"Strong, strong and blind, / Transcending kind-- / Love more strange than death / Or breath."

[larryhammer]

Starting your story of "The Moon Maiden" with "There was an old bamboo cutter called Také Tori" does not give me confidence in your translation skills: taketori means "bamboo cut(ter)." Which is a shame, as aside from the occasional lapse such as that, Grace James's Japanese Fairy Tales is otherwise well-told, in graceful English prose that does not much mangle the spirit of stories that I'm familiar with -- some stories are from Kojiki and others from Noh plays -- though I can't speak to the details as I don't know what texts/traditions she used.* In particular, she keeps the sometimes startling narrative shapes that do not match what one expects from Western fairy tales: there's an encounter with something supernatural, but then the human goes home with no consequences. Some of the oddities of language are understandable, such as the pre-Hepburn romanizations of Yedo and Kioto (for Edo and Kyoto) and inconsistently treated honorifics. But still, "Také Tori" as a name?

Gutenberg's edition (linked above) is undated, but old book dealers seem to think the first edition, Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales, is from 1912 -- calibrate your orientalization goggles accordingly.

* Speaking of which, does anyone have an idea of where "Flower of Peony" is from? I'm interested in particular in the original form of the songs, and where those rhymes come from.

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Smith as a name? Tanner as a name? Butcher as a name? Baker as a name? Brewster or Brewer as a name? Woodman as a name? Forester as a name? Glover as a name?

...I'd have to know that it was impossible, in Japanese, for surnames to come from jobs.

[larryhammer]

Not impossible, but rare -- much more common was place. And it was very rare before the Meiji restoration for commoners to have family names. In the original tale, Taketori monogatari ("Tale of the Bamboo Cutter"), taketori is treated as a job title -- "the woodcutter," essentially.

---L.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the original bamboo cutter was unnamed but the translator felt the need to give him a name and opted for the job title? I agree that dispensing with the generic name and simply saying "Once there was an old woodcutter" is a more elegant solution.

[larryhammer]

That does seem to be what happened.

---L.

The name...

[(Anonymous)]

The original first line is "今は昔竹取の翁といふものありけり", so it's a bit unclear whether we are to understand him as a man everyone called "the old woodcutter" or a man everyone called "Old Man Woodcutter", if that difference is relevant. But either way it's clearly a reference to his occupation, and as you say it's a very dubious translation strategy to retain "Také Tori" as if it were　an untranslatable proper noun -- divided into a family and given name, yet; good job the Moon-Maiden didn't get referred to as "Také no ko".

No idea about the peonies...

Re: The name...

[larryhammer]

"Také no ko"

*sputter*

Er, yeah. Good job that.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Looking at the Project Gutenberg version of the book (and flipping to the illustrations here (http://www.subtlebody-images.com/warwick.goble/wg.green.willow.html)) I suspect that the tea-kettle in the epoynmous story is a tanuki, not a badger. Indeed I think I have read a version of it called "The Tanuki" but I don't recall when or where!

[larryhammer]

Oh, yes, it's clearly a tanuki. I don't think I've read exactly that story, but I've met other tales of them.

---L.