wings.

1,101.

Cicadas*

そま人は宮木ひくらしあしひきの山の山びこよびとよむなり

Woodsmen have been felling trees for the shrine all day.

From the footsore mountains mountain-echoes resound.

*The word used for “cicada” in this title, “higurashi,” is not the word, “semi,” used elsewhere in the anthology. It is a pun on ひくらし “hikurashi,” “all day.” The pun on “all day” and a symbol of impermanence or fragility would not have been lost on the tenth-century Japanese readership.

宮 “miya” can mean either “palace” or “shrine.” I depart from most translators here by giving it the sense “shrine.”

“Waiting for the Barbarians”—Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)

Yes, I am able to read and translate from Greek as well as Japanese, although I’m much rustier (and really limited to translating relatively short poems, whereas in Japanese I simply prefer to do so).

Cavafy is one of the great gay poets of modern times but this particular poem, one of his most famous, has little of the erotic in it. It is rather one of the most accomplished, lapidary, and devastating portrayals in our poetry of a civilization in self-involved decline—rather like Verlaine’s Empire à la fin de la décadence, only regarding les grands Barbares blancs as, quite deliberately and self-consciously, an excuse. I think that Cavafy’s poem contains messages for our current age, unfortunately.

I’ve indulged in a couple of colloquialisms that most people who translate this poem don’t. It’s supposed to represent phrasings that I find especially snide or sardonic in other ways in the original.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Why are we awaiting, gathered in the agora?

Because the barbarians arrive today.

❦

Why such inaction in the Senate?

Why do the Senators just sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians arrive today.

What would the Senate bother to legislate about?

The barbarians will legislate when they get here.

❦

Why did our Emperor get up so early this morning

And go to sit in the great gate of the city

Upright on his throne, in state, crowned?

Because the barbarians arrive today

And our Emperor is waiting to receive

Their leader. He went so far as to prepare

A parchment for him, festooned with titles

And names to bestow upon him.

❦

Why have our Consuls and Praetors come out

Today, in their embroidered crimson togas?

Why have they put on their amethyst-choked bracelets

And rings of bright, gleaming emeralds?

Why wield they their precious sceptres,

Blinged out, as they say, with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians arrive today,

And things like that amaze the barbarians.

❦

Why don’t the orators come out like always,

To lay it on the line, to say their piece?

Because the barbarians arrive today,

And rhetorical flourishes bore them.

❦

Why so worried all of a sudden,

So confused? (How serious everyone’s faces are!)

Why do the plazas and avenues empty so quickly,

Everyone loping home, so pensive?

Because it is night, and the barbarians have not arrived

And some coming in over the frontier

Say there are no longer such things as barbarians.

❦

What will become of us without barbarians?

Those people were, from a certain point of view, a solution.

A poem by Saigyō (1118-1190)

This waka (the “most traditional” Japanese poetic form—the 5-7-5 familiar from haiku, followed by two more lines of seven morae each) is the work of the twelfth-century monk-poet Saigyō. It appears in the seventeenth volume of 1205's Shin Kokin Wakashū (新古今和歌集, “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems”), the eighth of the twenty-one Imperial Poetry Anthologies, whose intermediate points in the sequence is reflected in its modifier-heavy title. The doves in the poem make me think of this as something of a “Pentecost special,” especially since there is plenty of explicitly Pentecost-themed literature, such as Eliot's “Four Quartets” or O'Connor's “The Enduring Chill,” with just as morose a style and tone.

Many of Saigyō's poems, as with those of his later emulator Bashō, are unmediated descriptions of experiences he had traveling around Japan. In perhaps no other literature is the travelogue as august a literary form. Japan mastered it as early and as thoroughly as Occitania mastered the lyric poem or England the novel.

古畑の そばの立つ木に ゐる鳩の 友呼ぶ声の すごき夕暮れ

The voice of a dove calling for a companion from a tall tree—

The awesome sereness of this field at dusk.

Three poems from “Roses and Hanako”—Yosano Akiko (1878-1942)

These translations, like my translation of “Aomori Elegy III,” I undertook almost a decade ago for an undergraduate final. I stand by the way I translated these a bit more strongly than by the way I translated “Aomori Elegy” due to the simpler language. Yosano was a pioneering Modernist poet, but these poems were for her young daughter and most of the language in them is very direct. Think of this as a belated holiday upload; Children’s Day in Japan is May 5.

Yosano was for most of her life a progressive and feminist figure; unfortunately, in the last ten or twelve years of her life she veered sharply to the right. She died strongly supportive of Japan’s war aims in the Pacific Theater of World War II. I do not condone her views from this late period or the writing that she produced based on those views; a future upload will include my translations of an early antiwar poem and a late pro-war poem so that readers of English can see for themselves both the changes in Yosano’s beliefs and the decay of her poetic powers. However, the poems in Bara to Hanako (薔薇と華子 in prewar orthography) predate all that. The collection appears in volume 6 of her 2007 Complete Works (全集 zenshū); the poems in it were composed around 1927.

To my knowledge, Bara to Hanako has never had a translation published before and is in the public domain in Japan, whose copyright regime is the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. I’m electing to put these translations under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on these translations only if they attribute the translation to both Yosano Akiko and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

Roses and Hanako

The rose blossoms in Hanako’s garden,

because they are roses that Hanako planted

bloom looking just like her.

Their color is the color in Hanako’s cheeks,

the blossoms are in Hanako’s lips,

looking just like her, rose blossoms.

The rose blossoms in Hanako’s garden,

when the roses are pretty, if the sun too

scatters down its golden oil,

when the roses are pretty, a zephyr of air

comes to clothe them with the gauzy silk

in waves that cannot be seen by the eye.

In keeping with Hanako’s singing-day

the roses too take fragrant breaths

piping their voices like Hanako,

and in keeping with Hanako’s dancing-day

the roses too gently shake their forms

swaying like Hanako.

And on days when Hanako is out

they cover the eyes in which tears have welled,

those motionless downcast rose blossoms.

The meekness of the roses’ hearts,

this too is just like Hanako.

The rose blossoms in Hanako’s garden.

 ❦

Aeroplane

There, there, the passing aeroplane,

today too oblique to the city,

quavers with its wind-cutting sound,

with nimble carriage, way up on high

the fine form with outspread wings.

Put an opera glass to your eye,

and if you lift your eyes to the young passengers

who with thick stomachs took to the roads in the sky,

from the somewhat twisted fuselage,

sparkling golden reflections shine brilliantly.

The naïveté of the young passengers,

forsaking the hindmost, forgetting death,

not stopping for an instant, becoming

a new power they go flying on.

Forward, to the future, at full speed.

 ❦

Autumn is Come

Cool, cool, autumn is come,

Hanako’s beloved autumn is come.

The sky, of course, and the colors of the sun

and the water and the air and the blowing wind

neatly arrayed, clear up altogether.

Still more if it is a quiet night

little Hanako sits and reads

interesting fairy tales, and beside her

are the moon’s chilly golden color

and the insects’ dingdong ringing voices.

As thought up by little Hanako,

as when amidst the bamboo the beautiful

Princess Kaguya was found,

it is just that kind of an autumn day.

Cool, cool, autumn is come.

“Aomori Elegy III”—Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)

I did this translation almost a decade ago, as part of my final for an upper-level undergraduate course called Readings in Modern Japanese II. If I were doing this translation today it would probably be significantly different, but I am preserving the way I initially did it.

Miyazawa wrote several versions of “Aomori Elegy” (青森挽歌 Aomori banka), most much longer than this one. It is a Modernist poem that in some versions has pronounced Buddhist themes; in all of its forms, it represents Miyazawa’s efforts to come to term with the early death of his younger sister Toshiko.

This particular version has never had a translation published before and is in the public domain in Japan, whose copyright regime is the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. I’m electing to put this translation under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license. Anybody may copy, distribute, display, perform, and make derivative works and remixes based on this translation only if they attribute the translation to both Miyazawa Kenji and me. Anybody may distribute derivative works under a license not more restrictive than this license.

Aomori Elegy III

In the remaining mist of the thawed silicate siesta[1]

through the icy glass of the windows

the scent of apples drawing unto dawn

becoming a transparent cord flows in.

And outside monads of nephrite and silver

as they are full of gas emitted from the half-moon

into the guts of cirrocumulus

the moonbeams piercing through

make a weirder fluorescent plate

exude the weirder and weirder scent or light

that comes through the very smooth hard glass.

❦

It is not that it is because it is Aomori

but that it is more or less a phenomenon that always occurs

when the moon enters the cirrocumulus

that appears like this near to the dawn

or remains melting in the blue sky.

When I stand up in this berth by night

more or less everybody is sleeping.

