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.
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: