translating Japanese poetry

[Stephen Miller]

Dear Michael,

I'm not sure I agree with you about your last statement. It got me to thinking:
is there any reason that translating a Japanese verse and writing an English
verse have to be two different things? In fact, I sometimes think that Japanese
syntax and Japanese diction require translations into English to be expanded
into something an English-speaking audience will appreciate rather than
something that same audience will regard as Japanese. Fortunately the
foreignization/domestication argument will never be resolved except by
individual translators at particular instances of translation. This is why
there's always room for another translation.

After having translated 124 Japanese Buddhist waka alone and then later
collaboratively with an American poet, I can see the value of both. But I am
not a creative writer at heart, and my translations are not poetic in any sense
of the English meaning of that word. The translations I did alone will never
make anyone say, "Ooooo, that's great," but they do convey the meaning (whatever
that means) of the original (yawn--sometimes at least). The translations I did
collaboratively, on the other hand, are being appreciated (in literary journals)
as good English poems. So where I once may have had an audience of 200, now I
may have an audience of 400. Is that difference substantial? No, but the
difference has made me reconsider the word "translation."

Thanks, all, for a great discussion.

Stephen Miller
Assistant Professor
Japanese Language and Literature
440 Herter Hall
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Phone: 413-545-4953
Fax: 413-545-4975

[Greve Gabi]

Good points, Stephen !

Translating for the sake of the meaning of the text
or
translating to please the target audience ...

Maybe both versions of a poem on the same page would be helpful ?
I usually try to give more than one translation attempt for a haiku,
there are just too many possibilities to "see" it .

Gabi

http://worldkigodatabase.blogspot.com/

[Marc Adler]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Stephen Miller
<smi...@asianlan.umass.edu> wrote:

> of the English meaning of that word.  The translations I did alone will never
> make anyone say, "Ooooo, that's great," but they do convey the meaning (whatever
> that means) of the original (yawn--sometimes at least).  The translations I did

I think it's important to know what the target audience is. If you're
translating in an academic setting for people who speak Japanese or
are otherwise interested in the way the original "looks" (syntax,
etc.), then a translation that sticks to that would be better. But if
you're translating for poetry lovers, then I think you'd be doing a
disservice to the audience by not attempting to convey the beauty of
the original. After all, it's a beautiful poem. Can a boring
translation be considered faithful to the original?

--
Marc Adler
www.adlerpacific.com
nirebloga.wordpress.com
mudawwanatii.wordpress.com
blogsheli.wordpress.com

[Royall Tyler]

On 24/11/2009, at 9:47 AM, Marc Adler wrote:
> Can a boring
> translation [of a beautiful or witty original] be considered
> faithful to the original?

NO

Royall Tyler

[Michelle Li]

This conversation reminds me of a recent assignment given to my daughter and her class (12th grade). Each student had to choose a poem in a foreign language she knows and find 2 translations of it. Then, in an essay, she had to argue that one translation was better than the other, explaining why and establishing criteria for what makes a good translation. My daughter chose the poem about drinking alone under the moon by Li Bai. 

---

From: Royall Tyler <ty...@alpaca-s.com>
To: pm...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, November 23, 2009 3:17:52 PM
Subject: Re: [PMJS] translating Japanese poetry

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[Matthew Stavros]

Dear All,

Wouldn't it be interesting to have a sort of wiki-translation platform where verse or prose could be tweaked until a consensus was achieved (or interest dissipated)?

(That's actually the basic principle behind Google Translate but that's a closed system where changes are integrated only gradually.)

Alas, however, such a "convergence-oriented" method would not account for the well made point that translations can have different functions and audiences.

Matthew Stavros
www.mstavros.com
www.pmjs.org

[The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 legalizes warrantless
wiretaps on US citizens. Messages sent to or from this
account (mstavros) may be under surveillance.]

[Stephen Miller]

Marc,

Again, I find your distinction between audiences troublesome. Why shouldn't an
academic audience want to be read a "creative" translation in a scholarly text?
Is it because "creative" automatically connotes (denotes?) "inaccurate" or
"unscholarly?" I'd love to read some "creative" translations of Japanese poetry
in a scholarly work. It might actually make the text about the poems more
interesting to read.

