WHC/WHF2000
Celebrations
‘dew
on the grass’ : translating the masters
sound,
image, logic: an approach to haiku translation
Daniel
Gallimore
Oxford, UK
When
I look at my copy of Lewis MacKensie’s translation of Issa poems - a Kodansha
paperback published in 1984 with the title of The Autumn Wind - I see a
pretty haiga painting of a persimmon on the bough with a persimmon-coloured
border on front and back. It is a small volume (about 11 by 18 centimetres) with
the poems crammed in, from three to six to the page depending on notes, and
printed on the same low-grade paper as a Penguin Classic might be. This edition
seems to say that yes, haiku are short, but there’s a lot in them, and you
would like them even if they were written on toilet paper (which could itself
make a worthy subject of haiku)! Looking at the blurb on the back, the following
remarks by renowned critic Ueda Makoto hit the eye: ‘Intense
personality ... vital language ... shockingly impassioned verse’. And then,
from the Oriental Economist, ‘Issa has ... the strength not to
romanticise or sentimentalise. Mackensie’s translations and comments have the
same quality.’ What is clear is that translators and their publishers have to
work as hard as anyone to sell their product, and this is doubly true of the
British book market which is notoriously resistant to translated literature.
The
literary translator Gregory Rabassa writes that:
Translation
is a disturbing craft because there is precious little certainty about what we
are doing, which makes it so difficult in this age of fervent belief and
ideology, this age of greed and screed.
Rabassa
is not (I suppose) referring to Islamic fundamentalism, but to a universal and
sometimes pathological need for fixed identities, one which inevitably conflicts
with attitudes of ambiguity and doubt. Translators are put in the unenviable
schizophrenic position of having to coordinate their own motives for translation
- which may include such factors as inward investment by Japanese companies and
the popularity of the food - with what they understand the poet to have been
saying, and on top of that come numerous difficult decisions regarding
translating style and the treatment of individual words and phrases.
The haiku
translator obviously has fewer words to contend with but, as I have already
mentioned, the ambiguities of expression and varieties of context, above all the
need to make each and every one of those little poems stand on its own, they all
call for particular skills. Faced with such difficulties as a translator myself,
I wish to offer two reassurances. The first comes from some advice given by
Shiki to his disciple Kyoshi at the turn of the last century:
If
you examine a moonflower closely your previous mental images will completely
disappear, leaving only a new, shasei [or depictive] appreciation in your mind.
It
seems to me, by analogy, that if you read a Japanese haiku closely enough
it will imprint itself on your mind, and it is that imprint which constitutes
the raw material of translation. Sensitivity is the key, and sensitivity is a
quality we can all manifest so long as we are able to free ourselves from
distractions.
Likewise,
I wish to demythologise a little the act of making haiku. Kitahara
Hakushu, who was a major tanka poet of the first half of the 20th
Century and pioneer of modern Japanese poetry, wrote that:
In
Japanese poetry there is a shade between each phrase and each word, an odour;
the rhythm floats on the surface. How to achieve this fusion, this subtlety, can
be easily enough understood.
I
would add that if it can ‘be easily enough understood’, then one can attempt
to reproduce it in translation. One mistake is to try to do too much at one
time. Any poem can be understood according to the three Aristotelian dimensions
of melopoeia (musicality), phanopoeia (symbolic beauty) and logopoeia (logical
beauty), and yet it is rare even in the source for these three dimensions to
come together in an integral whole. There are examples of integration, but
before looking at one I would like to consider each of these three dimensions in
turn with regard to some classic haiku by Basho and their translations.
Melopoeia
Basho
is renowned - according to Shirane and other Japanese scholars from the Meiji
Era onwards - for the musicality of his style, and so it is to Shirane’s
translation of a poem written by Basho in the autumn of 1694, shortly before he
died, that I turn for an example of melopoeia (i.e. musicality). Shirane cites
this poem as an example of the return to the low style which characterises Basho’s
last years. In the first part of his career the poet had sought to transcend his
humble origins through study of classical, medieval and Chinese poetics but (in
the words of Shirane), he returns in his last years ‘to the exploration of
various aspects of Tokugawa commoner life and language.’ What Shirane does not
mention, however, perhaps because it is a commonplace of both the high and low
styles, is the poem’s remarkable musicality:
Aki
fukaki
Tonari wa nani wo
Suru hito zo
Autumn
deepening -
My neighbour
How does he live, I wonder?
