cover art for midaregami by takeji fujishima (1867-1943)

I love the English language. I would happily spend the rest of my days studying it, learning all the ways to bring it to life, putting words and phrases together in ways that inspire and incite powerful imagery.

However. Sometimes the language just cannot offer what it needs to.

For my senior project at university, I’m translating a book of Japanese poetry, Midaregami. It was written in 1901 by a Japanese woman named Yosano Akiko (she’s such a badass ohmygod i love her), with several of the poems written about the love affair that she had with a man (that she actually ended up marrying; the woman knew what she wanted). Some of the lines are so beautiful. Her voice and language bring so many emotions and images. Something interesting about Japanese poetry (specifically tanka - you know how haiku is 5-7-5? Tanka is 5-7-5-7-7) is that about half of it is directly about nature, whereas the second half is more about the self or whoever the “subject” of the poem is.

Here are some examples (my own translations, mind you):

ゆあみする泉の底の小百合花二十の夏をうつくしと見ぬ

The parts of the poem are “taking a bath,” “lily,” “pond bottom,” “20 years old,” “summer,” “see beauty.”

My translation:

Such as you would a lily

Lying in the deep of a spring,

As I lie in the bath

You see the beauty of twenty summers

In me

As you can see, here is an occasion where English language suffices well. What the English language can offer is able to be made as beautiful as the original poem is. Mind you, I only gave you the parts, not how she spins them to be poetry.

Now here is an example where English cannot suffice:

春よ老いな藤によりたる夜の舞殿ゐならぶ子らよ束の間老いな

I’m going to describe this poem with the imagery it provides. The first five characters are basically her begging the spring season to “not grow old.” For it to stay. The next six give the image of something or someone leaning into wisteria blossoms, and with the next four characters, you get the setting, that this is at a kind of court dance, set into the evening. It gives off a very festive and wistful vibe. The next six characters describe children, sitting in a line. Are they the ones leaning into the wisteria? The last six characters of the poem are about a small period of time, but I cannot for the life of me actually figure out if that last oina (that’s how the last three are pronounced) is the same as the first, as in “don’t grow old” or if it’s a poetic device describing how time is older or the children are older, or I don’t even know what. Regardless, this is how I attempted to translate it:

Spring, don’t go

Leaning into wisteria

This night with music divine

The children all sit in a row

For a moment frozen in time