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.
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.
❦
春立つや新年古き米五升
haru tatsu ya shinnen furuki kome goshō
Old translation: New year, old rice. Just enough is left.
New translation: We made it through the old year, with just enough rice left to go by.
春立つや haru tatsu ya declares the beginning of spring, i.e., in pre-Meiji Restoration Japan, of the year. 米五升 kome goshō for five shō (a unit of volume) of rice also proverbially is “just the right amount” of something.
New note on the new translation: I decided that the sense that one had to limp to the finish line, with the old year, could stand some more stress here. We are on year thirteen of the polycrisis now, by my count, which differs from other people’s counts in many particulars.
❦
山は猫ねぶりて行くや雪の隙
yama wa neko neburiteiku ya yuki no hima
Old translation: The cat from Cat Mountain has space, now, to lick out the snow.
New translation: Up on Catamount, there is space, now, to lick out the snow.
隙 “gap” or “crevice” as hima is an old reading; it could also be geki or suki and the meter would hold good. The hima reading, though, is a homophone of a still-current word for free time or unhurriedness, which allowed me to play with “having space” here; the peak Nekomagadake’s eponymous cat monster has room both spatial and temporal to clean up after a hard winter.
New note on the new translation: I cannot believe I missed the potential for “catamount,” both a regional Vermont and Western Massachusetts term for Puma concolor and the name of a ski resort near where I lived, the first time I translated this. Then again, I have had to soften on dynamic translation lately, because of the telecommunications conglomerate’s standards and practices.
❦
八九間空で雨降る柳かな
hakkuken sora de ame-furu yanagi kana
Old translation: The willow branches spilling all that rain must be—about fifty feet up in the sky?
New translation: The sky is full of rain, the willows spreading it fifty feet or so.
八九間 hakkuken is “eight or nine ken,” an old unit of length.
New note on the new translation: I love Florence and the Machine! The old translation I think is still technically better, though.
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:
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?