This is a haiku which can survive even the worst of translations, which Shirane’s
certainly is not. For even if we do not know its context we can immediately
appreciate the implicit image of the poet reaching out for neighbourly warmth as
the days get shorter and colder. That is one way of reading the poem, an
instinctive one perhaps, but in fact the poem is a good deal more subtle. A
simple contrast of cold and warmth would be enough to constitute a phrase in
some extended lyric, but we know that good haiku - especially those by Basho -
offer more than simple antitheses, and this is a point which is particularly
important to translators trying to render some of that musical complexity.
The
first phrase is phonologically closed: the rhyme on aki, the crisp k
and delicate i sounds, describe the sweetly relentless onset of autumn
and (to admit the contextual metaphor) of Basho’s declining years. The two na
sounds are clammy, moist; the poet weakens. But the wo at the turn of the
line is a very different, majestic sound that is repeated in the emphatic
particle zo. In other words, the solution to that invasive, get-you-down
clamminess is not necessarily to visit his neighbour but to go on a journey - as
(in a sense) he has been doing throughout his career - to wander, to guess, to
allow the poetry to justify his existence. What better way after all to face old
age than to carry on using one’s mind?
The
final zo ends the poem on a note of triumph, telling the world that he is
still a haijin after all, and in fact the poem was submitted as the hokku for a
poetry session which Basho was too sick to attend. The English language, on the
whole, lacks the capacity of Japanese for compression of sounds, which pushes
Shirane to the other extreme of opening up the spaces between the words and
foregrounding their denotative meanings. The diphthongs in the first line (‘au-’
and ‘dee’) establish the contemplative pace. The detachment of ‘my
neighbour’ puts the neighbour in mind (makes him the object), since this is
not an antisocial poem, and then those four monosyllables - ‘how’, ‘does’,
‘he’, ‘live’ - offer a third aspect, communicating the mystery of the
neighbour’s existence. The phrase is also an effectively ambiguous version of nani
wo suru; both questions could refer to a multiplicity of activities. Shirane
does not reproduce the sound values of the original but he does maintain the
tripartite diction.
Phanopoeia
For
a rather surprising example of phanopoeia, Dorothy Britton’s translation of a
poem from Oku no hosomichi, this one written at Zensho-ji temple in
modern-day Ishikawa Prefecture:
Yomosugara
Akikaze kiku ya
Ura no yama
All
through the night
I listened to the autumn wind
In the lonely hills
It
is a poem about listening and the loneliness of sound (oto no sabishisa)
and yet the strange thing is that it brings a quite symbolic, visual image to
mind. This is partly because of a vivid personal memory I have from my days in
the school cadet corps. We went on a night manoeuvre on the Berkshire Downs
where I was requisitioned to wait in the dark by a hedge for three hours until
someone found me. I well remember the stars and the wind, the emptiness of the
place and, of course, the cold. The time of year was late autumn and so reading
this poem I feel (as perhaps some of you do) that I know exactly what Basho
meant.
Phanopoeia
is something of a hit-and-miss affair for the haiku translator as he
seasons the few syllables allowed him with little hints which he hopes will
trigger off somewhat larger memories. Britton has the special advantage, no
doubt, of an unusual lineage: born in Japan, half-English and half-American,
spent most of her adult life in England married to an air force officer; she can
view all three of those cultures with a privileged detachment. With regard to
this poem and to Basho’s musical style, it is also worth knowing that she is a
professionally trained musician. To paraphrase Takiguchi’s analysis, perhaps
the most distinctive feature of her style is the way she splices minimalist
expressions (that seem quite literal translations of the Japanese) with a more
‘English’ idiom that often contains echoes of English poetry and popular
songs. That first line ‘All through the night’ manages both, in fact: it is
a literal translation of the source phrase yomosugara and is also the
name of an old Welsh song (‘Ar hyd y nos’), of which the first verse reads
as follows:
While
the moon her watch is keeping,
All through the night;
While the weary world is sleeping,
All through the night;
O’er thy bosom gently stealing,
Visions of the light revealing,
Breathe a pure and holy feeling,
All through the night.
