Poem: Anonymous (?), KKS I:35
Feb. 25th, 2012 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poetreeWhile it is tempting to pick a relatively easy translation tension, such as word order versus order of images, I think it is time to tackle the infamous pronoun problem and the related issue of context. Here's a particularly knotty one, one that would be even worse were it not for its complicated textual history.
Kokinshu #35 is from book 1, in the section of plum blossom poems. To explain the difficulty here, I need to lift up the hood and show the details of how to unpack a Japanese poem. First, the original text, which the Kokinshu gives as having unknown author, unknown topic:
梅花たちよるばかりありしより人のとがむるかにぞしみぬる
ume no hana
tachiyoru bakari
arishi yori
hito no togamuru
ka ni zo shiminuru
There are enough ambiguities here that even a painfully literal prose paraphrase requires making assumptions, so to start, here's a word-by-word pony:
plum | <-of | flower
visiting | only
existed (inflected as a personal recollection of a past action) | <-more than
person | <-(subject) (of this verb->) | charge/suspect (someone with/of something)
scent | <-(agent) | (emphatic!) | has permeated
Not very helpful, that -- for one thing, there's no indication of who is doing what and with which and to whom.
To start with, there's at least three people here, including the speaker, but only one of them is explicitly if vaguely named: hito, which could be a singular person or plural people, and while third-person is more likely, it could also be a second-person address (similar to how in modern Japanese it is politer to address someone by name than with "you"). There's also the question of what grammatical relationship the plum flowers have with "visit," as there's no particle indicating one -- subject doesn't make sense, but they could be the direct object of the speaker's personally recollected visit, for which the particle was omitted, as well as either an exclamation or a direct address, neither of which requires a particle. (For what it's worth, the middle line is best understood idiomatically as "(even though) existed for so short a time.")
In short, the matrix of possible meanings is large. In conversation, many of them would be understood from context. So what can the poem's context give us? In the Kokinshu, this follows three poems about using fragrant plum flowers (either directly or as incense) to perfume clothing -- in particular, mistaking flowers for someone's clothes, or vice versa, because of their scent. (The term for this type of sensory mixup, which was borrowed from Chinese poetry, is usually translated as "elegant confusion.") "Permeate" fits right in with that topic, which narrows our scope a little.
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 incorrectly suspects it of coming from some third party -- that is, that the scent is from the plum-flower incense used in some woman's apartments. The poem is a protestation of innocence, made either to the accuser (hito as you, flowers as direct object), to the world at large (hito as person/people, flowers as direct object or exclamation), or to the plum that caused his problems (hito as person/people, flowers 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. This gives the translation:
O flowering plum --
merely from visiting you
for so short a time,
I was so soaked in your scent
that now someone suspects me.
But -- and for once there is a but -- remember that textual complication I mentioned? This isn't the whole story. We happen to know the poem is by one Fujiwara no Kanesuke, a minor poet and contemporary of the editors -- because he included it in his collected poetry. According to his headnote there, the poem was sent to a lover when his own household began to suspect their secret affair. In that context, almost every decision we just painfully worked through gets changed -- 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!
Merely from visiting you
for so short a time,
I was so soaked in its scent
that now people suspect me.
The poem is not a protest of innocence, but a warning ("look out, they're onto us!") -- one that possibly signaled, by his sending it, his determination to continue the affair. Context means oh so much.
There's two lessons here. First, this is why Japanese poems so often come with topical headnotes -- to help a reader with interpretation by explaining how and where the poem came to be written. Second, if you want to change a poem's meaning (if, for example, you need more spring poems and so want to emphasize the plum blossoms instead of the love affair), you can re-frame it and so make readers see it completely differently.
Well, three lessons: translating is hard. Just like anything else worth doing.
And that's it for me this week (unless someone really wants that word-versus-image-order post). I hope I've managed to convey something of the fun of translation, and the beauties of classical Japanese poetry -- or if not, that I was at least entertaining. And I leave you with a question: which of the above versions is "correct," and why?
---L.
Kokinshu #35 is from book 1, in the section of plum blossom poems. To explain the difficulty here, I need to lift up the hood and show the details of how to unpack a Japanese poem. First, the original text, which the Kokinshu gives as having unknown author, unknown topic:
梅花たちよるばかりありしより人のとがむるかにぞしみぬる
ume no hana
tachiyoru bakari
arishi yori
hito no togamuru
ka ni zo shiminuru
There are enough ambiguities here that even a painfully literal prose paraphrase requires making assumptions, so to start, here's a word-by-word pony:
plum | <-of | flower
visiting | only
existed (inflected as a personal recollection of a past action) | <-more than
person | <-(subject) (of this verb->) | charge/suspect (someone with/of something)
scent | <-(agent) | (emphatic!) | has permeated
Not very helpful, that -- for one thing, there's no indication of who is doing what and with which and to whom.