My partner taught in the English department at a prestigious four-year college
for two years where the creative writers hated the scholars and the scholars
hated the creative writers. I've heard about this kind of thing before, but if
you think about it there wouldn't be anything for the scholars to do if there
weren't creative writers. Yet we can hardly say the opposite is true. I'm not
disparaging scholars (I am one!), but I'd like to see us all enjoy reading
literature (that is, creative writing) much more than many of us seem to. (That
last comment was not targeted at you--Marc--at all!) Imagine what would happen
if we all started smiling again while we read?

Stephen

I think it's important to know what the target audience is. If you're
translating in an academic setting for people who speak Japanese or
are otherwise interested in the way the original "looks" (syntax,
etc.), then a translation that sticks to that would be better. But if
you're translating for poetry lovers, then I think you'd be doing a
disservice to the audience by not attempting to convey the beauty of
the original. After all, it's a beautiful poem. Can a boring

translation be considered faithful to the original?

--

[Edward Lipsett /t]

on 09/11/24 10:30, Stephen Miller wrote:

> I find your distinction between audiences troublesome.

I don't believe the key issue here is audience, but goal.

If the poem is being translated to analyze and discuss the structure of the
Japanese, the usage of specific word forms, or other essentially
non-translatable issues, then the translation should, indeed, be as literal
as possible... Which usually means pretty boring. The translator would have
to make every effort to avoid injecting any interpretations of his or her
own into the translation, although it might be necessary to discuss possible
interpretations perceived by a Japanese reader.

If the goal is to translate a Japanese source into English for enjoyment, as
literature, then the task is quite a bit different. The translator must not
only understand the range of possible interpretations of the source,
including those fuzzy feelings you never find in the dictionary, and come up
with a way to express them fluently in English, without a plethora of
footnotes and in such as way that the reader can absorb the experience
without stumbling, without having to consciously dissect the English. In
short, it should give the English reader the same effect of the source gives
a Japanese reader.

IMHO the former is a scholarly task demanding a set of skills quite
different from the latter more creative task. Neither is "better" than the
other; they are different products created for different goals.

--
There is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal
sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality
that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was
such a child.
- Anna Fadiman, "Ex Libris"
--
Edward Lipsett
translation€@intercomltd.com
www.kurodahan.com

[Marc Adler]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Royall Tyler <ty...@alpaca-s.com> wrote:

> NO

My feelings exactly!

[Stephen Miller]

Edward,

It seems to me that when people use the phrase "literal translation" they mean
word for word translations. And whenever a translator selects one particular
word in the target language to represent a word in the source language, she is
making an interpretation. So that is unavoidable from the start. Moreover, it
doesn't seem impossible to discuss a Japanese poem using a more "creative"
translation: presumably the Japanese text is available somewhere (maybe even in
the scholarly study we're imagining), and it makes more sense anyway to discuss
a Japanese poem in terms of the language in which it's written rather than in
terms of the language you're using to translate the poem. In the end, I don't
think there's any difference between an audience or a goal. By picking an
audience, you've picked the goal. What I'm suggesting is mixing the two
audiences/goals. It's not like this hasn't been done before, but the problem is
the lack of respect it engenders in the academic community. I'm not saying that
everyone must do this--only that we should loosen up about what I think is a
vexing and inhibitive binary.

Stephen

I find your distinction between audiences troublesome.

I don't believe the key issue here is audience, but goal.

If the poem is being translated to analyze and discuss the structure of the
Japanese, the usage of specific word forms, or other essentially
non-translatable issues, then the translation should, indeed, be as literal
as possible... Which usually means pretty boring. The translator would have
to make every effort to avoid injecting any interpretations of his or her
own into the translation, although it might be necessary to discuss possible
interpretations perceived by a Japanese reader.

If the goal is to translate a Japanese source into English for enjoyment, as
literature, then the task is quite a bit different. The translator must not
only understand the range of possible interpretations of the source,
including those fuzzy feelings you never find in the dictionary, and come up
with a way to express them fluently in English, without a plethora of
footnotes and in such as way that the reader can absorb the experience
without stumbling, without having to consciously dissect the English. In
short, it should give the English reader the same effect of the source gives
a Japanese reader.

