Levy on Lady Kasa

MYS 0597-0600
As Translated by: Ian Hideo Levy: The Ten Thousand Leaves (1981)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

[The portions of these translations corresponding to the thematic line "koi-wataru ka mo" in Lady Kasa's set of twenty-four poems are here shown in red for easier technical comparison].

MYS 0597 (#11)
(7 + 10 + 2 / + 7 + 11, unrhymed)

This world is thick with men's eyes,
and so I must go on longing for you,
my Lord,
though you are as near to me
as the spaces in a bridge of stepping stones.

MYS 0598 (#12)
(7 / + 6 + 7 + 7 + 3 + 3, unrhymed)

One may die from longing, too.
Like the hidden current
in the Minase River,
unperceived, I grow thinner
with each month,
with each day.

MYS 0599 (#13)
(8 + 7 / + 7 + 6, unrhymed)

Though we only saw each other
dimly through the morning mist,
I go on longing for you,
so much that I shall die

MYS 600 (#14)
(5 + 5 + 8 / 2 + 7, unrhymed)

I go on longing
for one as fearsome
as the waves on the Ise Sea
that break
and set the rocks to roaring

The original cadence lines occur at various places in these versions, but never at the end. In two of the three cases (#11, #14), the end is occupied instead by physical detail. This may be a literary preference (it was part of the Imagist credo that physical detail is more poetic than personal statement). Or it may be a nod at #12, which does end, dramatically, with a clock ticking in increasingly small ticks. Some readers may be tempted to wonder if #14 owes something to previous efforts with Horace's eloquently decorative "quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare" (Carmina 1/11:5), so hard to visualize, and, once visualized, so hard to get down on paper without overbalancing the rest of the poem.

Whatever the reason, it is a fault not to end where the original poet ended. The last line of a poem is the final statement of its poet. Joseph Kerman (in Opera as Drama) gave the secret of how to find one's way through a complex poetic structure: "In opera, we trust what is done most firmly by the music." Care should be taken to do the poet musical justice at the end.

And if convenient, perhaps at the beginning also. The conventional epithet "utsusemi no" ("like a locust husk," referring to Buddhist ideas of the transience of this world), with which Lady Kasa begins the first of these four poems, should not overbalance the main statement, but it might be allowed to contribute to the main statement a sense of the open and conventional world, in contrast to her own intense and unacknowledgeable passion.

 

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