Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

So. :scuffs floor: Yeah. This is late. Over a decade late.

See, back when I was translating classical Japanese, I got a dozen poems into book XI of the Kokinshu before life pivoted me into learning Chinese. (Parenthood brings changes.) Which means I never got around to compiling those fragments—leaving them orphans not on my index of Japanese translations. So purely for the bookkeeping, here they are. Full disclosure: except for one wording tweak, these are unrevised reposts from the original posts. That said, without double-checking my understanding of the originals, I’m as happy as I ever am with the texts.

( A little bit of love goes a long, long way )

Index of Japanese translations

---L.

My haiku + woodblock print calendar has served up a pretty good combination this month. The haiku is Bashō:

futari mishi
yuki wa kotoshi mo
furikeri ka

The snow we two once
viewed together—has it
fallen again this year?

The translator did a pretty good job of bringing across both the tone and literal sense, without padding (arguably both “two” and “together” are redundant for sense, but with both brings out the strength and dual-form-edness of futari better than either alone), while matching the 17-syllable form. Yeah, it breaks into 5-6-6 instead of 5-7-5, but knowing by experience how hard this is to pull off, I’m more than willing to give that a pass. Well done.

The picture is Spring Snow by Takahashi Hiroaki, and it … just fits. I especially like the woman’s expression as she looks back through the snow but the basket of flowers & veggies and the touches of pink make the season, and the hope it represents, perfectly clear.

---L.

Subject quote from Love Reign O'er Me, The Who.

(This post will seriously annoy archivists and other document management specialists, and for that I apologize.)

Back when I posted this announcement, I thought I would simply port that round of changes into the print edition. However, comma, getting Ice Melts in the Wind out the door reminded me that I had retranslated of some of the poems that are in the Kokinshu, and I really ought to update those. While working on that, I realized that there’s other translations that no longer matched my practice evolved for the Kokinshu poems and notes. Not to mention having a somewhat better grasp of Japanese.

In other words, this is a completely revised One Hundred People, One Poem Each, with 20-odd translations reworked and updates to commentaries throughout. Because this does not match the ebook that’s labeled “Second Edition” and calling this a third edition would be confusing when there’s no print 2e., it’s officially a “Revised Edition.”

Around 1235, Japanese poet and scholar Fujiwara no Teika compiled for his son’s father-in-law a collection of one hundred poems by one hundred poets. Within its summary of six centuries of Japanese literature, Teika arranged a poetic conversation that ebbs and flows through various subjects. The collection became the exemplar of the genre—a mini-manual of classical poetry, taught in the standard school curriculum and used in a memory card game still played during New Years.

One Hundred People, One Poem Each contains the best that classical Japanese poetry has to offer—now in a revised verse translation.

Wider distribution, lower price, and better poems—what’s not to want?

Available in both paper and electronic editions from all the usual fine retailers: print | Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Smashwords | et cetera | as well as orderable through your local bookstore (ISBN 978-1790497690).

If you do read it, please consider reviewing or at least rating. Every tick-mark counts. Review copies can be arranged.

---L.

I am pleased to announce the publication of Ice Melts in the Wind: The Seasonal Poems of the Kokinshu, another collection of translations of classical Japanese poetry. Some of you may remember the drafts posted in this journal (linked here) — these have been revised and edited and otherwise swotted into shape. Full description:

“Japanese poetry takes the human heart as its seed, and has innumerable words as its leaves.”

The Kokinshu, compiled around 905 C.E. in 20 thematic books, was the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry. It defined the acceptable topics, diction, imagery, and style of court poetry for the next thousand years. Haiku poets took many cues from this tradition, including giving primacy to seasonal imagery.

Ice Melts in the Wind is an exciting new translation of the six books of seasonal poems, depicting the progression from New Year’s Day through spring cherry blossoms and summer cuckoo songs to autumn’s colorful leaves and winter snow, ending again with the New Year. Japanese text and commentary is included for every poem, along with brief biographies of all named poets.