IMHO the former is a scholarly task demanding a set of skills quite
different from the latter more creative task. Neither is "better" than the
other; they are different products created for different goals.

--

[Marc Adler]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Stephen Miller <smi...@asianlan.umass.edu> wrote:

> Again, I find your distinction between audiences troublesome.  Why shouldn't an
> academic audience want to be read a "creative" translation in a scholarly text?

I'm not saying academics are lifeless pedants, immune to the beauty in the things they study. I'm just saying that in an academic setting, people are generally aware of the original in some way -- they can read it, they can figure it out, they speak a similar language -- or they're looking for something specific. One example that comes to mind is Miguel de Unamuno being told that it was impossible to write beautiful poetry in agglutinative, head-final languages (like his native Basque). Someone wanting to refute this (not that anyone believes it today) could study haiku and waka because it's exactly the head-final-ness of Japanese that makes possible effects such as 蛙飛び込む水の音 (a normal modifying clause with the head at the end) or the even simpler 鉄棒の一回転の花の空. Or maybe I should say deceptively simple.

Either way, my point is that in an academic setting, people are generally interested in the actual structure of the language, so a translation which strays from that would be less useful.

古池や蛙飛び込む水の音
Attic fen / the smooth amphibian glances quick / burble-burble-burble

This isn't going to be helpful to someone who wants to know something about the function of 切れ字 in Basho's oeuvre. Do you see what I'm saying?

But when the professors have all punched the clock and headed home, they can ignore all that stuff and enjoy whatever they want.

> Is it because "creative" automatically connotes (denotes?) "inaccurate" or
> "unscholarly?"  I'd love to read some "creative" translations of Japanese poetry
> in a scholarly work.  It might actually make the text about the poems more
> interesting to read.

Sure, but as the Japanese say, you gotta know your "TPO." Whatever is most effective for achieving the object is what should be used. You've probably seen this kind of thing:

[old-pond] ya [frog]-subj. [jump-in]-past pred. [water]-no-[sound]-mod. head (or whatever)

In some cases, this translation might be suited best to the situation.

> literature (that is, creative writing) much more than many of us seem to.  (That
> last comment was not targeted at you--Marc--at all!)  Imagine what would happen
> if we all started smiling again while we read?

Everyone would benefit from reading a little poetry now and again.

[Edward Lipsett /t]

on 09/11/24 12:36, Stephen Miller wrote:

> It seems to me that when people use the phrase "literal translation" they mean
> word for word translations. And whenever a translator selects one particular
> word in the target language to represent a word in the source language, she is
> making an interpretation.

Interpretation exists within a language too, of course... Just take a look
at how much has been written about Joyce <g>. You are obviously correct
about any rephrasing, whether within a language or between languages,
incorporating new meaning.

I never have been clear exactly what "literal translation" might mean... It
strikes me a pretty close to a contradiction in terms.

[Noel Pinnington]

Well, there clearly are different goals in translations of poetry with at least the following possible polarity:

1. To create a poem in English that has as similar as possible an aesthetic effect on a modern English speaking reader as the original poem might have had on a contemporaneous reader in the original language.
2. To create a gloss in English, which indicates just what was said substantively in the original poem, without any attempt at aesthetic effect.
   

Example: A translation that refers to cryptomeria – no one can visualize it (except someone with a special knowledge);
A translation that refers to cedars – creates a similar mental image to some degree, but is inaccurate.

Another possible goal:
    3. To make implications perceived by the informed reader explicit for the general reader:

Example: translation by Brower and Miner in Classical Japanese Poetry – surely very far from what goal 2 might produce, as well as goal 1 (for some of the aesthetic effect lies precisely in not making associations, allusions, etc. explicit).

Of course I am not saying that any of these goals can be fully realized. (Sorry if this is all old hat). But I do not see how it is possible to combine these goals equally in translations of Japanese traditional poetry into English. How would you combine implicitness and explicitness? How would you combine accuracy with familiarity? How would you combine “the order of images” with normality of grammatical structure and “weight”?

Noel

[Stephen Miller]

Dear Marc and Noel,

Marc's remarc: "Either way, my point is that in an academic setting, people are

generally interested in the actual structure of the language, so a translation
which strays from that would be less useful."

