I managed to catch a cold somewhere during the last week, and now that all the birthday happenings are done with it seemed to get it's chance to try and take me down. The only effects of the said cold on me are a somewhat fuzzy head and a runny nose, but the latter is somewhat of a problem in Japan. For some reason, it's unpolite to blow your nose in public. I've seen people leave the table with a tissue in their hand and go to the toilet to do it, and nothing is more disgusting than sitting in a cafe trying to read, or even worse, eat something, while in the table next to you someone wearing a mask tries to avoid the horrible deed of blowing his nose to the last while sounding like ... *shudder* I don't even know what to call it, but it sure makes me want to go and offer a tissue to the poor soul with sinuses full of slime. If I'm with a sensei or in a similar situation, I try to act "properly" and disappear for the unmentionable act of blowing one's nose, but if I'm only in class, in the subway... Frankly, couldn't care less.
It would be of course a problem during zazen, but I still think I'll go tonight, if this doesn't get worse during the day.
What I meant to write about yesterday, but didn't have the time to edit to a readable form (as I said, my thinking isn't at it's clearest), is that I got into a conversation with my poetry class teacher about translation of japanese poetry and whether it's possible or not.
First of all you have to know that I'm most certainly not into poetry, and have never been. Usually I don't even like to read poetry. And even though I like to read books, including fiction, I'm not that much into "literature" as such. Translations of japanese literature were certainly not the reason I went to university to study japanese. It was simply because I didn't get any better ideas at the time and decided to take the entrance exam, since "Japanese Studies" sounded interesting. At least I could spend the year there figuring out what to do, if I even got in in the first place. (I had studied some japanese in the high school and done some kendo, but they certainly weren't enough of a reason to really REALLY push me into my studies - I just knew I didn't want to go to the University of Technology where the others from my class were going. It's actually surprising how well this subject came to suit me in the end...) Given that I've certainly done a fair amount of literature studies, but it certainly isn't my main interest - it's just something I have to do to get a better picture of the period, and to get my quota of credits full (and it's more interesting that politics and business studies). *g* I just can't ignore the literature and it's role in society. So, after reading this warning about my un-poeticness, take anything I have to say about poems and translations with a handful of salt.
It just seems to me that there's 2 kinds of extremes for translations - those that are accurate (sometimes to the point of being boringly explanative), and those that are nice to read but lose half of the content. It's even more apparent when translating classical japanese court poetry that at it's best/worst is full of pivot words, double meanings and manage to do it all in 5-7-5-7-7. You can either explain the poem and all it's meanings, or then you can try to make a nice poem out of it. Not both at the same time. What makes translating japanese court literature different of translating, say modern literature, is the fact that the literate society was much smaller and homogenous, and they were in the habit of really cramming the text full of allusions and playing with words in order to show off to others who, having memorized exactly the same poetry collections, could understand from a word and a half a whole scale of associative emotions. You might say that there is a "western literature" (about which I actually disagree - there might be an anglo-american one, but it certainly doesn't include us other western countries, like, say, most of Europe), and that there are a number of allusions inside it that are hard to translate. Fine, you might do it in footnotes, as many translators do (and I for one do think that poems might need footnotes too - it's because I never understand them without explanations). But if you have a japanese poem of 5-7-5-7-7, in which there are 3 double meanings, making it actually 2 different poems that you need to read simultaneously together and only then you get the full picture... How are you going to get that into something that resembles the original for both the meaning and the poetic beauty?
You could say "who cares as long as the reader enjoys the experience", but still, I think it's kind of sad that the interplay of the words just disappears. We read 7 translations of one poem by Ono no Komachi, and none of them had it all. Of course not all of the poems are as difficult to translate than that one, but still... I'm not saying that poetic translation is impossible, just that it's more difficult than some other kinds of translations. And anyways my view on translating things is somewhat pessimistic, I guess, maybe because I'm not too keen on translating myself (even though some people see translating as the only possible reason for wanting to study a foreign culture). I will probably have to translate at least as a part of research - but I don't see myself translating literature as such, for all the reasons given above.
I leave the translating to my friends who are better at it. Now I just need to figure out how to make a living of this thing...
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