Poetry

There is a lot to say about translating poetry but I basically agree with all of what we read. And there were nice tips like starting with an accented syllable, and preserving flow. But I'm just going to nitpick and quibble, mostly about the haiku discussion.

After taking Professor Vincent's haiku class, I love haiku. Janine Beichman actually came up in that class, too. But I felt unconvinced by some of her suggestions/points.

"Keene’s emendation of “I sing only in one breath” to “I sing on one breath” is really beautiful. Such tiny changes can make or break a translation."

What? To me, Keene's edit seems almost ungrammatical. I'm sure tiny changes can sometimes make or break a translation, but the example was bad to me.

I loved the Ishihara Yatsuka haiku that she introduced: 黒凍みの道夜に入りて雪嶺顕つ. But I think Beichman calls way too much attention to the 'break' between 黒凍みの and 道. It feels pretentious, like the kind that makes some people (e.g. past-me) not like poetry. First of all, as she says herself there is no physical line break in Japanese, so doing so in English overpronounces it in my opinion. 

black frozen

road going into night

a snowy peak stands out

"the eye and ear are forced to leap over white space at the end of the first line, giving a sense of distance conquered that subtly suggests the way the road itself runs on into the darkness."

No way! I don't get that at all and if you say you did when you read that haiku I don't believe you. If I had to give my own analysis of why it is written like that, I'd say 1. because primarily haiku sometimes forces that kind of construction and 2. secondarily, to make the reader sit with the cold of the first line for half of a half of a second before continuing, which does justify preserving it in the English, I think.

"The words themselves become a ribbon of blackness moving ahead, black on black. Then, just when we have started to adjust to the unfamiliar push and pull, harmony is restored by a syntactically normal line, and the whole is resolved into the unitary image of the white snowy peak rising out of the dark."

More of the same. I feel like this kind of analysis makes people hate poetry because when they don't experience the same thing, they feel like they are stupid and/or poetry is stupid. Sorry, but the haiku is just not doing all of that without retroactive over-analysis.

Also, the phrase 'stands out' in the translation was kind of disappointing to me because the Japanese ends with an interesting irregular kanji usage that gets almost ignored. Of course it's very hard to translate, but I feel like using the word 'prominent' might've been nice.

Joey