    The water I cupped
in my hands, drenching my sleeves,
    has long been frozen—
today, with the start of spring,
will it melt in the wind?

Plus there’s occasional seasonal Japanese woodblock prints, for those who enjoy them.

Available in both paper and electronic editions from all the usual fine retailers: print | Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Smashwords | et cetera | as well as orderable through your local bookstore (ISBN 978-1728826417).

If you do read it, please consider reviewing or at least rating. Every tick-mark counts. Review copies can be arranged.

—L.

(Okay, so this makes it three book announcement posts in a row. Sorry not sorry.)

I should also mention that I’ve released a second edition ebook of my translation of One Hundred People, One Poem Each. There’s no substantive changes to any poem, but I did clean up the formatting and commentary plus gave it wider distribution.

Available from all the usual fine ebook purveyors: Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Smashwords | et cetera

(Note: The print version of the first edition remains available at Lulu. I haven’t updated this yet because life, but didn’t want to hold the ebook up just for that.)

---L.

It is a Wednesday, and I am actually still reading things -- mostly on my phone these days. The three most recent things poked at, according to the Kobo app, are:

Poems of Places volume 28 -- still. Though I am almost done with the Southern States. The poems of Washington, DC, were especially resonant, so Longfellow clearly wasn't utterly failing as an editor -- but the American Civil War, which the principle obsession of a volume covering the recently former Confederacy, is not mine at the moment. After this, one more volume to go: the Western States, meaning everything from Ohio to the Pacific.

A Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar by Tae Kim.

Madan no Ou to Vanadis volume 10, which supposedly wraps up the second arc -- resolving the amnesia plot, one hopes. So far it bounces along nicely.

The most recently finished book was The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, in which a mystery-novel detective laid up by injury investigates by proxy the death of the Princes in the Tower and concludes Richard III didn't have them killed, but rather Henry VII. Before that was Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery, which demonstrates that many of the tropes that go into a Manic Pixie Dream Girl have been around for quite a while.

---L.

Subject quote from "C.S. Lewis Song," Brooke Fraser (adapting C.S. Lewis).

Important recent discoveries:

Mnemosyne may indeed be a better flash-card program than Kanji Gold, and not just because it's not just for kanji. (I prefer the way it spaces out cards how well you know them, though I don't always find the period predictable. OTOH, I do like how Kanji Gold separates meaning, kun-yomi, and on-yomi drills. Hmmm.)

A web-widget that converts Aozora Bunko texts to PDFs, vertical text, in standard Japanese paperback page-size. Which also happens to be very close to standard e-reader screen size. (Also, Aozora has the works of Niimi Nankichi, but that's more a belated realization than a discovery. I am very fond of my picture book edition of "Tebukuro o kai ni," and am looking forward to reading more.)

Wuxia translations, which may not have all the fan translations of wuxia novels that are out there, but the bulk of completed ones are available in ebook formats (with links to projects in progress).

An actually good Chinese restaurant in town. It's Szechuan rather than Americanized Chinese, and very little English was being spoken.

There are such things as albino hummingbirds.

---L.

Subject quote from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," Lafcadio Hearn.

The Shinkokin(waka)shu, "New collection of older and recent (Japanese poems)," was the eighth imperially commissioned anthology of poetry in Japanese, and is generally considered the best and most important one after the Kokinshu (together with the Man'yoshu, they are the three cornerstones of classical poetry). It was compiled around 1205 near the end of the Heian period, almost exactly 300 years after the Kokinshu it emulated, and it is interesting to compare how the fashions of style changed in that time.

The most obvious is a shift in emphasis from voice and wit to image and emotional resonance. There's a greater reliance on concrete nouns instead of verbs, and many poems end on a noun phrase without a main verb. It looks like there are fewer speculative conjugations and deductions from appearance and more direct presentation of the (supposed) scene, but my sample size is too small to confirm this, ah, speculation. The poems are, also, the work of the first intertextual generation, who systematically developed the technique of "allusive variation" by partial quotation of one or more earlier poems from the canon, using the sources to provide additional resonance.

