[Omitted in the NGS selection]
MYS 600 (#14)
(8 / + 4 + 5 + 8, unrhymed)Oh how steadily I love you -
You who awe me
Like the thunderous waves
That lash the sea-coast of Ise!Waley, in his Notes on Translation, deals graciously with this NGS selection of a thousand poems excerpted from the more than four thousand poems of the Manyôshû, though he rather cattily attributes its "excellence" to the presence of an English poet, Ralph Hodgson, on the committee. The sponsoring institution translates its own name as the Japan Society for the Promotion of Scientific Research (we would rather have said, Advancement of Learning). We might pause to consider what sort of embassy to the English-speaking world it was officially hoped, in the tense year 1940, that such a translation would represent.
Approached from that angle, it may be that the suggestion of impropriety ("people's eyes") doomed #11, and that the threat of love suicide ruled out #12 and #13. If so, it perhaps becomes intelligible that in #14, which did make get into the published volume, a violent and unrequited love has been reduced, in translation, to a faithful and respectful admiration.
That translation illustrates how the materials of a Japanese poem, if considered as a series of adjectives modifying a final noun, can wind up inverted in English. This puts the thematic line in which we are interested, and with which Lady Kasa cadenced her statement, at the top and not the bottom of the one poem they did bother to include. When the NGS people get through, there is little left of the poem, and next to nothing of the series of poems. This perhaps does not count as a conspicuous achievement in the advancement of learning.
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5 Dec 2002 / Contact The Project / Exit to Lectures Page