In response to this, Marc, I'd say that if scholars are using "the structure of
the language" to derive meaning, that's fine, but obviously that's not the only
source of meaning. You can analyze a poem to death structurally, but that will
not help convey the aesthetic affect of the poem.

I really like the "attic fen" translation, by the way.

Noel's remark: (1) To create a poem in English that has as similar as possible

an aesthetic effect on a modern English speaking reader as the original poem
might have had on a contemporaneous reader in the original language.

(2) To create a gloss in English, which indicates just what was said

substantively in the original poem, without any attempt at aesthetic effect.

To think that a translator could possibly know what the aesthetic effect on the
original reader was is just hubris. But, on the other hand, hubris is what
leads all of us to translate in the first place. I can say, however, that I
would never presume to know what sort of effect a poem could have had on any
given reader at any given point in history. There are too many variables--both
known and unknown. I think the same thing can be said about glosses that I said
about translation in general: they too are interpretations. A gloss will never
get at "just what was said substantively in the original poem" because a poem
speaks in a number of ways. Yes, you can say that a given word means X, but X
is probably just one choice among others. The translator can also line up the
words to examine the syntax--either for her own edification or for others'. If
the translator does it for herself, that's good investigative (and interpretive)
work. If a translator does it for others, it's still good investigative (and
interpretive) work, but you risk reducing (probably for tenure) your readership
to a small number indeed.

One answer to all these problems may be found in the Tendai doctrine of the
three truths (santai): on the one hand you have the absolute creative truth
bumping heads with the quotidian scholarly truth (not to belittle the
scholarly!), but what would be ideal is if we translated within the existential
boundaries of the third truth, or "chu," the middle way, keeping both hats on
our head at the same time that we hold a pen or type on a computer. Another
risky endeavor indeed!

Stephen

[Marc Adler]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Stephen Miller <smi...@asianlan.umass.edu> wrote:

 

In response to this, Marc, I'd say that if scholars are using "the structure of
the language" to derive meaning, that's fine, but obviously that's not the only
source of meaning.  You can analyze a poem to death structurally, but that will
not help convey the aesthetic affect of the poem.

Totally agreed. My only point is that translations can be modified to suit purposes. As Noel said, though, you often can't make a translation work on many levels. That's the trick of the translator's art, though.
 

I really like the "attic fen" translation, by the way.

Thanks. Look for it in the December issue of the American Journal of Off-the-Cuff Translation Parodies Written as Exaggerations for Purposes of Making a Point. (It's obscure, but I think JSTOR has it.)
 

To think that a translator could possibly know what the aesthetic effect on the
original reader was is just hubris.  

This is a list about pre-modern Japanese, so I'm assuming you mean this in the context of pre-modern Japanese writing, but in modern writing knowing the effect on the audience in the original language (I was going to say "intended audience" but the example of Haruki Murakami muddies those waters) is not only possible, it's a prerequisite for translating.
 

[TEMcAuley]

On Nov 24, 5:54 am, Noel Pinnington <no...@email.arizona.edu> wrote:
> Well, there clearly are different goals in translations of poetry with at
> least the following possible polarity:
>

> 1. To create a poem in English that has as similar as possible an aesthetic

> effect on a modern English speaking reader as the original poem might have
> had on a contemporaneous reader in the original language.

> 2. To create a gloss in English, which indicates just what was said

> substantively in the original poem, without any attempt at aesthetic effect.
>
>

> But I do not see how it is possible to
> combine these goals equally in translations of Japanese traditional poetry
> into English. How would you combine implicitness and explicitness? How would
> you combine accuracy with familiarity? How would you combine “the order of
> images” with normality of grammatical structure and “weight”?
>

Noel is right, of course – you cannot combine all of these goals
equally. Instead, you need to rephrase the questions into: what
priority do I give to implicitness/explicitness, accuracy/familiarity,
‘order of images’/grammatical structure? The answers will be
determined by goal/target audience of the translation, and will help
the translator decide what combination of foreignising, or
domesticating, strategies he/she uses to produce it.

