![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerTime again for another episode of amateur scholarship hour. Sitting comfortably? Good -- because, as usual, I'm thinking out loud and so not very brief.
One stumbling block for western learners of Japanese is that it is, to use a technical term, "pro-drop" -- grammatically, anything not essential to conveying meaning can be dropped, and in fluent usage usually is. The attitude being roughly that, if you have enough context to know who a pronoun refers to, why even bother with the pronoun? -- though of course this applies to far more than just persons. Subjects, objects, agents, locations -- everything but the verb can evaporate at a whiff of prior mention or current situation. It's all, to use the oft-repeated phrase, very contextual.
Poetry being a way of heightening language, the contextuality of poems is even higher than conversation. In the short space of 31 syllables for a tanka or 17 for a haiku, you include nothing that isn't absolutely essential. Particles get lost with stratospheric levels of idiomaticity. One result is the near-obsession with providing headnotes identifying the "topic" of a poem -- indicating at least the subject, but better still something of the circumstances of composition. (Never mind that for a long time poetry was social in nature, and Japanese poetics insisted on tight association of a poem with the time and place it was written -- I'm focusing on the act of reading here.) Given contextual language, context for poems helps -- a lot. As concrete example of how this can work, how about another poem from the Kokinshu -- number 35.
This is still from book one -- still early spring, but the plum trees have finally started blooming. (Aside: Until the time of the Kokinshu, the plum was the preeminent type of spring flower -- how the anthology helped displace them with cherry blossoms could be a dissertation chapter all on its own. Fortunately, I'm not in the dissertating business.) Salient features of plum blossoms: they are the first spring flower to bloom in Japan, and (unlike cherry) they are fragrant; as such, they were used in the Heian era as perfume and incense, both for personal spaces and clothing.
The poem itself is, like over a third of the anthology, given as author unknown and topic unknown. First, a romanized Japanese text for reference:
In short, the matrix of possible meanings is rather large. So what can context give us? In the sequence, this comes after three poems in a row about using the scent of plum flowers to perfume clothing, and in particular, about confusing robes and blooms by scent. "Permeate" fits right in with that subject, which narrows things down a bit. Given that, the most likely situation is this: the speaker visited the flowers, got the scent of them on his robes, and someone else (possibly a lover) smelled this and suspects it of coming from some third party -- that is, that the scent is from the incense used in some woman's apartments. The poem is a protestation of innocence, made to the accuser (hito as you, plum as direct object), to the world at large (hito as person/people, plum as direct object or exclamation), or to the plum that caused his problems (hito as person/people, plum as addressee). The first of these requires the most straining. The last, on the other hand, requires the fewest grammatical supplements -- and gives most pointed irony, and you rarely go wrong hearing irony in this sort of courtly poetry.
Going with that, then, the poem might be translated something like:
But -- and you knew there was a but, right? -- this not the whole story. We happen to know that the author is one Fujiwara no Kanesuke because the poem is included in his collected poetry -- and given he was a contemporary of the editors and they included four other of his poems with attribution, odds are they knew as well. Furthermore, in his collection, there's a headnote, from which we learn the poem was sent to his lover when his own household began to suspect their affair. In that context, almost every decision above changes -- it's the visitee being addressed, the scent is from visiting her apartments, and hito is the "people" who correctly suspect this:
Very different effect -- what first read as a protestation of innocence now reads like a warning ("look out -- they're onto us!") with a possible implication that, by sending this, he is signaling his determination to continue with the affair. Certainly, seen in this way, the emphasis is not on the plum's ability to perfume, but on the love affair. A love poem has been turned into a spring poem by replacing its context.
Of course, either of those versions may be my misreading. I'm an outsider, and a student at that. Please correct me, or offer suggestions, for any of this.
This is far from only attribution removed by the Kokinshu editors, though it's one of the few where we know the author -- nor the only re-interpretation by placement in a different context. There are many possible reasons for anonymizing poems -- some as innocent as putting a fig-leaf over a scandal, or what would be a scandal if given public attribution. Maybe they wanted to use a poem by a rival without giving credit, or by someone on the political outs and so dangerous to acknowledge. And so on, through many possibilities -- motives can be complex. And even after anonymizing, for why one might reinterpret-by-placement, maybe there was a hole in the sequence, and only by changing the reading could a poem be made to fit. And so on.
Whether the editors were "wrong" to create a different reading than what the author intended, and whether that new reading is "wrong," is a whole 'nother basket of worms. One I don't have the lid for. But I am led to a question: is either wrongness worse than the wrong done in translating?
---L.
One stumbling block for western learners of Japanese is that it is, to use a technical term, "pro-drop" -- grammatically, anything not essential to conveying meaning can be dropped, and in fluent usage usually is. The attitude being roughly that, if you have enough context to know who a pronoun refers to, why even bother with the pronoun? -- though of course this applies to far more than just persons. Subjects, objects, agents, locations -- everything but the verb can evaporate at a whiff of prior mention or current situation. It's all, to use the oft-repeated phrase, very contextual.
Poetry being a way of heightening language, the contextuality of poems is even higher than conversation. In the short space of 31 syllables for a tanka or 17 for a haiku, you include nothing that isn't absolutely essential. Particles get lost with stratospheric levels of idiomaticity. One result is the near-obsession with providing headnotes identifying the "topic" of a poem -- indicating at least the subject, but better still something of the circumstances of composition. (Never mind that for a long time poetry was social in nature, and Japanese poetics insisted on tight association of a poem with the time and place it was written -- I'm focusing on the act of reading here.) Given contextual language, context for poems helps -- a lot. As concrete example of how this can work, how about another poem from the Kokinshu -- number 35.
