Poetry

Allow me to start this article off by acquainting my readers with a few core concepts of Japanese poetry.

Japanese poetry originated in two forms, the tanka (short poem) and chouka (long poem).  However, they were very strictly metered – a tanka consisted of five lines, with 5/7/5/7/7 syllables.  A chouka could go on as long as it wanted, alternating 5/7, but the last three lines had to be 5/7/7.  For the observant, you will notice that the 5/7/5 is the same syllabic arrangement as haiku; haiku rose out of renga poetry, in which any number of people would take turns composing parts of a tanka (the first would compose 5/7/5, the second 7/7 relating to the first, the third 5/7/5 relating to the second, and so on).

This semester marked my first descent into classical Japanese, and I have to say, it is an entirely different beast.  Fortunately, under no circumstances am I ever really expected to be fluent in classical Japanese, I just need to know how to navigate a dictionary, and over the semester I have gotten very proficient at doing so.  But as part of the class, and part of the honors contract I took on for the class, I decided I was going to translate the smallest chapter in the Genji Monogatari, that being the chapter Hanachirusato.

I did not quite realize how hard it was going to be to translate the prose, but the poetry in the chapter was a whole different beast.

I’m going to talk translation for a moment.  I mentioned in my second post that Dr. Royall Tyler, in his translation of Genji, took pains to try and keep the same syllabic format of the poetry, and after talking with a few classmates about it, I decided I would too.  Why not, after all?  It would be fun.

And it was, but let’s take a look at the results, shall we?

The first poem is one from Genji to a woman:

Returning once more (5)

Unable to stand the passion (8)

the cuckoo bird (4)

Comes to the fence where it sang (7)

To do so once again (7)

This is the first poem in the chapter, and as you can see from the syllabic counts, I think I managed to equal the total number of syllables, but ultimately failed to properly recreate the scheme.

It’s fairly hard to approximate Japanese and English.  If I haven’t made that abundantly clear by this point, then hopefully your experience with things like scanlations or fansubs has given you some sense of the difficulties.  It’s even worse with classical Japanese, because even classical has its own distinctions, linguistic and literary, from modern Japanese, and even modern Japanese translations of things like the Genji, while closer than their English counterparts, don’t always succeed in conveying the full extent of the original (there is also something of a recursive relationship between classical and modern in that classical words are necessarily defined in modern terms, based on modern analysis of the text, which inherently dilutes the original).

There are three other poems in the chapter, which I will post.  I’m not a poet by any stretch of the imagination (I can turn a pretty phrase in prose, but I am helpless when it comes to poetry), so I can’t tell you that these have any actual artistic merit, but I thought it would be fun to post these up and expose them to the scorn of the viewing public.

The second poem, in response to Genji’s first:

“Cuckoo bird, I know (5)

The song that you speak of, but (7)

Like the rainy skies, (5)

The memory is unclear to me” (9)

(I’m missing an entire line here, but I ran out of things to translate, so I left it as it is.)

The third poem is from Genji to the consort Reikeiden:

“The nostalgic scent (5)

Of the orange blossom tree (7)

The cuckoo bird comes (5)

To the town of scattered flowers (8)

In search of what once was” (6)

And the fourth poem, from Reikeiden to Genji:

“Nobody comes here (5)

To this forgotten house (6)

It was only the (5)

Scent of the orange blossoms (7)

At the eaves that drew you here” (7)

All told, a lot of work, and a lot of fun.  As a sign of my insanity, I look forward to continuing my studies in classical next semester.