The emphasis in the discussion so far, though, has been on the
translation of Japanese poems – as individual items – but I think we
also need to consider strategies in the translation of Japanese poetry
– as a whole – particularly if we want to aim for something like
Noel’s (1). Leaving aside the fact that the pursuit of ‘equivalent
effect’ as an aim in translation – particularly when dealing with
premodern texts – has been largely discounted in translation studies
as it’s considered impossible to measure (if you’re dealing with a
Heian waka, without a Heian aristocrat to ask, you have no way of
knowing what ‘effect’ it had on original readers, or how that effect
was reached), the fact is that readers of the originals didn’t
encounter just a few poems – they read thousands and would have
written hundreds themselves – and surely part of the pleasure would
have been the familiarity that generated. To put it another way, while
there’s no doubt there are individually superb Japanese poems, much
of the joy comes from seeing how the single poems relate to each other
and their topics, and a waka that can seem trite, or banal, in
isolation becomes a familiar friend in a collection or longer
sequence.

Deciding on strategies for how to attempt to give readers in English,
who don’t have the background knowledge, and (probably) won’t be
reading that many waka, or hokku, a similar sense of familiarity and
connection with the poetry, is one of the knottiest challenges in
translating it – if one wants to attempt that, of course. For myself,
in my 2001 Waka (http://www.temcauley.staff.shef.ac.uk/poems.shtml)
I’ve increasingly aimed at being consistent in translations of
commonly re-occurring phrases, in the hopes that readers will
recognise the commonalities between individual poems as they read
through. I don’t claim it to be an ideal strategy, but it’s one way of
dealing with the problem.

Finally, returning to equivalent effect, we need to remember that waka
were fun, just as much as they were serious art, and put that across,
too. Reading and translating the Roppyaku-ban Uta Awase as I am at the
moment, I’m struck by the teams arguing with each other in their
comments (http://www.temcauley.staff.shef.ac.uk/waka3097.shtml),
Shunzei making facetious remarks in his judgements (http://
www.temcauley.staff.shef.ac.uk/waka3014.shtml), or expressing pure
pleasure (http://www.temcauley.staff.shef.ac.uk/waka3113.shtml), which
just shows how much they enjoyed their poetry – and if our
translations don’t do the same for our readers, then they fail. It’s
certainly do-able, though, I had an email out-of-the-blue from one of
the subscribers to my waka translation mailing list after I started
posting the Roppyaku-ban Uta Awase translations saying, ‘I just wanted
to let you know how much I am enjoining this series especially with
the comments from each side. I like it so much that I have started a
tanka contest in my own group and I can tell you it is such fun.’ From
translation, to the recreation of an uta awase – in Florida, I believe
– what translator could ask for more?

Thomas McAuley

Dr Thomas E. McAuley
National Institute of Japanese Studies
School of East Asian Studies
University of Sheffield

E-Column: Thoughts on Japan (http://www.eltnews.com/columns/
thoughts_on_japan/)
Part of the White Rose East Asia Centre: www.wreac.org

[Noel Pinnington]

Dear Stephen,

Of course, no one would claim to know the aesthetic effect on a
contemporaneous reader - even at the time, for as certain teachers of
literature tirelessly point out, every response is individual. And, as
Dickens strikingly evokes in the opening scenes of Tale of Two Cities, the
experience of any mind is always hidden from all other minds.

Still, for me, this is like the question of historic truth, one cannot know
fully what happened in history, or even conceive of what it might be like so
to know. But still to abandon the goal of truth in history, is to make a
nonsense of what historians do. In fact to abandon fidelity to any kind of
cultural fact, is to abandon assumptions that day in and day out underpin
how we live. When we say to a student that his translation is wrong (for
example when he misreads -keri in a poem as a pluperfect) - that is based on
an ideal of fidelity to correct meaning in translations.

There are, indeed, a lot of variables, and discoveries to be made all the
time, but still it is not appropriate to abandon the goal of fidelity.
Beyond the literal meanings of the words we also need to consider their
connotations. If you discover, for example, as I did, that "ume no hana" was
widely used in the Kokinshuu period to refer to a common recipe for the
incense used to steep aristocratic clothing, and then you notice that that
fact sheds light on a number of poems about ume no hana, then you try to
reflect it in your translation if you are any good. If you import some
western association with plum-pudding in to your poem, however, then you are
a wilfully bad translator.

