Miyoshi versus me

March 28, 2010 The task involves trying to tackle several challenges at once. First, the translator has to think about the ways that the source and target languages differ and understand the fine nuances of how images or words in the original might not carry the same significance or weight in the target language. Second, the translator must examine the original networks of language present in the original and consider how the patterns of sounds, images, lexical parts, clauses and lineation might be represented in a language that does not structure meaning in quite the same ways. Third, and – perhaps most problematic – the translator has to figure out how to make do with sounds, words, metres and concepts present in the target language when those differ from what one finds in the source language.

These issues are present in all translation, but nowhere are they more pronounced than in the world of poetry, where much hinges on extremely local concepts of what sounds ‘poetic’. Usually, the author of the original poem has paid attention to every element of the poem, from the sound, metre and texture of the original words to length of the individual line, but these elements do not always carry over well from language to language. For instance, rhymes which sound stunning in Urdu may sound banal in English. Something expressed with amazing density in classical Japanese may become unwieldy and awkward in English. Linguistic and poetic structures available in classical Arabic for the author of a ghazal are not necessarily available for the English translator. In each case, the translator must think long and hard about how to rework the original for the English-speaking target audience.

This problem is made all the more urgent by the fact that the poet is always engaged with notions within his or her culture about what sounds poetic. Sometimes the poet is working in tandem with those concepts, creating a poem that confirms to dominant notions of poeticity and that sounds ‘pretty’, whereas at others, the poet is working against those notions, creating an original poem that is transgressive or challenging. When poetry is translated, however, the poem is deracinated from the original poetic context and transplanted into new soil. As a result, it is sometimes hard to see just by looking at translations in English, for instance, why one particular haiku might be more ‘avant-garde’ to the Japanese haiku establishment than another. After all, it is only the rare English-reader that has a good knowledge of the vast amount of stylistic variation, criticism and experimentation within the staggeringly rich world of haiku in Japan.

In short, concepts about what is poetic differ so much between cultures that the mindful translator is forced to think about the problem of how to replicate those qualities that make the original poem unique within the original poet’s literary tradition. What I am trying to say is this – a translation must reflect the content of the original with a fair degree of accuracy, but if that is all that it does, then the translator has only done half of his or her task. The other part, and perhaps far more challenging task, is to try to show what is original about the work. So often in the case of poetry, what is original has to do with a poem’s style, musicality, phrasing or imagery, and it is precisely those things that are the most difficult to represent in translation.

The problems of carrying networks of meaning across linguistic boundaries are so significant that translators typically chose either consciously or unconsciously to focus on certain aspects of the text at the cost of others. It is commonly said that the translator betrays – traduttore, traditore in the clever Italian phrase – but this is a vastly oversimplified view. With the exception of cases in which the translator is not especially sympathetic toward the culture and language of the original (such as in colonial situations or other systems involving obvious power dynamics), the translator rarely abandons everything in the original and betrays the original altogether. Usually, the translator chooses to focus on certain elements of the original, highlighting certain elements at the expense of others.

Each year, when I teach my course on translation theory, I begin by asking my students, “What is a good translation?” Most answer that a “good translation” is one that sounds natural in the English and that reads smoothly – a seemingly contradictory answer that suggests a translation of literature from a foreign language should have no whiff of coming from another language. Over the course of the following several weeks, I force them to reexamine this assumption from the ground up, showing them that every translation has different goals and assumptions (either explicit or unconscious) that shape the choices a translator makes at every step. What a “good translation” represents depends entirely one’s goals. For the casual reader who wants no challenge and is not especially interested in learning about other poetic traditions, that might be the translation that offers little resistance and challenge, even if that means sacrificing the voice of the original writer. Such translations have their place, especially in developing the popularity of a particular author or genre, but for those in literary history who care about the complicated ways that literary development unfolds upon its complicated, ever-branching paths, a “good translation” is more likely one that highlights those elements which are new in a work and which give it its own original voice. A “good translation” for someone interested in literature should be one that that focuses on the elements that make it stand out from the thousands of other pieces written like it every year.

