An Exercise in Revisitation, Part One: Bashō’s Spring Poems
I have become interested lately in the ways in which a writer, or in this case a translator, can feel moved to revisit her old work over time. Some of the translation exercises I did in undergrad appall me now, although others, I think, hold up. This also seems like a good time to start revisiting some older material because in recent months I have done some (I hope) successful piecework for a Japanese telecommunications conglomerate, not translating but editing translations for a re-release of a certain well-regarded 2000s anime. I have a better idea of what audiences “want from” certain kinds of translated Japanese material now, and I have strong feelings about those audience desires, feelings that are not uniformly positive or negative. So here is a second attempt at the three Bashō springtime poems that I translated first a year ago today.
No particular source for this selection, although the Japanese orthography is that used by Yamanashi Prefectural University.
Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) on Fireflies
Fireflies are one of my favorite things about summer. Bashō seems to have felt similarly. Here is one of his several poems on the matter, using the Japanese orthography given by the Yamanashi Prefectural University.
Three Poems of Spring—Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)
As I said last summer, I think many of us know the drill with Bashō at this point, don’t we, readers?
No particular source for this selection, although the Japanese orthography is that used by Yamanashi Prefectural University.
Poems of Summer—Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)
I think many of us know the drill with Bashō at this point, don’t we, readers?
No particular source for this selection, although most of the Japanese orthography is that of the Haiku International Association website.
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.