WHC MASAOKA SHIKI
CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS
In the Aftermath of Shiki’s
Fireworks
John E. Carley, Ed. (UK)
Darkness. And the nature thereof:
wonderment… or regret? When the last firework has faded, how do you
feel?
If you are British, and of a
certain generation, your mouth will be too tacked up to manage a reply. And even
after the last piece of treacle toffee has achieved its jaw creaking
consummation, there’s still the baked potato to look forward to: raked out of
the embers of the bonfire, tasting gloriously of sulphur and bed springs. But
what was the aftermath for Shiki? And how to convey the same?
The fifth strand of the Masaoka
Shiki On-line Joint Translation Project was opened on the sixth of January 2002
by Susumu Takiguchi in the now customary way: a post to the Haikuforum Workshop
containing the text in romaji; a literal rendering; a personal version; a
recognised translation, and a brief introduction.
Like the fireworks themselves,
this strand generated a glorious array of response poems, free adaptations,
humorous capping verses and personal anecdotes -– far too many to weave into a
single account, but testimony, were it needed, of the power of poetry to blossom
in the mind. It is with regret therefore that this account must omit such
generous interpretations, and limit itself instead to the more narrow
definitions of ‘translation’. Firstly then the text from Susumu:
hito kaeru hanabi no ato no
kura-sa kana
Masaoka Shiki, 1895, Meiji 28
hito - people
kaeru
- return, go home (rentai-kei, or a kind of participial adjective)
hanabi
- fireworks
no - possessive, or genitive (case) particle
ato
- after
no - possessive, or genitive (case) particle
kura-sa
- darkness
kana
- particle, exclamatory: kireji
spectators
on their way home
after the fireworks -
what darkness!
version by Susumu Takiguchi
The fireworks over,
The people all gone, --
How dark it
is!
tr. by R. H. Blyth, pp.
1025-1026, Haiku, vol. 4
The full text of Susumu’s
introduction, "Shiki's Fireworks",
appears in this edition, but in quoting Blyth’s accompanying notes,
what Shiki is telling us is
something about the absence of two things and the presence of one as a unity of
deep experience. [R. H. Blyth]
Susumu raises a fundamental
objection:
...there is no past tense or
present perfect in the verb "kaeru" used. It is in the present tense.
Therefore, one cannot say that the people have, or are "all gone".
They may still have been all be there, or some may have gone but others, or the
majority of them, may have still been there [S.T.]
If Blyth’s direct comparison of
two states of ‘absence’ is questionable the same might be said of the
admirably compact and dynamic version posted by WHC member Chris
Baltzley who, like both Blyth and Takiguchi, uses
an exclamation mark to add weight and immediacy:
how dark!
people and fireworks
both gone
Chris Baltzley
Less apparent, but perhaps as
significant, is the question of image order. In her version,
Chris inverts the position of the ‘darkness’, moving it from last to first. Robert
Wilson and Sheila Windsor, by contrast, closely followed Blyth:
fireworks over
people return to
the darkness
Robert Wilson
fireworks all spent
the people return home
in darkness
Sheila Windsor
Similarly, Alenka Zorman, who,
unlike Robert and
Sheila, also opted for Blyth’s tense usage regarding the presence/absence of
the crowd noting that:
Shiki wanted to express the
darkness after the fireworks
and even
more after the people [were] all gone
the fireworks over
and the people all gone
what darkness!
Alenka Zorman
In the question of both image
order and tense usage others followed Susumu’s lead
people leave
after the fireworks
such darkness
Ito
people going home
after the fireworks--
so dark!
Karma Tenzing Wangchuk
Noting the close similarities between these two drafts Ito posts:
i opted for the word ‘leave’ […]
perhaps Shiki perceives his own loneliness […] making him acutely aware of how
dark the sky is just after the fireworks end.
Whereas Tenzing makes the
timely observation:
both yours and the one i did
seem fairly 'true' to the literal translation
Carol Raisfeld likewise:
people go home
at fireworks end -
sudden darkness!
Carol Raisfeld
And likewise Kevin Ryan who also
adds that final emphatic!
returning home -
after fireworks
such darkness!
Kevin Ryan
This is not the place to obsess
about punctuation marks, pause indicators and kireji, but the more grammatically
compulsive amongst the readership will, like the author, will be well aware that
this version by Kevin Ryan marks the seventh instance thus far of the use of an
exclamation mark in response to the Japanese ‘kana’. In
short, certainly everyone understood the crucial nature of the emphasis or
inflection imparted by the elusive particle. Responses varied: from darkness
at heel – Terry Isshi, to darkness behind – Karina Klesko. Mary
Jane Turner offered three alternatives: magnifying darkness; a blacker
darkness and darkness doubles.
