Discussions of poetic form and shape tend to be really fascinating to me, and this introduction to Japanese literary history was no exception. In a Japanese-to-English translation setting, with so many elements to consider (sound, rhythm, meaning, tone, context, point of view), the appearance of the poem on the page might be the hardest to preserve. Juliet Winters Carpenter talks about how tanka are almost always a single line of vertical text, and how even Machi Tawara’s choice to employ breaks within the tanka was experimental and noteworthy. Carpenter uses a three-line format that reduplicates the original brevity, but I wonder what is lost when the poem is no longer a single column. Somehow (maybe due to the lack of space between units?) Beichman’s translations look a little better to me. But because I have no familiarity with Japanese characters, maybe I’m overthinking shape…
Also, wow! Basho was such a boss! It’s so exciting to me that, across the centuries, his poems still work so beautifully:
Dried salmon,
the gauntness of a Kūyu pilgrim
in the cold season
Just amazing.
Also amazing is that Yosano Akiko wrote upwards of 50,000 tanka. I wonder how scholars decide which entries to focus on for translation. It seems impossible to pick. “O, My Little Brother” is an obvious choice given its popularity and how stunning it is (I teared up hearing it read), but it makes me think about other poems that are lying dormant in the annals of her oeuvre.
Finally, this is a bit of a side note, but in my own writing and reading of poetry, I tend to enjoy unexpected, unfamiliar words, and how they present opportunities for curiosity, and how they contribute to a sonic landscape. As such, I’m selfishly excited about all the new terms this class has already added to my lexicon (kigo and kireji, haibun and haiga and haigon), and I hope that trend continues.
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