The
undercurrent of the first two lines is one of deep content: ‘I am snug in bed,
comfortable in my pew or wherever, and the wind is whistling around me.’
Unlike Basho, Britton does not insert a cutting-word (kireji) and does
not need to, because the rhythm creates an equivalent rhetorical effect. The
momentum of the first two lines is broken by the return to the shorter syllabic
of the last and by this unusual word ‘lonely’. Britton’s use of the word
is in danger of being labelled a pathetic fallacy - how can hills be lonely? -
but I believe its very strangeness is sufficient for the haiku moment,
the emotional arrest. Basho’s phrase ura no yama refers to the cultural
backwardness and relative isolation of ura Nihon, the Japan Sea-facing
‘back of Japan’, both of which in haiku terms connote loneliness, and
the Welsh association of Britton’s ‘All through the night’ might have a
similar connotation.
Logopoeia
Logopoeia,
that is to say the logical lucidity of poetry, might be regarded as a misnomer
when applied to the haiku, when - both in Japanese and English- the
logical connections between objects, events and phenomena are usually vague and
unstated. The question that haiku raises is not ‘Did the earth move for
you?’ but rather two disjointed statements, ‘A rumple of bedclothes. An
earthquake.’ In the first volume of his haiku anthology (in the section
on haiku and poetry), Blyth gives examples of haiku which he
considers to supply the stimulus by which the mind is encouraged to make the
effort to overcome the difficulty of uniting what God has put asunder.
These
are examples of haiku where the real is transcended romantically, and the
possibility of a brighter vision made real. I would agree with Blyth of the
necessity of making this kind of distinction if we are going to talk of a
sub-genre of haiku love poetry, for example. This is one of his two
examples from Basho:
Neko
no koi
Yamu toki neya no
Oborozuki
The
loves of the cats;
When it was over, the hazy moon
Over the bed-chamber.
One of the devices used to facilitate logical continuity in English poetry is
enjambment (corresponding with the haiku device of kumatagari),
and we see the same process at work in Basho’s poem. The first phrase crosses
over the five up to toki; the second, contrasting phrase crosses over the
seven onto oborozuki. Logical beauty is allied with syntax, since it is
largely through syntax that sentences make sense, but working against or
compounding such logic are the purely phonological, alliterative effects on ko,
ya and ki. The phonological complexity complements the semantic
ambiguity which you will already have noticed. For it is never quite clear who
has been doing what in the bed-chamber (neya) and indeed what the hazy
moon (oborozuki) has to do with things; therein lies the rhetorical logic
of this poem. We are of course adult enough not to need to be told what has been
going on and to make the symbolic connection between ‘the loves of the cats’
and ‘the hazy moon’, which is used to evoke erotic love in traditional
Japanese poetry. In other words, the poetic logic takes us halfway there and the
rhetoric as far as we want to go. Blyth does his best to convey the ambiguity
with a comic discrepancy between the pluralised ‘loves’ (as in ‘Cats do it
without pawsing’) and the singular ‘it’ (in ‘When it was over’),
unless that is that Blyth (and Basho) have naughtier imaginations than we give
them credit for ...
Crystallisation:
‘Fire and Ice’ in Shiki and Basho
All
three of these poems by Basho manage each in their way to work on the auditory,
logical and visual imaginations, but for one where the processes are quite
clearly deliberate a haiku written by Shiki in 1902, during the last
summer of his life:
Bara
wo kiru
Hasami no oto ya
Satsukibare
The
sound of scissors
Clipping roses -
A clear spell in May.
Knowing that Shiki was confined to his sickbed with tuberculosis, we realise the
poignancy of this image of this dying man grabbing whatever opportunity he could
to bring a little beauty into his life, but what I would like to consider here
is how the image is constructed. Shiki’s poem does not, at first reading, seem
a particularly musical or onomatopoeic poem. It is true that the succession of
seven open a vowels give the poem a certain unity but apart from that
there is nothing very meaningful to catch the eye or ear. Actually, there is, as
the open, graceful bara (‘rose’) and the clear-cut kiru (‘cut’)
are combined within one word in the final phrase, satsukibare. This is
what cut roses and fine weather in May mean to each other at this moment in
Shiki’s life: the sounds are almost identical to the picture so that when the
two work together like this the logic works very fast indeed. ‘Death
concentrates the mind wonderfully’, and it is not the clipping of scissors
which is figured, as one might expect, but the beauty of those flowers; in other
words, the sound values work in relation to the logic of the poem but are not
subordinate.