Similar things can be said about aesthetic effect, although I grant you the
issue is more difficult. You cannot just ignore it. An example in this case
is the use of wordplay. Quite clearly, when the poet said: "kasumi tachi /
kono me mo haru no / yuki fureba..." it had a positive aesthetic effect. At
least the room was not full of the groans, mock vomiting, etc. that welcomes
punning in English literary circles.Even with a tolerant reader, "The mist
forms, and the tree buds spring out, and when spring snow falls" is going to
be felt to be inelegant at the very least. So we have to weigh up the
question of what might produce an appropriate or as close as possible
equivalent aesthetic effect in English. Some people have thought "well, word
play of that sort does not work, let us try rhyme, which often plays a
similar role in English verse (ie giving a feeling of inevitability of
connection between things that are not connected objectively)." But, of
course, now, rhyme for many people sounds childish. Alliteration is probably
a better bet. Hence Rodd's version:

"When the warm mists veil all and buds swell / while yet spring snows..."

"Swell" and "spring snow" ties together quite well.

One cannot just ignore the aesthetics of Japanese poetry in its time, and
one surely can aim at a translation that is true to those aspects, however
difficult it might be.

Such an aim, however, is surely going to conflict with certain other aims in
translation - for example, a student audience is going to need to know that
"haru" is used twice, in each case with a different meaning. The need to be
explicit about that might override the inelegance of a translation that
attempts to preserve polysemy.

Noel

[Michelle Li]

---

Hello Everyone,

Does anyone have the current address of Professor Ikegami Jun'ichi (formerly of Kobe U)?

You can send me it directly: jiayim...@sbcglobal.net

Thank you!

Michelle

[Adrian Pinnington]

I would like strongly to agree with Noel's view here, but put it in a slightly different way. Although there is no one right way of translating a poem, this surely should not be taken to mean that there are no wrong ways of translating it -- just as the fact that there are infinite possible descriptions of the world does not mean that all descriptions are correct. If this were not the case, then we would not even be talking about the same poems. I am often struck by the way in which Japanese scholars of all periods appeal to notions of logic and plausibility when deciding not only the meaning but also sometimes the very texts of poems, notions which usually also make immediate sense to me. Conversely, when I am puzzled by what a poem says, often I find that people in other periods have also been puzzled by it. If we can understand what 'translation studies' tells us, surely we can also understand what poems tell us. In fact, I think most people when discussing translations distinguish between what are questions of taste (for instance, the beauty or otherwise of the language used) and what are questions of interpretation,
 
Adrian Pinnington  
 
> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:01:30 -0700

> Subject: Re: [PMJS] translating Japanese poetry

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[pollack]

> Although there is no one right way of translating a poem, this
> surely should not be taken to mean that there are no wrong ways of translating

> it.

I learned this lesson early on, as an undergrad in Ch'en Shih-hsiang's course on
Chinese Poetry at UC Berkeley. We knew Gary Snyder had taken the course some
years before. We were working from Tang Shi San Bai Shou and we had all prepared
our first translation, of Li Bo's quatrain "Night Thoughts." A simpler task
would be hard to imagine. After listening patiently to all the translations,
Ch'en allowed that most were accurate and passasble, "But none is as good as
Gary's version," he continued. "Why?", we demanded. "Because Gary is a poet, and
you are not," he replied. And he was right. I've always been painfully aware of
the difference.

David Pollack

[TEMcAuley]

How best to judge the quality of a translation is a particularly
thorny area. Juliane House, in her ‘Translation Quality
Assessment’ (1997) gives a good survey of the various different
approaches and points out some of the problems with each, before
proposing a formal linguistics-based model for assessing translations,
which, while effective after a fashion, is highly cumbersome to apply
and operate. Her key criticism of the various approaches is that they
almost all tend to focus on one narrow feature of translation – the
relationship between translator and text, the relationship between
recipients and text, defining translation quality with
intelligibility, etc., and so fail to take account of all of the
elements involved. There’s also a good deal of judgement based upon
‘expert opinion’, which is highly subjective.

