The following is a well-known adage about exchanging
things: If you and I have an apple each
and we exchange them, then we will still have one apple each. But if you and I
both have ideas and we exchange them, then each of us will have two ideas. I
love apples and I love ideas. But this saying reminds me that exchanging ideas
is often more interesting than exchanging apples.
When I share my idea with you, then not only do I keep hold
of my idea, but you also get access to it. And vice-versa. Or at least, that’s what the saying suggests will happen.
The reality is of course more complex. We will more likely end up with at least
four ideas after this type of exchange rather than two. Even if an idea is
written down, it cannot be shared exactly with someone else. In its simplest
form then, idea-exchange must involve translation. We exchange ideas all the
time, and we are therefore translating ideas all the time. Idea exchange and
translation are two of the basic operations on which all knowledge economies are
built.
Translation is real work. It is always creative, and it is often
difficult. Very often translation is asymmetrical, in a specific idea exchange,
one of the two people involved will put more energy into the exchange and
translation than the other.
One way to think about the quantity of work that is involved
in translation is to use an idea developed by the American anthropologist David
Graeber. He defines Interpretive Labour
as, ‘…equal to the energy put into explaining an idea, plus the energy needed
to understand it’. These amounts of energy cannot be quantified precisely, but
some of the factors influencing the quantity of interpretive labour involved in
a specific translation include: the level of fluency each person has in the
different languages, the acceptability of a partially formed or tentative
translation, and the distance between
the source and destination.
Poetry is the most enigmatic of literary forms. It often relies
on layers of allusion and linguistic sophistication for its emotional and
aesthetic power. Poetry is rarely unambiguous, even for languages that share
common roots, such as English and French. Translating poetry between languages
with much larger structural differences, such as from Japanese to English, or vice-versa, is much more difficult.
The celebrated Japanese writer Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) took
a long trip across Japan in May 1689. This trip gave rise to his most
celebrated travel journal, Oku no
Hosomichi (奥の細道), a title usually translated as Narrow Road to the Deep North. Earlier in the same year Bashō had
been staying with a friend when he wrote the following fragment of poetry:
かげろふの我が肩に立つ紙子かな
This verse was composed by Bashō on February 7th
1689 as the opening hokku in a linked
set of verses. He and other poets, including Tanzan, Sora, Shikin, and Ranran
were gathered at an inn in Edo where a poet from Õgaki called Tōzan was
staying.
A full translation of this short poem requires work at multiple
levels of complexity. Much of the following has been guided by the translation
given by Oshiharu Oseko from his wonderful book Basho’s Haiku: Literal translations for those who want to read the
original Japanese text, with grammatical analysis and explanatory notes. (1990).
Firstly, the poem’s form. Although this type of poem is now
known generically as a haiku, it was classically
known as a hokku. It usually included
a season word to indicate when it was written, and was composed of 17 Japanese on – discrete short syllables such as ka, ri,
and to. These syllables are shorter
and more similar in length than many English syllables. Barnhill describes the
hokku structure as a rhythm of
five-seven-five Japanese on.
When rendered into a form that an English reader can begin
to engage with (Romaji script), Bashō’s hokku now reads as:
Kagerō no / waga kata ni tatsu / kamiko
kana.
An English reader can use this transliteration from Kanji to
Romaji to hear an approximation of what the original Japanese might have sounded
like. The vowels and consonants are pronounced much like in English, with little
or no emphasis on different syllables within the words. So the sounds that
Bashō first captured with his poet friends in Edo in 1689 can, to some extent
at least, be brought back to life with our own voices today.
But what does it mean? Oseko’s translation into a three line
verse, is as follows:
A shimmer of warm air
Rises up from the shoulders
Of my paper robe
Other translations largely agree with this rendering.
Barnhill translates this hokku as:
heat waves
shimmering
from the shoulders
of my paper
robe
In one sense then, we have a translation. But even this
translation may best be thought of more accurately as a compound of two
translations: firstly from the original Kanji into a roughly phonetic form in
Romaji, and then into English. For many readers of English, the full meaning of
this poem is still obscure. What is a paper robe? Why would Bashō comment on the warm air? What
does he mean by shimmer? And how does this succinct poem reflect on the
cultural and personal context in which it was composed? These levels of
translation remain unexplored.