The
translator, Burton Watson, similarly evokes this feeling that the poet is more
interested in the significance of the clipping than the ominous sound itself.
The word ‘clipping’ is separated by enjambment from ‘scissors’ such that
this terse sound - with all its freshness and its transience - belongs as much
to the roses as to the scissors, especially as it alliterates with ‘clear’
in the final line. The alliteration also accounts for the logical development of
Watson’s version; as with the source, we seem to see, hear and experience it
all at once. This phenomenon is surely what was meant by Yasuda’s term ‘crystallisation’:
‘a crystallised haiku is held together by the organic, emotional force
of the experience’.
Shiki’s
poem moves so quickly that it can be read as an example of that momentary
rhetorical fusion of subject and object which distinguishes great haiku: very
difficult to pull off but when it works, powerful indeed. For an analogy with
poetry written in English, I like Robert Frost’s poem ‘Fire and Ice’
(1921):
Some
say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
The measured diction and rhymes seem to fuse the two simplest of metaphors -
fire and ice - in a way that their metaphorical potential is unleashed. In my
mind at least, they are metaphors for the condition of poetry lying between
entropy on the one hand (‘ice’) and manic self-destruction on the other (‘fire’),
and in Basho’s career that tension becomes a tension between the desire of
body and soul to travel and imagine and a desire to sit still and quite
literally lose oneself in the nothingness of the moment:
Atsuki hi wo
Umi ni iretari
Mogamigawa
[Britton]
[Shirane]
The
river Mogami
Has drowned the hot, summer sun
And sunk it in the sea!
Pouring
the hot day
Into the sea -
Mogami River.
Basho’s poem plays with a question which has been with us ever since we first
saw the sun setting over the sea as children - what would happen if the sun
really did collide with the sea? It is that unanswered mystery which the poem
evokes. The contrast of sun and water is clear and refreshing enough but what
gives the poem its continuity is the central image of pouring: sunlight into the
water, the river into the sea. The image plays no tricks on the reader; it does
not allow the reader to distance himself from the experience.
Dorothy
Britton’s bold statement has a Shakespearean quality serving both to
individuate and to generalise the experience, perhaps even alluding to some
event in the human world: ‘Have you heard? The river Mogami has drowned the
hot, summer sun and sunk it in the sea?’ Shirane’s minimalism, by contrast,
lets him down here. The two phrases are not quite sufficient to give the line
its grandeur, although the translation is clear enough.
the
rhetoric of haiku translation
It
is all very well mastering the poetics of Basho, but would people actually want
to buy your translation? In 1965, the translation theorist Hugo Friedrich made a
vital ‘distinction between language as reality (Gegebenheit) and
language as act (Tat), that is, style’, and we can say that both these
functions of language are functions of haiku as well. One quality that
unites Basho’s haiku with Shiki’s is the primacy of immediate
reality. Conversely, it is the sense of immediacy, ‘the presentation of such a
‘complex’ instantaneously which gives a sense of sudden liberation’ (to
quote Ezra Pound), the active, stylistic function of haiku.
We
all know that the relationship between language and reality is unstable but that
poetry can effect a temporary illusion of stability. I would describe the haiku
‘moment’ as one such illusion and extend it with reference to the haiku
‘resonance’ or yôj; yôj is that lingering difference which
the haiku poem can make to our moods and even behaviour. Goethe said of
the translator’s art that ‘We are led, yes, compelled as it were, back to
the source text’, which I suppose must be the highest compliment one can pay
to a literary translator. One also thinks of Leslie Downer retracing the steps
of Basho for Channel 4 in the 1990s and (on a less ambitious scale) of those of
us who take the trouble to read books about the haiku masters, who want
to know what they were like as people.
