furusato to / narinishi nara no / miyako ni mo / iro wa kawarazu / hana wa sakikeri*

[larryhammer]

Posting this here only because I'm rather fond of it.

Kokinshu #111. Author and topic unknown.
koma namete iza mi ni yukamu furusato wa yuki to nomi koso hana wa chirurame	Our steeds are lined up, so come now, let's go and see --     in the old village, flowers must be scattering like nothing so much as snow.

The image of horsemen in period costumes cantering through a cinematic whirl of cherry petals? -- that, I find rather romantic. At least, I'm pretty sure the generic flowers are supposed to be sakura. If they aren't, they ought to be. And likewise, although koma, now an old-fashioned synonym for uma ("horse"), seems to have been at the time in the standard rather than elevated register, I still want render it as "steed."

Submitting to that romanticism is perhaps not the best translation practice. But in this one thing, at least, I can recognize my biases, however much I may fall down ignorant in others.


* KKS #90: "Even in Nara, / the capital that became / an old village, / the colors aren't changing: / the flowers are still blooming."

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Does "old" carry a sense of "backwater"or some other connotation besides mere age?

[larryhammer]

Closer to nostalgia than that -- furusato can also be used idiomatically to mean "hometown," the place you came from of old. In this particular case, if these really are cherry blossoms, there's a good chance it's meant to evoke the former capital of Nara, which is still particularly associated with sakura. This association is pointed up in the poem in the subject line, written by the emperor during whose reign the capital moved to Kyoto, but who then abdicated and retired back to Nara.

---L.

"Submitting to that romanticism is perhaps not the best translation practice"

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not even sure about that, in this context. I mean, if you were preparing a translation of the KKS for serious scholars, to be used in arguments about precise details of literary technique in word choice and so on, it would be irresponsible to allow yourself this kind of fun (at the very least without making it transparent to readers somehow).

But as I understand it that isn't what you're trying to do here. (It certainly isn't what I'm trying to do on my blog.) I think it's perfectly fine to make translations where you, as translator, are actively present in some way, *as long as you are open about that*. And if you provide notes explaining what you have done, so much the better! I know that there are theories of translation that would frown on this sort of play no matter how well signposted, but I don't see why it's any worse than, say, an extremely idiosyncratic interpretation of Bach.

I suppose there's a pragmatic argument that if you are the first person to translate some important work, you have a responsibility to future scholars to reduce this kind of play and make your translation usable for purposes other than pure entertainment. But that obviously doesn't apply to Japanese any more. There are already enough fine translations of most classical Japanese works. We don't need another Genji that attempts to lie limpid and natural in English. (One per generation is probably plenty.) But we might enjoy a Genji written in, say, a quasi-hallucinatory run-on style that attempts to evoke how the original reads to us when we read it here in 2011.

Re: "Submitting to that romanticism is perhaps not the best translation practice"

[larryhammer]

So you're suggesting that I'm privileging the scholarly notion of translation, as opposed to it being one among possible tactics?

Hrm. Er, yeah, guilty.

No, what I'm trying to do (after, yanno, teach myself the language) is render my best understanding of a given poem as a readable English poem that reflects as best I can the literary qualities of the original. Definitely the sort of translation that's mediated by the translator's consciousness. In a way that, ultimately, produces a readable, rather than scholarly, edition in the target language.

I take it you're in some sympathy with Robin Gill's work, or at least his tactics?

---L.

Re: "Submitting to that romanticism is perhaps not the best translation practice"

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, I have no problem with Robin Gill's ouevre. I don't always think his translations of a particular work are the best possible, and I think we would be poorer overall if all translators worked like he does, but we would also be poorer without him.

(Particularly as he tends to work on humorous poetry, which is much more resistant to "straight translation": in most cases, you can have it literal and not funny with the gag explained, or funny but not literal. He gives these poems to us in several versions balancing the two extremes to various degrees, with notes explaining what's going on, which seems like a fine solution to me.)

I should stress that I don't have anything against the scholarly notion of translation, either, where the translator is supposed to be invisible. (I don't think that it's always an achievable goal, and I think that such "transparent" translations are often more colored by the translator than people like to admit, but that doesn't mean it can't be an ideal to work towards.) Certainly I've used that technique myself when I thought it appropriate, and I prefer it myself when reading something for its information content rather than for fun. (E.g. I would not want a "fun" translation of an old Korean chronicle if what I wanted to extract from it was reliable information about interactions with Japan.)

Of course, in the real world, the "straighter" translations tend to be produced by translators who are just better at what they do -- and, conversely, many people adopt the "fun" approach because they are simply incapable of rendering the intricacies of the original "straight", much as distortion covers a multitude of sins for electric guitarists. So I'm not arguing that all translations are equally "good" or equally "valuable." But, yes, I reject the idea that any non-scholarly approach to translation is a priori wrong.

Incidentally, your KKS translations have always seemed to me to be on the more scholarly side (not meant as criticism!) -- but they are definitely YOURS and not just "the KKS, in English." For example (I know you know all of the below but I need to restate it to make my point clear) there's no exact concept corresponding to a mora in English; you've chosen to use syllables instead. This is just one of many subtle choices leaving you, personally, in the translations as a presence. (And if you'd decided to count stressed syllables instead, or　not count syllables at all, those would be marked decisions too. There is no unmarked or "neutral" position on this and many other issues. So I suppose ultimately I am just arguing that if we accept a range of choices for mora-representation, we may as well also accept in principle a range of choices for tone of voice, or treatment of rhyming, or cultural reference, etc. etc.)

Re: "Submitting to that romanticism is perhaps not the best translation practice"

[larryhammer]

Very definitely mine, in my manner, and no one else's -- I've done enough translations from other languages (Spanish and Latin) to know that unmediated transparency is a grail to be never reached.

And good point about many adaptations being because the translator is unable to make a nuanced translation. *glances at some of his from-Latin epigrams* A very good one.

---L.