In the seats in the midst of the right-hand side

pale opened peacock feathers

the child nursing a soft grass-colored dream

Toshiko, they look like you.

❦

“Sometimes in life we see our perfect double

at the Hōryūji depot

in some other steam train

a child exactly the same.”

On some morning so Father said.

And it seems it was me

in the December after that person died

as if it was yeast the fine snow

the most severe driving snowstorm

came down as I ran down the slope from school.

Before the pure white glass of Yanagisawa Clothiers

within the smoke of that indigo evening cloud

I met a woman in a black cloak.

Her eyes were hidden in her head-covering

her jaw was white and her teeth clean

and she looked at me as if to laugh a little.

(Naturally this pertained to the refractive index of the wind and the clouds.)

I nearly screamed.

(What, you, saying some plausible thing

like “you died”?

Yet here you are now walking around.)

Still surely I so screamed.

But since it was in that kind of tempestuous snowstorm

that voice was lost in the wind

having disintegrated into the wind I am bereft[2].

❦

“In the great house that commands such a view of the ocean

when I slept with my face upturned

with a hello-hello-hello-hello

over and over again the policeman awoke me.”

Those wrinkled loose white clothes

in the evening, one night, under that kind of electric light of yours

the senior-high-school teacher who sat down there

when he arrived in Aomori

did he say to eat an apple?

The sea is shining all around

and around now there are no crimson apples.

If it was fresh green apples he meant

those are certainly ready now.

[1] Neologism; compound; meaning is unclear; both words are now obscure.

[2] Literally “have lost a part”.

“Hakata Lullaby”—Japanese popular song, Late 19th or Early 20th Century

“Hakata Lullaby” (博多子守歌 Hakata komoriuta) is a comic folk song (with a dark twist at the end) written by an anonymous nursemaid (子守 komori), probably a teenage girl, in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Japan. These nursemaids did not necessarily work in the grand households that might have had domestic servants in the West; often they worked for other working-class people, whose luck had simply not been as hard as their own. However, the master and mistress of this particular song might have had upper-class pretensions, since the mistress is described as 渋う shibuu, which has a double meaning of “astringent, bitter” and “austere, understated, tasteful”; I have translated it “elegant, but dour.”

The first stanza contains a lurking allusion to the sex trade by way of the word “willow” (柳 yanagi). An alternate reading of the character for “willow” was (and still is) used to describe geisha, who do not sell sex as an integral part of their profession but in many cases do so on the side. The reference to the “willow” that is the nursemaid’s own body in particular draws attention to the fact that, for many former nursemaids, the sex trade was their only viable future option. “Yanagimachi,” the “willow district” of the city of Hakata (now a neighborhood of Fukuoka in southwestern Japan), was known as a red light district in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’m indebted to Franklin Odo’s magnificent book Voices from the Canefield: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai’i for alerting me to this song’s arresting, disturbing final stanza, which led to my decision to translate the whole song.

The decision to use the singsongy 7.6.7.6. meter in English (technically, ballad meter with hypometric tetrameters for the longer lines and an XAXA rhyme scheme) was taken because the poetic form in Japanese is nominally intended to be sung to children (although I can’t imagine any child in their right mind enjoying this particular lullaby). A literal translation of the Japanese text that I am using, which I ran across in certain old books and musical recordings, appears below the metrical translation.

Hakata Lullaby

In Hakata’s “Willow District”

No trees have lately swayed.

The willow-withy there is

The figure of a maid.

The Mistress of this household

Is bad-persimmon-sour:

A lovely treat to look at,

Elegant, but dour.

The Master of this household

Is of a high estate;

And as to what is meant here—

As a drinker, he’s first-rate.

O Mistress, listen closely.

And Master, listen, you.

If you abuse the nursemaid

Then baby gets it too.

In Yanagimachi, Hakata, there are no willows. A girl’s figure is the body of the willow.

The mistress of the house is like a bad persimmon. She’s lovely to look at, but austere to the point of bitterness.

The master of the house is of a high station in life. What kind of station is this? A grade of sake.

Listen well, Mistress; you listen too, Master. If you do evil to the nursemaid, she’ll take it out on the child.

博多柳町　柳はないが

むすめ姿が　柳腰

うちの御 寮さんな　がらがら柿よ

見かきゃよけれど　渋うござる

うちのお父つあんな　位がござる

なーんの位か　酒くらい

御寮よく聞け　旦那も聞けよ

守りに悪すりゃ　子にあたる