ALICE MAJOR

I worked with Yukari Meldrum to translate a number of poems by Mizuzu Kaneko, a beloved Japanese poet, that we published in a small book called Shell of Moon and Sun. It was my first – and so far only – experience of the complexities and challenges of bringing a poem from one language into another. Translators face this all the time. But for a unilingual poet like me, this opportunity was a privilege. It made me think more closely about what goes into any poem.​

​​

 

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

Working to recreate these poems in English made me very aware of the three separate strands that must be braided together in translation—and, in fact, in the writing of any
poem.
 

Meaning, sound, and context

​

First and obviously, there is rendering the meaning of words—not simply their literal meaning, but their nuance and emotional connotation. Then there is the attention to sound: what kind of patterns does the original poem make, and how can you echo them? Finally, there is the context, the world in which the poem was created.
 

For me, this was an opportunity to learn a little bit about the structure and poetic traditions of a language that is so very different from my own. Misuzu’s poems were
composed by a very young woman from a world that was beginning to vanish. She was born in fishing village in a remote part of Japan, a world of sea-related ceremonies, temple bells, and a belief system amalgamating Shinto gods and Buddhism.

 

She also stood at the cusp of change in the 1920s, where she could begin to connect with a new urban community of writers and editors but where she could be married off to a man who would forbid her to do so.
 

These poems have a special fragrance, a gentle pot-pourri. They come from a particular time and place that seems both distant and close: a seaside town in the early part of the twentieth century, rituals of fishing and temple, a child hearing scraps of conversation, a culture that valued restraint over turmoil and adventure. (The closest thing I can think of in English literature comes in the narrative viewpoint of certain
novels by Jane Gardham).

 

Pulling a whole world through a keyhole
 

As translators, we are trying to create a braid strong enough to pull this whole world through a keyhole. To do so, we pondered numerous choices of phrase and diction. For

instance, we wanted to incorporate the details of Japanese culture without making them overly exotic; in the original, these details are simply part of everyday life. So, for example in "The Memorial Service for Whales," we translated ‘haori,’ (a kind of formal clothing worn over a full-length kimono-like garment on special occasions) as “good jackets over kimonos” because ‘kimono’ is a term that is familiar enough in English and still carries the sense of Japanese culture in the translation.
 

Misuzu’s poems were not written in the classic forms of Japanese poetry—they are often looser, more ‘modern’ in shape—but they preserve the traditional underlying beat of 5-7-5 syllables, an unconscious counting that tells the listener that language is being used in a special way. We chose not to try to replicate the syllable count of lines, since syllables in English are defined much less clearly and consistently than in Japanese. We retained features like stanza lengths and overall shape, with Misuzu’s line indentations. But often we turned to the closest equivalent to the 5-7-5 pattern in English poetry, which is the iambic rhythm of stressed/unstressed syllables that creates the heartbeat of poetry in this language. And, although Misuzu’s poems are often considered ‘for children,’ we did not turn to the common English convention of rhyming used in verse for young readers.

 

Writing poetry for children was taken seriously by well-established, highly regarded authors. The voice in her work may often be child-like, but it is never childish. Her poems are for wise, observant children, who may be occasionally and quietly rebellious but are conscious (in a very Japanese way) of the duty not to burden others—flowers that do not want to make a bee feel badly by shedding a tear-like drop of dew. They are children who empathize with the whale-child whose parents have been caught by fishermen. They notice the dreamy light on roof- tops.

 

Careful choices
 

We made many careful choices as we tried to braid the three strands of emotional significance, sound and context. As just a few examples:

In "Memorial Service for Whales", the word ‘koishi’ is an adjective in Japanese which cannot be translated directly into English. It expresses a full range of strong emotions, a longing for someone who is not present or far away. We might have used a term like ‘heartbroken’ but that didn’t approach the direct simplicity we needed. This is a child’s experience of loss, so we used “I miss you,” and depended on the context provided by the narrative situation to give the words their impact.
 

"Benten Island" is a small narrative from the child’s point of view. Rather than trying to stick to the literal translation, we tried to convey her feelings closely as possible. The third stanza starts with “Uso da, uso da,” which literally translates as “It’s a lie, it’s a lie.” What might an English-speaking child say? We thought that a direct expression of “No! No!” would fit here well to express how worried this child was feeling – a pure sense of denial.
 

Japanese often use onomatopoeic expressions, and in this poem, too, we have one: “dokidoki” in the fourth stanza. This is a sound of the heart beating. Luckily for us, there is an almost-exact English equivalent, “thumpety-thump”.

 

In "Sails", the colours “kuro” and “shiro” can be literally translated as “black” and “white.” However, the binary opposition of black and white is too harsh and carries too many other connotations in English. Misuzu’s original suggests that the sails have been blackened, or dirtied, in the course of their lives through many journeys, so we decided to use “dirtied sails” instead of “black.”

​

A glimpse through a window

 

The very last line of "Hanazura" in the original is “minna mukashi ni narimashita” which literally translates into “all have become past.” The original line sounds as if it is the end of the tale, pulling the curtains down at the end of the play. To convey the strong emotion that something has actively been lost, we translated the lines as “time […] has taken all away.” In "Stars and Dandelions", the fourth line of the original is “hiru no ohoshi,” which literally means “daytime stars.” Our translation as “stars in the sun” gives the pleasure of alliteration in English, but also echoes the fact that the word for “day” in Japanese (“hi” or “nichi”) is represented by a character that incorporates the concept of sun.

The main work of translation was carried out by Yukari, who brought her own native understanding of Japanese speaking patterns and culture. I simply brought my own experience of poetry in English to help. It was a privilege to do so. In that process, this small collection of translated poems became, for me, a glimpse through a window, beckoning. As Kaneko Misuzu wrote:

There must be something, something
further along this road.
Everyone, everyone, let’s go down this path.

​

You can buy Shell of Moon and Sun on Amazon.