Some Poems from the Kin'yō Wakashū
And we are back to the imperial poetry anthologies. This one, 金葉和歌集 “Poetry Collection of Golden Leaves,” is from the early twelfth century and I am indebted to one of my undergraduate professors, Stephen D. Miller, for turning me on to it. I think he’s translated some of these poems as well in his day. The ones I’ve selected generally have a Buddhist focus or in some cases an autumnal or wintry seasonal focus, which is aspirational given the weather we have been having where I am. There is one summer poem, though.
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.
The Hundred-Square-Foot Record (Kamo no Chōmei, 1153—1216)
A Silicate Siesta Obon Special
In memoriam C.I.M.
❦
The flow of the rushing river never ends, nor are its waters what they were at the beginning. The bubbles here vanish, there reappear, never tarrying in the stagnant pools for long. So too with worldlings and their dwellings.
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.
Two Poems about War—Yosano Akiko (1878-1942)
I promised these translations over two years ago in the introduction to my translation of three poems from Yosano’s Bara to Hanako collection. The juxtaposition displays a political evolution that is also a decay of the poet’s literary powers. Yosano was, for most of her life, a leftist and feminist poet best known for her antiwar poem “You Must Not Die” (“Kimi shinitamau koto nakare,” 『君死にたまふことなかれ』 in the orthography of the time) and her collection of feminist erotic poetry Tangled Hair (みだれ髪 Midaregami). Late in life she abruptly went down the 1930s Japanese equivalent of the rightist Facebook boomer pipeline. The result was “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” (“Nihon kokumin, asa no uta,” 『日本の国民、朝の歌 』), twenty highly mannered, formally controlled lines of cliché-storm edgy fascist garbage extolling the virtues of blowing yourself up and firing machine guns at Chinese civilians.
My translations of “You Must Not Die” (1904) and “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” (1932) follow. I’m electing to put them 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.
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 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.
“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 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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
“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 at all—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.
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. 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?
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.
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.
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.
“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.