"Let's dance to Joy Division and celebrate the irony / everything's going wrong and we're so happy"

[larryhammer]

The craft of translating classical Japanese poetry in 11 easy steps:

1. Translate word-by-word, marking the grammatical relations between those two-thirds you already understand; include both meanings of pivot words; bracket the words you can't find in dictionaries.
   
   
2. Look up Japanese commentaries, paying special attention to the glossaries of archaic terms and modern paraphrases.
   
   
3. Write a prose version in translationese, as literal as possible while still being comprehensible as English. Include pivot words in both phrases swinging from them.
   
   
4. Comb through the grammars of Old Japanese in Google Books, looking for examples that explain the rest of the verb endings.
   
   
5. Revise your translationese, smoothing out the language into actual English, incorporating your glosses and best guesses. Mark those phrases that fall naturally into 5 or 7 syllable cadences.
   
   
6. Decide that you really aren't going to figure out all the endings of those line-long verbs and settle for the one you do grasp.
   
   
7. Shape your draft into something approximating the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable form. Start adjusting line lengths a la Procrustes, trying to keep to phrases that match the literal meanings as close as possible.
   
   
8. Discard that version, and start over with an ear to tenor of the original, as best you understand it, and to the sounds of English words, and to propitious line breaks (bow to all four directions and the zenith).
   
   
9. Sit on it for a few days. Let it ripen.
   
   No, longer than that. Put it back.
   
   
10. Adjust that awkward phrase, that jarring line-break, now that you see how. Read it aloud, comparing it to the original.
    
    
11. Only now throw it away in despair.

See? The process is easy, once you break it down like that.

Later, after I've studied for ten years, I'll report back on the art of translating Japanese poetry.

---L.