To start with, there's at least three people here, including the speaker, but only one of them is explicitly if vaguely named: hito, which could be a singular person or plural people, and while third-person is more likely, it could also be a second-person address (similar to how in modern Japanese it is politer to address someone by name than with "you"). There's also the question of what grammatical relationship the plum flowers have with "visit," as there's no particle indicating one -- subject doesn't make sense, but they could be the direct object of the speaker's personally recollected visit, for which the particle was omitted, as well as either an exclamation or a direct address, neither of which requires a particle. (For what it's worth, the middle line is best understood idiomatically as "(even though) existed for so short a time.")
In short, the matrix of possible meanings is large. In conversation, many of them would be understood from context. So what can the poem's context give us? In the Kokinshu, this follows three poems about using fragrant plum flowers (either directly or as incense) to perfume clothing -- in particular, mistaking flowers for someone's clothes, or vice versa, because of their scent. (The term for this type of sensory mixup, which was borrowed from Chinese poetry, is usually translated as "elegant confusion.") "Permeate" fits right in with that topic, which narrows our scope a little.
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 incorrectly suspects it of coming from some third party -- that is, that the scent is from the plum-flower incense used in some woman's apartments. The poem is a protestation of innocence, made either to the accuser (hito as you, flowers as direct object), to the world at large (hito as person/people, flowers as direct object or exclamation), or to the plum that caused his problems (hito as person/people, flowers 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. This gives the translation:
O flowering plum --
merely from visiting you
for so short a time,
I was so soaked in your scent
that now someone suspects me.
But -- and for once there is a but -- remember that textual complication I mentioned? This isn't the whole story. We happen to know the poem is by one Fujiwara no Kanesuke, a minor poet and contemporary of the editors -- because he included it in his collected poetry. According to his headnote there, the poem was sent to a lover when his own household began to suspect their secret affair. In that context, almost every decision we just painfully worked through gets changed -- 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!
Merely from visiting you
for so short a time,
I was so soaked in its scent
that now people suspect me.
The poem is not a protest of innocence, but a warning ("look out, they're onto us!") -- one that possibly signaled, by his sending it, his determination to continue the affair. Context means oh so much.
There's two lessons here. First, this is why Japanese poems so often come with topical headnotes -- to help a reader with interpretation by explaining how and where the poem came to be written. Second, if you want to change a poem's meaning (if, for example, you need more spring poems and so want to emphasize the plum blossoms instead of the love affair), you can re-frame it and so make readers see it completely differently.
Well, three lessons: translating is hard. Just like anything else worth doing.
And that's it for me this week (unless someone really wants that word-versus-image-order post). I hope I've managed to convey something of the fun of translation, and the beauties of classical Japanese poetry -- or if not, that I was at least entertaining. And I leave you with a question: which of the above versions is "correct," and why?
---L.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-26 02:03 pm (UTC)Prior to reading your posts this week I hadn't realized just how ambiguous Japanese poetry can be in certain ways - e.g. this poem in particular is a brilliant example of how drastically different assumptions about which pronouns are appropriate changes the overall meaning of the poem - and now I'm bitten by the desire to know more. Aside from subscribing to your Dreamwidth journal (which I already do), are there any resources you'd recommend for finding out more about the topics you've covered this week?
Anyway, thank you for doing such an amazing job as a Poetry Host this week! I look forward to the chance to reread your posts in depth this evening when I'm putting together the weekly roundup. I'm sorry there hasn't been as robust an initial series of conversations in the comments as we sometimes have, but I thought you might want to know that your words have already spread outside of the Dreamwidth context: I ended up printing out copies of your 'Meta: translating Japanese' post and sharing them with the poetry workshop participants I mentioned to you to provide context for the ambiguities of only knowing a Japanese poet's work through translation. It substantially enriched the subsequent conversation we had there.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-26 08:52 pm (UTC)FWIW, my answer to the question is, if translating the poem on its own or as part of Kanesuke's collection, the second is correct, but if translating it as part of the Kokinshu, the first is.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-20 05:58 pm (UTC)