Translation

This page is intended as a forum for matters relating to translation. If you want to check details of my published translations, take a look at my books. I am a former Committee Member of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors of Great Britain: see how far a little Japanese can get you!

As I'm not sure yet quite what form this page should take, I'm going to start by posting translations and exegeses which I think will interest people. Other suggestions for content on this page are welcome. For instance, would a list of available translation grants be useful? (The Translators Association is always looking for new sponsors for prizes, especially in non-European languages.)

Yume no ukihashi

Todae shite

Mine ni wakaruru

Yokogumo no sora

The floating bridge of dreams

of the brief spring night of love

has now broken off:

dawn sky with a wisp of cloud

taking its leave of the peak.

Fujiwara Teika (1162-1241) was one of the most brilliant and influential of Japanese classical poets. He wrote tanka, the 5/7/5/7/7-syllable form which overwhelmingly dominates classical Japanese poetry, and of which the shorter haiku is just an offshoot. The above tanka is perhaps his most famous and most translated – and I make no apologies for translating it again - but needs some exegesis to make its full stature clear.

The poet is roused by the spring dawn from a nightlong dream of love, or a night of love which passed like a dream. He looks out to see cloud trailing away from a peak in a clear sky. In the conventions of Japanese poetry, spring nights quicken lovers' desires, but are all too short, lifting the curtain of night to bring an end to their passion. (I expanded the original somewhat in translation to provide this information to English readers, as well as to fit the syllable count.) Japanese men at this time usually slipped into the woman's house at night and left at dawn, sometimes even after marriage. The classical canon is also full of references to a superstition whereby lovers' souls could leave their bodies at night to visit the beloved's dreams. In the original, as in the translation, there is no gender or person given: though critics traditionally took Teika to be recounting a personal experience, the early riser in the poem could equally be a lady, watching her lover's departure, or the whole situation could be a dream, which has broken off just like the cloud trail in the sky. The sustained ambiguity, hovering between meanings just as the scene described hovers between dream and waking, night and dawn, is fundamental to the poem.

Classical Japanese poetry was a courtly tradition, and love lyrics like this were its mainstay. The Japanese aristocracy demonstrated their refinement by corresponding through poetry, which was therefore a central part of social and personal life. (By Teika's time, the aristocracy had yielded political supremacy to the provincial warrior class, but retained cultural prestige: Teika himself was of the Fujiwara family, most revered of the aristocratic houses.) Didactic and public poetry was, by convention, written in Chinese, and exclusively by men; poetry in the native language was for the sphere of personal life, and often written to or by women, little schooled in the complexities of Chinese characters. Hence, love poetry is a dominant strand in classical Japanese verse; but, as in all traditions, it became the vehicle for highly complex essays in form and content.

Teika's poem triumphs over its short form through association and suggestion. It refers to two important literary sources. The last chapter of the Tale of Genji is entitled Yume no ukihasi, The Floating Bridge of Dreams, and chronicles the breaking off of the relationship – even more inconclusive and ephemeral than most in Genji – between Prince Kaoru and the withdrawn, mysterious girl Ukifune, who ends by becoming a nun. A Chinese legend tells of King Huai, who was visited by a women who gave herself to him for a night which might have been a dream. When asked for a memento, she replied, 'I am the cloud that trails from the peak of Mount Wu, and the rain that falls on its slopes.' The king realized that he had spent the night with the goddess of Mount Wu. (Ever since, 'clouds and rain' has been a euphemism for sex in Chinese.) Both tales of fugitive passion colour Teika's poem.

Religious and metaphysical overtones, specifically Buddhist, are also present. The dream of passion from which the poet wakens may be the dream of his fallen state of bondage to passion, from which he is woken by enlightenment. The sky described in the poem could also be the Void (ku - written with the same character as 'sky') underlying phenomenal reality, into which the enlightened soul departs when the attachment, or 'wrongful clinging', to the object of his passion is broken off. Buddhism and Daoism both emphasize the uncertain distinction between dream and reality: in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, the sage awakens after dreaming of being a butterfly, declaring that he does not know if he is Zhuangzi dreaming that he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he is Zhuangzi.

Teika's poem is widely regarded as the quintessential instance of the yoen ('ethereal charm') style, which he originated and perfected. His father, the great poet Fujiwara Shunzei, had evolved a style of yugen ('mystery and depth'), which expanded the weight and significance of a poem through suggestion, symbol and brief allusion, allowing the imagination to expand into realms not explicitly stated. The style often yielded fairly stark, sombre poems. Teika wrote many fine yugen poems, but preferred a style with a softer, more dreamy beauty: instead of the quails crying in the chill night wind of Shunzei's most famous poem, Teika produces the wistful loveliness of a spring dawn.

References: Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, Stanford U.P.

All material on this page © Paul St John Mackintosh

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