The
irony of the effective translation is that it is all too aware of its
limitations and does not try too hard to persuade us otherwise. It leaves a
space for the reader to explore at will, having been left with no doubt in his
mind of the poet’s intrinsic interest, and this space is what may be meant by
Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘pure language’ (reine Sprache), that
hidden presence within the source that transcends both source and target
cultures. Irrespective of whether or not the translator chooses to make
deliberate reference to his own culture, the final test of a haiku must
be whether or not the haiku ‘moment’ rises lotus-like in the reader’s
mind and enables him to see another side. To do so will require careful
attention to technique, of which some concluding words.
Reading
the prosody: 5-7-5
The
magic of the fixed form or yuki teikei, the 5-7-5 syllabic format, has
nothing (one should hasten to add) to do with any magical qualities associated
with those numbers in Eastern and Western cultures. First and foremost, 5-7-5
gives the haiku a definite shape - note that I do not say ‘the’ or
even ‘its’ shape - which is registered phonically and often on the written
page as well. Form is intrinsically pleasing and even more so when it supports a
symmetry or progression of meaning. Translating a Japanese haiku into
strict 5-7-5 in English is not impossible but is not easily justified
poetically. What is more important is that the translator read the rhythms of
the source effectively. The most typical pattern is for the rhythm to be broken
by a cutting-word at the break of the poem after the seven, which is certainly a
device worth trying in English, but the translator must also read those subtle
internal rhythms (or naizairitsu), which are determined mainly by
syllabic boundaries (threes and fours are common) but also by pitch accent.
These rhythms contribute to tone and register and should be read as such.
In The
Japanese Haiku, Yasuda discusses the prosodic potential of threes and fours,
showing how it is quite possible in English for variations in syllabic length to
match semantic modulations. It is only our inevitable bias toward stress accent
as native English speakers which blinds us to the possibilities of syllabic
metre. Yasuda’s book was published in 1957 but in an essay published last year
and now available on the Internet, two professors working in Kumamoto, Richard
Gilbert and Judy Yoneoka, measure out some common ground between Japanese and
English by arguing that haiku in both languages can be fitted into a
broad 8-8-8 template. They produce convincing evidence that native speakers read
haiku both between and within lines so that even traditional 5-7-5 haiku
can attain a longer syllabic. This is an idea which haiku translators may
do well to consider, although I would qualify it with the criticism that the
authors do not make an adequate distinction between rhythmically sensitive and
rhythmically insensitive readings. I do not believe that haiku should
be read flat: they do contain latent rhythms waiting to be exploited.
My
own experience of translating haiku has suggested that the 5-7-5 syllabic
will more likely be arrived at by accident than by design. Here is one such
happy coincidence, my translation of a haiku by a young woman called
Ishikawa Tomiko, composed shortly after World War II:
Jopu
tome
Orishi momiji ya
Nogiku kana
A
stationary
Jeep. Fallen maple leaves and
Wild chrysanthemums.
In my mind at least, the poem recalls a rendezvous between a young woman (not
necessarily the author) and some GI in a secluded field. The ‘fallen maple
leaves’ might refer to GIs taking their chances while they can or to parents
or other authority figures killed in war and the wild chrysanthemums to those
untamed young women with no one around to keep them in order. The fact that the
translation is in 5-7-5 probably makes little difference to the rhetorical
effect, especially as the moraic values differ between Japanese and English, but
for the translator it is itself a kind of template, a structure on which to
build the translation.
There
is an ebb and flow in haiku - a pithy phrase in the first line, followed by an
expulsion in the second before settling into some final essence in the last -
and this is a movement which will usually be felt in English as well with the
greater number of both syllables and stress accents in the middle line. By way
of contrast, here is another haiku in 5-7-5 by Ishikawa Tomiko, which I rendered
in a 3-6-7 format:
Chokan
no
Koishi ni hisomu
Kokani kana
Morning
frost.
A little crab, I guess,
Hidden among the pebbles.
Here the three-line structure allows me to stress the word ‘hidden’, which
relates to the tight mood established in the first line.