This is still from book one -- still early spring, but the plum trees have finally started blooming. (Aside: Until the time of the Kokinshu, the plum was the preeminent type of spring flower -- how the anthology helped displace them with cherry blossoms could be a dissertation chapter all on its own. Fortunately, I'm not in the dissertating business.) Salient features of plum blossoms: they are the first spring flower to bloom in Japan, and (unlike cherry) they are fragrant; as such, they were used in the Heian era as perfume and incense, both for personal spaces and clothing.
The poem itself is, like over a third of the anthology, given as author unknown and topic unknown. First, a romanized Japanese text for reference:
ume no hanaAs usual for poetry, lots of ambiguities -- enough that I can't give even a painfully literal paraphrase without making assumptions. Here's the not very helpful word-for-word pony:
tachiyoru bakari
arishi yori
hito no togamuru
ka ni zo shiminuru
plum | <-of | flowerTo read this, one has to decide who visited whom, who suspected whom, and whom the scent permeated. Taken together, there's at least three people here, including the speaker, with only one explicitly if vaguely marked in the text (hito). There's also the question of what, if any, grammatical relationship the flowers have with "visit," as there's no particle indicating one -- subject doesn't make sense, but it could be a direct object of the speaker's personally recollected visit, as well as either an exclamation or even a direct address, nether of which requires a particle. The phrase arashi yori is best understood idiomatically as "(even though) existed for so short a time" -- it'd be easier to grasp this if a hodo was present, but we can take that as yet another understood word. The last major difficulty is hito, which could be a singular person or plural people, and while third-person is more likely, it could be a second-person address -- similar to how in modern Japanese it is politer to address someone by name than by "you."
visit | only
exist + (ending indicating personal recollection of past) | <-more than
person | <-(subject) (of this verb->) | charge/suspect (someone with/of something)
scent | <-(agent) | (emphatic) | has permeated
In short, the matrix of possible meanings is rather large. So what can context give us? In the sequence, this comes after three poems in a row about using the scent of plum flowers to perfume clothing, and in particular, about confusing robes and blooms by scent. "Permeate" fits right in with that subject, which narrows things down a bit. Given that, the most likely situation is this: the speaker visited the flowers, got the scent of them on his robes, and someone else (possibly a lover) smelled this and suspects it of coming from some third party -- that is, that the scent is from the incense used in some woman's apartments. The poem is a protestation of innocence, made to the accuser (hito as you, plum as direct object), to the world at large (hito as person/people, plum as direct object or exclamation), or to the plum that caused his problems (hito as person/people, plum as addressee). The first of these requires the most straining. The last, on the other hand, requires the fewest grammatical supplements -- and gives most pointed irony, and you rarely go wrong hearing irony in this sort of courtly poetry.
Going with that, then, the poem might be translated something like:
O flowering plum --To refine it, I might replace the third line with "for just a moment" to alliterate with "merely," as an analog to the soundplay in bakari arishi, but it's passable as is.
merely from visiting you
for so short a time,
I was so soaked in your scent
that now someone suspects me.
But -- and you knew there was a but, right? -- this not the whole story. We happen to know that the author is one Fujiwara no Kanesuke because the poem is included in his collected poetry -- and given he was a contemporary of the editors and they included four other of his poems with attribution, odds are they knew as well. Furthermore, in his collection, there's a headnote, from which we learn the poem was sent to his lover when his own household began to suspect their affair. In that context, almost every decision above changes -- it's the visitee being addressed, the scent is from visiting her apartments, and hito is the "people" who correctly suspect this:
Your flowering plum!(Outside of this discussion, I might replace the clarifying "your" with a more neutral "that" -- even in English, context changes things.)
Merely from visiting you
for so short a time,
I was so soaked in its scent
that now people suspect me.
Very different effect -- what first read as a protestation of innocence now reads like a warning ("look out -- they're onto us!") with a possible implication that, by sending this, he is signaling his determination to continue with the affair. Certainly, seen in this way, the emphasis is not on the plum's ability to perfume, but on the love affair. A love poem has been turned into a spring poem by replacing its context.
Of course, either of those versions may be my misreading. I'm an outsider, and a student at that. Please correct me, or offer suggestions, for any of this.
This is far from only attribution removed by the Kokinshu editors, though it's one of the few where we know the author -- nor the only re-interpretation by placement in a different context. There are many possible reasons for anonymizing poems -- some as innocent as putting a fig-leaf over a scandal, or what would be a scandal if given public attribution. Maybe they wanted to use a poem by a rival without giving credit, or by someone on the political outs and so dangerous to acknowledge. And so on, through many possibilities -- motives can be complex. And even after anonymizing, for why one might reinterpret-by-placement, maybe there was a hole in the sequence, and only by changing the reading could a poem be made to fit. And so on.
Whether the editors were "wrong" to create a different reading than what the author intended, and whether that new reading is "wrong," is a whole 'nother basket of worms. One I don't have the lid for. But I am led to a question: is either wrongness worse than the wrong done in translating?
---L.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 26 October 2010 03:00 pm (UTC)I love ambiguity, and English can do it too.
no subject
Date: 26 October 2010 03:48 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 26 October 2010 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 October 2010 04:31 pm (UTC)Beneath the flowering plum tree
A chaste rendezvous.
Too short an encounter,
Yet I am disgraced.
Now, in everything, the scent of plums.
("Chaste" is nowhere in the poem, but I'm extrapolating it from the emphasis on briefness.)
(Now that I think about it, "hurried" would be even better, but I'll let my first thought stand.)
no subject
Date: 26 October 2010 10:17 pm (UTC)---L.