A further point is that there’s a difference between judging the
quality of an individual translation of a text, and assessing the
merits of competing translations of the same text. The latter is the
more difficult, because apart from in highly artificial situations –
students all translating the same text at the same time – when dealing
with different translations of the same text one is almost never able
to compare like with like. The target audience, and in some cases
culture, goals and strategies of the translator are likely to have
been different, resulting in a different translation product. Under
such circumstances, it’s problematic to characterise one translation
as ‘better’ than another.

To take a Japanese example, how can we compare Royall Tyler’s
towering, superbly informative Genji translation, with Arthur Waley’s
literary, romantic version? Which one would British readers in the
late 1920s, looking for a fantastic escape from the mundane realities
of depression prefer? Does Tyler’s text ‘work’ as an introduction to
Japan and Japanese literature to a ‘Western’ audience completely
unfamiliar with it? Obviously, the answers to these questions can
never be known for certain, but one can speculate that readers in the
inter-war period simply wouldn’t have been ready for a translation as
highly foreignised as Tyler’s is, and would not have accepted it.

The problem is compounded with poetry, as responses to it and
judgements about it are highly subjective. Take these translations of
Emperor Tenji’s tanka from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu:

Coarse the rush-mat roof
Sheltering the harvest-hut
Of the autumn rice-field;
And my sleeves are growing wet
With the moisture dripping through.

Out in autumn fields
stands my makeshift hut of grass-
its thatch so rough
that the long sleeves of my robe
are always wet with dew.
(Carter, 1991, 206)

In the harvest field
gaps in the rough-laid thatch
of my makeshift hut
let the dewdrops in,
but it is not only dew
that wets my sleeves
through this night alone.
(McMillan, 2008, 3)

Here we see progressively greater domestication taking place, with the
first translator retaining 37 syllables in English to match the
Japanese original and having 5 lines to match the 5-7-5-7-7 pattern,
the second simply has 5 lines, and the third abandons that pattern and
also inserts material to draw out some of the implied content of the
original. (I also seem to recall reading some translations of tanka
which were written as a single line, to match the way they are
textually presented in Japanese, but can’t lay my hand to the source
at the moment.) Which translation is ‘better’, though? Is one of them
‘right’ and the others ‘wrong’?

Personally, I dislike McMillan’s translation – I think it’s over-
interpreted and in its concern to explicate the implied content, it
denies readers the opportunity for their own response and
interpretation – but I have to acknowledge the validity of his
translation strategy, and of course, his work has been highly feted. I
could pick at the other versions, too – we all could, I’m sure – but
objectively all are valid translation products, consistent with the
translators’ strategies and appropriate for their audiences.

Thomas McAuley

[Amy Heinrich]

Hiro Sato translates tanka in one line; has done so for a long time, in
many publications, starting with (or at least since) *From the Country
of Eight Islands,* translated with Burton Watson, published in 1981.

/amy heinrich

TEMcAuley wrote:
>
> On Nov 24, 11:34 pm, "pollack" <poll...@mail.rochester.edu> wrote:
>>> Although there is no one right way of translating a poem, this
>>> surely should not be taken to mean that there are no wrong ways of translating
>>> it.
>> I learned this lesson early on, as an undergrad in Ch'en Shih-hsiang's course on
>> Chinese Poetry at UC Berkeley. We knew Gary Snyder had taken the course some
>> years before. We were working from Tang Shi San Bai Shou and we had all prepared
>> our first translation, of Li Bo's quatrain "Night Thoughts." A simpler task
>> would be hard to imagine. After listening patiently to all the translations,
>> Ch'en allowed that most were accurate and passasble, "But none is as good as
>> Gary's version," he continued. "Why?", we demanded. "Because Gary is a poet, and
>> you are not," he replied. And he was right. I've always been painfully aware of
>> the difference.
>>
>
> How best to judge the quality of a translation is a particularly

> thorny area. Juliane House, in her �Translation Quality
> Assessment� (1997) gives a good survey of the various different

> approaches and points out some of the problems with each, before
> proposing a formal linguistics-based model for assessing translations,
> which, while effective after a fashion, is highly cumbersome to apply
> and operate. Her key criticism of the various approaches is that they