Born in Osaka in the year 1900, Tatsuji Miyoshi was very much a poet of the twentieth century. His first anthology, published in 1930, appeared at a point in time when modernist experimentation was at its height in Japan. In fact, soon after coming to Tokyo in 1926, he became involved with a number of journals which were at the forefront of creating a new, modern poetics. In 1926, he joined the group of writers producing the journal Aozora (Blue Sky). The following year, he became part of the coterie producing the surrealist journal A (Asia), and in 1928, he joined the group behind the journal Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics). Although his training in French literature and his early interest in French symbolism and his associations with the poetic modernists involved with those journals does show through from time to time, Miyoshi does not look especially flashy or avant-garde when compared to other of his contemporaries, such as Kyojiro Hagiwara who was writing in a Dadaist, anarchist vein, or Takenaka Iku, who was busily deconstructing the narrative voice in poetry. What characterised Tatsuji’s work right from the very beginning was not the vagueness of French symbolism nor the formal experimentation of his contemporaries; it was the lush, scintillating musicality that he managed to fit into the space of every single line.

No doubt one source of this lyricism comes from his thorough familiarity with traditional Japanese poetry. Tatsuji wrote an enormous amount of traditional verse over the course of his life – by the time of his death, he had published well over a thousand haiku poems. The earliest of these poems date from his teenage years, when he started writing haiku in the style of the journal Hototogisu (The Cuckoo). By the time he published his first longer poems (shi) in journals in the 1920s, he was already putting this familiarity with traditional poetics to work. One sees this most clearly in his tendency to use classical verb endings and vocabulary that one would find only in the written language. Still, it is clear that he strove at every turn to restore the voice to poetry, creating poems that are meant to be read aloud rather than to be read silently on the page. In other words, traditional language and images come alive in his hands, crafted into poems that practically beg the reader to read them aloud.

Because lyricism is the distinguishing hallmark of Tatsuji’s poetry, it is necessary for any translator approaching Tatsuji’s work to emphasise that in his or her translations. Musicality is, however, one of the most difficult things to render in translation, especially when that musicality relies on metre, as is so often the case with Tatsuji. For instance, the poem ‘Arare furikeru (ni)’ (The Hail Fell 2) is written in a repeating pattern of five and seven morae, except for the final line which contains only a satisfying seven morae. For many years, the Japanese have used patterns of five and seven in order to evoke a sense of musicality, much as English authors have used iambic pentameter to create works that sound pleasing to the ear. The waka (Japanese song), which was already well developed by the eighth century, consists of patterns of 5-7-5-7-7 morae, and the haiku is comprised of patterns of 5-7-5. Below is a transcription of the final five lines of the poem with a vertical pipe inserted at the end of each mora to show how carefully he uses the kinds of rhythmic patterns present in traditional poetry.

                                                                  5                         7
あきはやくくれにけるかな a|ki| ha| ya|ku| 　ku|re|ni|ke|ru|ka|na
ふゆのひはとほくちひさく fu|yu| no| hi| wa|　 to|(h)o|ku| chi|(h)i|sa|ku

うらやまのはざまのこみち u|ra|ya|ma| no|　 ha|za|ma| no| ko|mi|chi
はらはらとあられふりける ha|ra|ha|ra|to|　 a|ra|re| fu|ri|ke|ru
　　　　　あられふりける a|ra|re| fu|ri|ke|ru


The literal translation is:

Autumn early had come [past tense with suffix showing completion] [expression of emotion]
Winter’s days distant, small

Back mountains’ ravine’s small-path
Fluttering/rolling hail fell [past tense of recollection]
hail fell [past tense of recollection]

Early on, I considered the possibility of trying to create patterns of five and seven syllables in the translation, but since English ears are not trained to hear these patterns, my attempts to do so did not produce the desired effect. Moreover, Japanese words typically have more syllables than English, so a faithful translation of the meaning involves far fewer syllables in English than in the Japanese. Because of this, all of my attempts to reproduce the metre in English involved adding padding to flesh out the lines, and that simply produced a relatively prosaic poem.
 