The beauty of Oseko’s book is that he describes the meaning
of each Japanese word in each line in the poem. So we learn that the second
line of the Romaji version - waga kata ni tatsu is word by word equivalent
to:
waga: my
kata: a shoulder or shoulders
ni: a particle meaning: at, on, or from
tatsu […]: to stand, or rise
And Oseko’s translation of this portion is now clear Rises up from the shoulders (of my…).
The last line – Of my
paper robe, elicits a question from a modern reader. It implies that a Japanese
traveller like Bashō would have worn paper clothing to keep warm in winter. Surprising
though this may seem to a modern reader, it is true. At the time that Bashō was
writing this poem, the use of Kamiko
– paper clothing such as the washi paper made from kozo (mulberry) fibres in Shiroishi, was widely worn as clothing.
One final thing to keep in mind in reading translations of
hokku is that the abbreviated form of the original inevitably left some room
for the reader to infer what was missing – based on cultural allusions or their
own preferences – meaning these short poems can create multiple
interpretations. Translations of hokku do not generally benefit from the
insertion of explanatory extra words. Not only is this approach clumsy, but as Barnhill
notes: ‘We should not be in a hurry to eliminate ambiguity if it is part of the
poetry of the original text.’
Arthur Waley (1889 – 1966) was an English translator of
classical Chinese and Japanese literature. He was very highly educated and
cultured, but fundamentally not an academic. He taught himself classical
Chinese and Japanese, yet never visited either country. He translated for nearly
sixty years and wrote prolifically. His translation of the eleventh century
Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji,
runs to more than 700,000 words in 6 volumes. His highly regarded, Monkey, was an abridged translation of the sixteenth century Chinese classic Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en. It is more than 320 pages
long. Waley was both a translator, and a poet, one recent critic notes that:
There are many westerners whose
knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is greater than his, and there are perhaps a
few who can handle both languages as well. But they are not poets, and those
who are better poets than Waley do not know Chinese or Japanese.
In a fascinating article in The Atlantic Monthly (1958), called Notes on Translation: Unlocking the Chinese Poets, Waley makes
detailed comparisons of different attempts to translate from Chinese and
Japanese classics, and the Bhagavad Gita. He describes his own experiences, and how
best to translate. One especially clear lesson from Waley is that, ‘The
translator must use the tools that he knows best how to handle’. By way of
illustration he describes the translation career of a Chinese translator Lin Shu
(1852 – 1924). Once, Lin Shu was asked why he had translated the works of
Charles Dickens into ancient Chinese, rather than into a more modern and
colloquial Chinese, he replied: ‘Because ancient Chinese is what I am good at.’
Lin Shu translated more than 160 translations into Chinese
over a twenty five year period. Waley re-counts that in 1907 he published
translations of Walter Scott’s The
Talisman and The Betrothed, both The Old Curiosity Shop and Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens,
and works by Washington Irving, Arthur Morrison, and Conan Doyle. The most remarkable aspect of Lin Shu’s career
as a translator is that he didn’t know any of the European languages he was translating
from. Instead, for each of his translations he worked with a young collaborator
who was able to directly translate orally into colloquial Chinese, from which
Lin Shu would create a work of literary Chinese. In Lin Shu’s preface to
Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, he describes
his method:
I have no foreign languages. I
cannot pass for a translator without the aid of several gentlemen, who
interpret the texts for me. They interpret, and I write down what they
interpret. They stop, and I put down my pen. 6,000 words can be produced after
a mere four hours' labour. I am most fortunate to have my error-plagued, rough
translations kindly accepted by the learned.
This method, unusual though it sounds, created good results.
Waley is complimentary about Lin Shu’s translations of Dickens: ‘… the results
are not at all grotesque. Dickens, inevitably, becomes a rather different and
to my mind a better writer’.
LINKS
Portrait of Bashō, by Ichijun HERE.
An article on Growing paper clothes in rural Japan HERE.
Bashō's Haiku - David Landis Barnhill - HERE.