> almost all tend to focus on one narrow feature of translation � the

> relationship between translator and text, the relationship between
> recipients and text, defining translation quality with
> intelligibility, etc., and so fail to take account of all of the

> elements involved. There�s also a good deal of judgement based upon
> �expert opinion�, which is highly subjective.
>
> A further point is that there�s a difference between judging the

> quality of an individual translation of a text, and assessing the
> merits of competing translations of the same text. The latter is the

> more difficult, because apart from in highly artificial situations �
> students all translating the same text at the same time � when dealing

> with different translations of the same text one is almost never able
> to compare like with like. The target audience, and in some cases
> culture, goals and strategies of the translator are likely to have
> been different, resulting in a different translation product. Under

> such circumstances, it�s problematic to characterise one translation
> as �better� than another.
>
> To take a Japanese example, how can we compare Royall Tyler�s
> towering, superbly informative Genji translation, with Arthur Waley�s

> literary, romantic version? Which one would British readers in the
> late 1920s, looking for a fantastic escape from the mundane realities

> of depression prefer? Does Tyler�s text �work� as an introduction to
> Japan and Japanese literature to a �Western� audience completely

> unfamiliar with it? Obviously, the answers to these questions can
> never be known for certain, but one can speculate that readers in the

> inter-war period simply wouldn�t have been ready for a translation as
> highly foreignised as Tyler�s is, and would not have accepted it.

>
> The problem is compounded with poetry, as responses to it and
> judgements about it are highly subjective. Take these translations of

> Emperor Tenji�s tanka from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu:

> textually presented in Japanese, but can�t lay my hand to the source
> at the moment.) Which translation is �better�, though? Is one of them
> �right� and the others �wrong�?
>
> Personally, I dislike McMillan�s translation � I think it�s over-

> interpreted and in its concern to explicate the implied content, it
> denies readers the opportunity for their own response and

> interpretation � but I have to acknowledge the validity of his

> translation strategy, and of course, his work has been highly feted. I

> could pick at the other versions, too � we all could, I�m sure � but

> objectively all are valid translation products, consistent with the

> translators� strategies and appropriate for their audiences.
>
> Thomas McAuley
>

[Marc Adler]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 5:52 AM, TEMcAuley <t.e.m...@googlemail.com> wrote:

 

Personally, I dislike McMillan’s translation – I think it’s over-
interpreted and in its concern to explicate the implied content, it
denies readers the opportunity for their own response and
interpretation

But isn't that only because you know the original?  Translation is done for the benefit of people who don't know the language, after all. I don't think it's fair to compare the translation to the original that way. The most important thing is the aesthetic effect on the reader of the translation (unless the goal is analysis, as has been discussed above), and of the three versions you posted, the last one works best for me. The first two sound like translations of haiku. The last one sounds like poetry.

[robin d. gill]

Dear Prof McAuley,

 

The amount of material you and your classes offer at a totally open site is admirable.

Thanks to it, I discovered a waka poet with  some subject matter good for Mad In Translation

and the subsequent Reader, Sanekata. What a lady's man and wit!

 

I am sorry not to have time to discuss the various possibilities for translation

-- it all goes into my books 100% of which you may see at google books,

but let me put one Sanekata poem here that made it into the smaller of those books

(the large one has many), the translation of which you may compare with yours.

 

ama no to o waga tame ni to wa sasanedomo ayashiku akanu kokochi nomi shite 

 

Heaven's Portal

was for my sake left ajar

But odd to say

I'm still far from through

longing for you come day

 

In retrospect, I think I should have made it "wanting you" rather than "longing for you" in that last line (for he seems quite the Casanova), but I would stand by the ajar though I know "unbarred" would be accurate. More important, however, is that I explained the "akanu" pun in case a reader fails to get it from my "still far through" which was why I made it ajar.  Contradicting what I wrote in the first paragraph, I will make one comment about translation: catching the wit and either translating or explaining it, or, better yet both, comes first, in my opinion.

 

Please keep going with that website!　And, I cannot recall, but if you do not already have a place for outsiders to make comments/suggestions/corrections re individual poems (eg. I believe the central pun was not picked up on in the case of the above poem), please make that, too, possible!

 

敬愚

 

robin d gill

 

 

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