Instead of reproducing rhythm, I turned to other devices to give a sense of the poetry of the original. Most importantly, I turned to parallelism (“how quickly . . . /how distant . . .”), which I felt was justified given the strict parallelism in the metre, and alliteration (the repeated L sounds in “hail fell fluttering”), which replicates the frequent R sounds in those lines in the Japanese. The onomatopoetic expression harahara to, translated very roughly as “fluttering”, is an expression that is not often used to refer to the falling of hail. Instead, it is most often refers to the rolling of tears down the face, the twisting of leaves as they fall from trees, or the twisting of snowflakes as they fall from the sky. Because the word is not so frequently used to refer to hail, I thought a slightly unusual word choice would be most appropriate. The fact that the L in “fluttering” repeats a sound present in the surrounding phrase made this word seem the most musical choice to me.

The line that even now strikes me as the least satisfactory in my English translation is “Onto the path through the ravine between the back hills” which in the Japanese (urayama no hazama no komichi) is beautifully compact and dense. In English, however, it sounds wordy and heavy, primarily because of the need to put articles before each of the three nouns and to use different prepositions to represent the Japanese word no, which is staggeringly flexible in its ability to link words in a variety of different relationships. Since all choices that presented themselves to me seemed clunky, I decided to err on the line of representing the meaning accurately, while hoping that the surrounding lines are poetic enough to make up for this relatively prosaic line.

‘Waga na o yobite’ (‘Please Call My Name’) is another poem where Tatsuji has fused rhythm and content to powerful effect. This poem is written largely in classical Japanese, although its sensibilities and use of repetition are distinctively modern. Both the title and the refrain yobite tamaware (the gerund of “call” plus the classical Japanese honorific tamau in the imperative form) are seven morae, whereas other lines frequently tend to employ patterns of fives and sevens. For instance, here are the rhythmic patterns of two lines toward the middle of the poem.

庭のかたへに茶の花のさきのこる日の
ちらちらと雪のふる日のとほくよりわが名をよびてたまはれ

Ni|wa| no| ka|ta|(h)e| ni| cha| no| ha|na| no| sa|ki| no| ko|ru| hi| no|
chi|ra|chi|ra|to| yu|ki| no| fu|ru| hi| no| to|(h)o|ku| yo|ri| wa|ga|na| o| yo|bi|te| ta|ma|wa|re

Literal translation (not rearranged to represent grammatical connections):

At the garden’s side, tea flowers’ tips freezing day
Fluttering snow falling day far from my name call out please

The first line is the pattern of 7-5-7 morae, whereas the second is in 5-7-5-4-7. In the second line, Tatsuji is one syllable short of five morae toward the end, but here, he uses this to contribute to the dramatic effect. The four-morae segment falls on the expression waga na o (“my name” plus the particle o marking the direct object), thus the missing mora creates a rhythmic skip on a critical phrase, thus contributing to a sense of a dramatic tension.

After several experiments, I have decided not to try to reproduce this rhythm, so carefully crafted in the Japanese, as, once again, Western ears are not trained to hear patterns of five and seven. Instead, I have attempted to make up for what is lost in translation through another poetic device. Throughout the poem, I have used alliteration in small, localised clusters, such as the D sound in “distant day” and the M in “my name”; however, it is the sound L that appears most frequently, both in the repeated refrain “Please call” and in phrases scattered throughout the poem, such as “blooms lingering on the tea plant” and “flurries fell so lightly”. I tried to make sure that the alliteration was not too strong, as it would only make the poem sound saccharine; instead, I tried to deploy it in ways that that were subtle enough to appeal to the ear but not stand out too much.

Because Tatsuji’s musicality proposes so many challenges to the English translator, it only makes sense that no one translator can do absolute justice to every single aspect of Tatsuji’s work. Perhaps the best one translator can do is strive to do one’s best, aiming to create a work that represents those unique elements of his style and while standing on its own as a work of literature. As José Ortega y Gasset wrote in the essay ‘The Misery and Splendor of Translation’, a perfect translation that pays tribute to absolutely every aspect of the original is impossible, but it is that very impossibility that makes translation such a grand and splendid enterprise – it is that very impossibility which drives the translator to strive so hard for the eternally elusive goal of perfection, retranslating and attempting to supercede what came before. It is my sincere hope that more translators will take up the seemingly impossible, yet worthy pursuit of rendering Tatsuji into English, and I welcome any new translation that helps us move toward that lofty goal.

24 March 2010, Kyoto