On Aiming High and Falling Short
Each morning, my first task after eating breakfast and feeding the cat is to translate one of Yosano Akiko’s tanka into English. Tanka are 31-syllable poems; they are similar to haiku, except they have 14 more precious syllables. The haiku syllable pattern is 5-7-5, tanka is 5-7-5-7-7.
Akiko’s tanka are notoriously difficult to understand. She was a lover of Japanese and Chinese classical literature, and as a child taught herself to read and understand works that literary scholars spend careers trying to master. She weaves phrases from these ancient stories into her tanka in a way that is both beautiful and maddeningly obscure. Imagine reading a modern poem, only to find that it is laced with archaic words and references to Chaucer, Beowulf, or the Iliad. Native Japanese speakers struggle to decipher her poems; numerous books attempt to untangle and interpret them. Few of them agree word for word. What hope do I have?
As my husband was getting ready to leave for work this morning, I rushed past him to find a book that might help me with the morning’s task.
“You know,” I said, “I really could have chosen an easier topic for myself.”
He said that Samuel Johnson, the author of an influential dictionary published in 1755, would have sympathized. I did not understand what he was talking about, so he pulled out his phone, looked up the passage he had in mind, and read it aloud to me (bold text emphasis is mine):
To have attempted much is always laudable, even when the enterprize is above the strength that undertakes it: To rest below his own aim is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little. When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus enquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them. (Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Dictionary, 1755)
This is why I love my husband. (It is one reason, at any rate; I also love how he cooks fresh pasta with pesto and mushrooms.) He can pull all kinds of random but brilliantly apt knowledge seemingly out of the air.
With this book project, I am trying to interpret Yosano Akiko’s tanka accurately and bring her poetry to life for a 21st century, English-speaking audience. I am not always going to get it right. Sometimes I will post a tanka without knowing what some of her words mean. Sometimes I will be mistaken. I am feeling my way.
Modern poet Tawara Machi has translated some of Akiko’s tanka into modern Japanese. Some academics criticize her translations as loose, even sloppy. She misses some of the personal context and classical references, they say. Tawara Machi believes, however, that Akiko wouldn’t have wanted her to dwell too long on scholarly minutiae. She writes that she can almost feel Akiko next to her while she is translating, saying, don’t think about it too much, go with your gut, go with your heart.
And so, I will try, and I will fail, but I will have a wonderful time, and I will share many beautiful things with you. I would like to think that Akiko—and perhaps Samuel Johnson—would be okay with that.