Below are translations of a random baker's dozen of seasonal poems from the first six books. There's no method to my choices aside from (obviously) the opening handful and getting one from each season -- they just caught my eye. My notes are light on the biographicals and allusions, and don't even touch the elaborate system of association and progression that govern the arrangement of poems. This should do for non-scholarly comparison, though.

( Ephemeral beauty prefers being hidden behind a cut tag )

---L.

(Index for this project)

Not much reading-reading these two weeks -- I've been kinda wrapped up in Japanese studies-n-poems.

What I've recently finished since my last post:

Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaô volume 4 by Shôtarô Mizuki. The moral dimensions of the world are starting to come into focus, or some aspects are, highlighting how our reluctant Big Bad could end up fulfilling his prophetic role despite himself. Hand in hand with that, one of the more appealing harem members contenders for the protagonist's ultimate romantic partner potted herself into the Unworthy bin -- she's a got of Learning Better to make up for. Possibly fortunately, series metadata is pointing towards another contender. The series remains cheesy but still entertaining, though it was annoying to find out only at the end this is the first half of a two-part story. (BTW, a better translation for the title might be "the last-in-line demon king.") (Also, am amused to find that this series' defining trope has a TV Tropes page.)

Lost Horizon by James Hilton -- that was an oddly elliptical ending, with the reasons for the protagonist's climactic decision veiled by sudden narrative distance. That the life-extending techniques of Shangri-La is not available to natives remains a BIG problem.

What I'm reading now:

Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (Rose) -- now partway through canto 44, and in the home stretch. I'd forgotten how lonnng 43 is.

Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson translated by W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento. This has settled into my reading over breakfast -- a dozen-odd haiku to start the day off. Am into autumn.

A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin & Gao E into chapter 6 (of 120). Given Japanese and Chinese popular culture, I think it's safe to assume that somewhere, someone has rewritten the story so that the twelve women constellated around Bao-yu are are ninjas. Internets, I ask you: WHERE CAN I FIND THIS? (Having them all be wuxia heroines would also be acceptable, and even culturally appropriate.) I mean, if there are multiple versions of Three Kingdoms with all the fighters as young women, ditto Journey to the West, surely this one. Regardless, entertaining, and I'd be further along if I were reading-reading more.

Irregular update on Japanese, aside from lessonwork: in my systematic working through of the Kokinshu, I'm more than halfway through book 10, and I've supplemented my diet with random samplings from the Shinkokinshu -- the comparison is illuminating (to overgeneralize with a small sample set), as in the 300 years between the two, the stylistic focus shifted from voice and wit to image and, um, symbol's not the right word. Resonance, maybe? I might pull together a post about it, if I can manage coherent. In any case, though, being able to apprehend this feels pretty cool. So is reaching to point I can jot down a rough literal translation (possibly minus an unknown word or two) of a poem as an annotation on my Kobo. OTOH, I've barely touched Ginga tetsudô no yoru this past month :-( . I should pick up a manga from my pile.

What I might read next:

Saa. Er, I mean, who knows ...

---L.

Book VIII is poems of partings of various sorts. This was a standard genre in Chinese tradition: close male friends bidding each other farewell, especially as one left to take a new post (Chinese officials were rotated regularly, to reduce the chance they'd build local alliances), and the results are frequently lachrymose.

The Kokinshu includes these sorts of poems from a range of public and private occasions, but also mixes in farewells by lovers -- never a common genre in China -- and even chance encounters. The result is a diversity of tone (or least, more diversity than the previous book -- I know, not hard) and a distinct and unexpected progression.


( Kokinshu VIII:365-405 )


And so the book of partings ends with informal words after momentary meetings -- a far cry from the formal banquets of the start. Next up: the logical consequence of farewells -- traveling.

(Index for this series)

---L.