Thinking along similar line Mary
Lee McClure proposed the heavy dark whilst
Johnye Strickland elegantly stood tautology on its head with:
Johnye Strickland
The shift of the line-end cutting
device in version two here, mirroring that of Kevin Ryan, is a deliberate
experiment with both meaning and layout. As we examine the effect it is also
perhaps worth noting the number of versions that, like that of Blyth, adopt both
dash and exclamation mark in the context of 'kana'. Kireji-spotters might
be forgiven for asking the inevitable question: is this a double cut?
Meanwhile, completely reversing
Shiki’s image order and omitting any punctuation device Soji had a finely
balanced draft to offer:
a deeper darkness
after the fireworks
the crowd dwindles
Soji
Nancy Stewart Smith also had a
sense of the crowd being diminished, and an alternative way of attenuating the
delivery of 'darkness':
after the fireworks
the crowd trickles homeward
profounder darkness
Nancy Stewart Smith
At heel; behind; dwindle; trickle.
All had put in an appearance, and with good reason. Japanese poetry is replete
with the skilled use of homonyms and cognates… were there shades of meaning
here that should be factored in? Debra Woolard Bender for one had been
researching, and posted a comprehensive set of alternatives, amongst which were
to be found:
ato - (adj-no,n-adv,n)
after; behind; later; rear; remainder; successor; (P)
ato - (n) trace; tracks; mark; scar; sign; remains; ruins; (P)*
*Jeffrey's
Japanese<->English Dictionary
Working on a synthesis where the
festively clad spectators dispersing homeward in all directions, lanterns aglow,
might also convey the sense of the course of fireworks through the night sky,
Debra offered the outline of a freer adaptation:
after fireworks
trails of people return
to darkness
Debra Woolard Bender
Unusually for the World Haiku
Club, which is nothing if not a broad church, all the versions to date had
followed the predominant three line form of the English language haiku. First to
the rescue came Paul Conneally with a one line arrangement:
fireworks over the
people leave darkness
Paul Conneally
And then Eiko Yachimoto with a
lyrical fifteen syllable zip:
fire-blossom-viewing...shared
as people walk home...darkness prevails
Eiko Yachimoto
On the introduction of the word
'shared' Eiko comments:
Shiki was from Matsuyama, known
for its people's soft and gentle dialect. When Shiki says 'hito' I sense
something warm...almost meaning 'my fellow human friends' […] The
English word 'share' (of which we do not have a clear equivalent in the
Japanese language) is a great word for that purpose.
And on the more literal
'fire-blossom-viewing':
Hanabi-taikai (fireworks
exhibition) in Japan is not meant to celebrate something. It is like a
cherry blossom viewing and people go out for the sake of fireworks blooming in
the sky. […] In traditional renku, you could write a verse about hanabi at the
fixed position reserved for hana [blossom]!
Carmen Sterba too sensed this
relationship and, after a brief exchange with Kathi, settled on a draft using hypallage
– the transferred epithet –- as a way of inflecting the notion of ‘darkness’:
crowds return home -
after the fireworks
darkness blooms
Carmen Sterba
Also respecting the literal image
order of Shiki’s original, Sheila Windsor posted a final draft linking the
darkness to the fireworks… but in a rather more bleak and ironic way:
people go home!
after the fireworks
darkness falls
Sheila Windsor
It would be a dereliction of duty
not to observe that both these versions, like others before from Johnye
Strickland and Kevin Ryan, apply an emphasis to the line-break between the
elements ‘homebound’ and ‘aftermath’. By contrast others had chosen the
point between the elements ‘aftermath’ and ‘darkness’.
It would be fair to say that the
way in which the particle kana might be judged to inflect the concept ‘darkness’,
in particular, and the overall mood of the poem in general, had provoked as much
debate as the rest of the poem put together.
This fifth strand of the Masaoka
Shiki On-line Joint Translation Project had started with translations from
Susumu Takiguchi and R. H. Blyth – both of whom used combinations of end-line
emphasis, exclamation marks and verbal constructions to equate to Shiki’s
kireji. It seems fitting therefore to end on a version that uses none, relying
instead on the stark use of line-break and syntax.
This poem is an foundling –
posted by an occasional WHC contributor, it was discovered in an obscure corner
of a distant strand (of an ancillary mail group) by a conscientious WHC member
who forwarded it to the present author for safekeeping. May it trace a course
across your mind.
returning home
after the fireworks
darkness
Zinovy Vayman
|
Back
| Next |
