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AGAIN ON HOKKU
THE word "epigram" is no right word (and there's no right
word at all) for Hokku, the seventeen syllable poem
of Japan, just as overcoat is not the word for our haori.
"That is good," I exclaimed in spite of myself, when I found
this comparison to begin my article. We know that
haori is more, or less, according to your attitude, than the overcoat of
Western garb which rises and falls with practical service;
when I say more, I mean that our Japanese haori is
unlike the Western overcoat, a piece of art and besides, a
symbol of rite, as its usefulness appears often when it
means practically nothing. If I rightly understand the word
epigram, it is or at least looks to have one object, like
that overcoat of practical use, to express something, a
Cathay of thought or not, before itself; its beauty, if it
has any, is like that of a netsuke or
okimono carved in ivory or wood, decorative at the best. But what our
hokku
aims at is, like the haori of silk or crepe, a usefulness of
uselessness, not what it expresses but how it expresses
itself spiritually; its real [<140] value is not in its
physical directness but in its psychological indirectness.
To use a simile, it is like a dew upon lotus leaves of
green, or under maple leaves of red, which, although it is
nothing but a trifling drop of water, shines, glitters and
sparkles now pearl-white, then amethyst-blue, again
ruby-red, according to the time of day and situation; better
still to say, this hokku is like a spider-thread
laden with the white summer dews, swaying among the branches
of a tree like an often invisible ghost in air, on the
perfect balance; that sway indeed, not the thread itself, is
the beauty of our seventeen syllable poem.
I cannot forget Mrs. N. S. who came to see me at the poppy-covered
Mountainside of California one morning, now almost seventeen
years ago; what I cannot forget chiefly about that morning
is her story that she made a roundabout way in entering into
my garden as the little proper path had been blocked by a
spider-net thick with diamonds. I exclaimed then as I do
often to-day: "Such a dear sweet soul (that could not dare
break that silvery thread) would be the very soul who will
appreciate our [<141] hokku."
What do you say, if there is one, suppose, who brings down the spider-net
and attempts to hang it up in another place? Is it not
exactly the case with a translator of Japanese poem,
hokku
or uta, whatever it be? To use another expression, what would you say
if somebody ventured to imitate with someone's fountain pen
the Japanese picture drawn with the bamboo brush and
incensed Indian ink? Is it not again the exact case with the
translator like Mr. William N. Porter in A Year of Japanese
Epigrams?
We confess that we have shown, to speak rather bluntly, very little
satisfaction even with the translations of Prof. Chamberlain
and the late Mr. Aston; when I say that I was perfectly
amazed at Mr. Porter's audacity in his sense of curiosity, I
hope that my words will never be taken as sarcasm. With due
respect, I dare say that nearly all things of that book
leave something to be desired for our Japanese mind, or to
say more true, have something too much that we do not find
in the original, as a result they only weaken, confuse and
trouble the real atmosphere; while perhaps, it means [<142]
certainly that the English mind is differently rooted from
the Japanese mind, even in the matter of poetry which is
said to have no East or West. When I appear to unkindly
expose Mr. Porter's defects (excuse my careless use of word)
to the light, that is from my anxiety to make this Japanese
poetry properly understood. To take a poem or two from his
book at random
Uzumibi ya
Kabe ni wa kyaku (not kaku) no
Kage-boshi. Basho.
Mr. Porter translates it as follows:
"Alas! My fire is out,
And there's a shadow on the wall—
A visitor, no doubt.["]
I should like to know who would ever think of the above as
poetry, even poor poetry, in his reading of it in one
breath; what does "no doubt " (which the original hasn't)
mean except that it rhymes with the first line; and the
rhyme cheapens the poetry at least to the Japanese mind from
the reason of its English conventionality. The first line of
the original is not "my [<143] fire is out;" on the
contrary, it means that the fire, of course the charcoal
fire, is buried under the ashes. The poem is a poem of
winter night which becomes late, and when a charcoal fire
already small grows still dearer as it is more cold without,
perhaps windy; now the talk of the guest or visitor (lo, his
sad lone shadow on the wall) and the master poet stops, then
it starts again, like a little stream hidden under the
grasses; and the desolation of the advanced night
intensifies the sadness of the house, doubtless Basho An
whose small body is wrapped by a few large leaves of Basho's
beloved banana tree in the garden. You must know, before you
attempt to understand it, a few points of the poet's
characteristics, above all the way of his living, and the
general aspect of his house, I mean Basho An, the poetical
poverty of which will be seen from the fact that he made a
big hole in the wall to place a tiny Buddha statue as he had
no place to enshrine it; not only this Basho's hokkus,
nearly all the seventeen-syllable poems that were produced
in the early age, you will find difficult to understand
when separated from the circumstances [<144] and background
from which they were born, to use a simile, like a dew born
out of the deepest heart of dawn.
It is not my purpose here to criticise and examine Mr. Porter's
translation to satisfy my fastidious heart of
minuteness-loving; let it suffice to say that the hokku
is not a poetry to be rightly appreciated by people in the
West who lie by the comfortable fire in Winter, or under an
electric fan in Summer, because it was originally written
beside a paper
shoji door or upon the straw mats. We have a saying: "Better to leave the
renge
flowers in their own wild plain;" it suggest[s] quite many things, but what
it impresses me most is that you should admire things,
flowers or pictures or what not, in their own proper place.
To translate hokku or any other Japanese poem into
English rarely does justice to the original; it is a
thankless task at the best. I myself was a hokku
student since I was fifteen or sixteen years old; during
many years of my Western life, now amid the California
forest, then by the skyscrapers of New York, again in the
London 'bus, I often, tried to translate the hokkus
of our old masters [<145] but I gave up my hope when I had
written the following in English:
"My Love's lengthened hair
Swings o'er me from Heaven's gate:
Lo, Evening's shadow!"
It was in London, to say more particularly, Hyde Park, that
I wrote the above hokku in English, where I walked
slowly, my mind being filled with the thought of the long
hair of Rossetti's woman as I perhaps had visited Tate's
Gallery that afternoon; pray, believe me when I say the dusk
that descended from the sky swung like that lengthened hair.
I exclaimed then: "What use to try the impossibility in
translation, when I have a moment to feel a hokku
feeling and write about it in English?" Although I had only
a few such moments in the past, my decision not to translate
hokku into English is unchanged. Let me wait patiently for a moment to
come when I become a hokku poet in my beloved
English. [<146]
Next: ON POETRY |
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