Cutting
words
Tomiko’s
haiku is not unusual in containing a cutting-word (kireji), which
Blyth defines as a kind of ‘poetical punctuation’, and as such, they usually
do require a more literal treatment than shichigo cho. Kireji mark a
definite break in the poem but can also alter its mood significantly and should
therefore be translated in context. Kana, one of the more common, tends
to give a poem karumi (lightness of touch), to let it fade gently away.
In conversation with Japanese speakers I sometimes hear them end their sentences
with this phrase which can literally mean ‘or something like that’, but is
translated poetically as ‘I guess’ or ‘I wonder’, and I wonder indeed
whether they know of its use in haiku. The emphatic zo and yo,
however, are usually rendered with full stops or exclamation marks, the softer keri
as a comma.
Translating
number
At
the other extreme is the problem of number: how to quantify nouns when the
absence of plural endings in Japanese makes it difficult to determine whether
there is one or more than one. This is a problem singled out, as it were, by
Blyth and made even harder in haiku translation by the lack of context. Here is
my translation of another haiku by Ishikawa Tomiko by way of illustration:
Yamiyo
nimo
Sabisho sakeri
Tsukimiso
Even
on this dark
Night forlorn, the evening
Primrose.
The question is whether there is more than one evening primrose. Does its
loneliness refer to its singularity, popping up alone amidst foliage, or to the
fact that it is unusual among flowers in flowering only in the evening? The
answer is more likely the latter as the first phrase ‘Even in this dark night’
specifically denotes its unusual flowering schedule, and yet it has to be
admitted that the first possibility is suggested at least by the classical mood
of the poem. Sabisho contains the archaic -sho inflection and tsukimi
in the flower’s name means ‘moon-viewing’, which is a byword for romance
in classical poetry. Isn’t there another story going on: the story of a young
woman who has loved too late and sees her image in the pale yellow flowers? One
of the pleasures of haiku is that through these real, immediate images we are
able to glimpse an array of other possibilities, and in this case to read the
past. They are possibilities which can be suggested by the slightest of
stylistic touches. To pluralise the flower - ‘evening primroses’ - strikes
me as unnatural. Why not make it a metonym, let it stand both for evening
primroses and for unrequited loves for all time.
conclusion:
haiku translation for all
The
Meiji critic,Tsubouchi Shoyo, who was himself the pioneer of Shakespeare
translation in Japan, once dismissed haiku as ‘the pastime of dilettantes’.
Yet it can hardly be doubted that the globalisation of haiku in the 20th
Century has demonstrated its seriousness as a poetic form both outside Japan and
within. Shoyo's agenda was to develop a national literature sufficiently serious
to counter the weight of Western tradition. He believed that the haiku form was
too trivial to make a difference; Shiki and Shiki’s disciples proved him
wrong. Events such as World Haiku Festival would have little meaning if its
participants did not in some sense ‘believe’ in haiku. Yet it goes without
saying that only a fraction of this process of intercultural transmission would
have been possible without translation.
Haiku
translation deserves to be taken seriously as an art in itself and for the
impact that haiku translations can have on their target cultures. The reception
of haiku translations is not something covered in any depth in this paper. What
I have tried to do instead is to uncover some of the problems and processes of
translation. Translation is a process as reading is a process. I know from my
experience of the handful of haiku that I have translated, how not only is one’s
knowledge of Japanese language and culture enhanced by the act of translation,
but in taking on board those haiku ‘moments’ and those haiku images for
several moments longer than one usually does than when reading someone else’s
translation off the written page, that one’s appreciation of the haiku form is
deepened. I do not expect every haiku poet to become a haiku translator as well,
but I do believe that the globalisation of haiku can only be advanced by the
teaching of haiku translation in Japanese language and literature courses
outside Japan. Haiku translation is also an issue between other languages
(Bulgarian and Italian, for example) but Japan remains the home of haiku
culture, and so exchange between that and other haiku cultures will be rooted in
the teaching of the Japanese language.
Daniel
Gallimore
is studying for a doctorate at Linacre College, Oxford, on Japanese
translations of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He also
teaches Japanese part-time at Oxford Brookes University. He is interested in the
therapeutic value of haiku and recently led a haiku writing group at Acorn, a
MIND day centre in Oxford.
This
paper was read at WHF2000, London/Oxford Conference, August 2000.
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