Takeda 1
A Word’s Power: The Additional “Snow” in a Japanese
Pre-Feminist Poem’s English Translation
Noriko Takeda
Hiroshima University, Japan
1. YOSANO Akiko’s cherry blossoms poem
The modernization of Japanese lyricism was executed
principally by a Japanese female poet named YOSANO Akiko. Her
first collected poems were given the general title Midaregami
(Tangled Hair) and published in 1901. As is suggested by the
dramatic title, Tangled Hair, Yosano’s collection inaugurated
a powerful voice for symbolically expressing the sensibility
of Japanese individuals under waves of global modernization.
With meaningful words such as “stars,” “fans,” and “blossoms,”
her first collection emits an enlightening force with the
potential--or at least an engaging illusion--to dissipate any
imposed limitedness.
At the time Tangled Hair was published, Japanese
modernization was being propelled by the government in the form
of drastic Westernization. The official reformation had formally
started with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Restoration set
up a capitalistic society within the framework of a
constitutional monarchy, and thus negated the traditional feudal
system. The old regime based on agricultural communities had
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existed for about 700 years, officially since 1192, under the
hegemony of succeeding Shogunates, i.e., Generals, who held real
power in place of the symbolic emperor.
The aesthetic vehicle for conveying the Japanese psyche
under the feudal regime was the 31-syllable waka, i.e., Japanese
song. The waka represents the matrix of the 17-syllable haiku
that was shaped as a poetic genre in the early Edo period
(1603-1867). At the publication of Yosano Akiko’s collection,
the waka had also enjoyed a history of domination in Japanese
literature for around 1,000 years; the first court anthology,
entitled Kokin waka shu and established in about 913, authorized
the waka as a primary instrument for transmitting the Japanese
mind. The millennium of dominance includes the epoch of ancient
monarchy that decided upon the waka’s elegant conventions around
the imperial court, before the inception of the military regime.
The restricted form of 31 syllables simulates Japan’s small land
to be cooperatively cultivated by communal groups of rice
croppers. The minuscule poetic form was actually not monopolized
by the aristocrats; according to Anthony Thwaite, the waka was,
and still is, “a poetry for everyone” in Japan for recording
everyday sensation (xxxvii). Haruko Wakita delineates the waka’s
popularization all over the country during the feudal period
(132). Professionals or amateurs, the old poets were nonetheless
required to follow the waka’s conventional demand for
aristocratic elegance. Prestigious but democratic, the waka
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symbolized imperial power coming from one privileged family,
which was ascribed to a source of divine if naturalistic
sunlight.1 The country of a restricted size is based on a natural
fusion and equality.
Yosano Akiko’s modern/modernist originality resides in an
idiolectal innovation of the traditional waka, which was renamed
tanka, meaning short song. Her reformation revivified the waka
in codified classicism with a diversified coloration as seen
in luminous expressions such as “my surging blood” and “To whom
should I speak / Of the color of crimson.”
Yosano’s new tanka poems mobilized, in fact, a fresh
vocabulary in the conventional 31 syllables. Though keeping the
old waka’s syllabic framework, the female poet broke up the rule
of the elegant waka that had strictly limited the number of usable
words.2 She was successful in conveying the new women’s liberated
feelings with provocative words such as “breasts,” “skin,” and
“blood.” The poet even presented an audacious shot of the
author-speaker’s naked body, though under a translucent veil
of aestheticism based on figurative indirectness--for example,
the comparison of the speaker’s female body to oceanic waves.
Through Yosano, the traditional waka in a monochrome
sentimentality was changed into an active body with stimulations.
The waka was transformed from a shadowy sign of arbitrary
conventions to an individual body as “objet” for transgressive
signification. The transgression should be ascribed to the female
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poet’s critical insight into the feudal system’s oppression and
exploitation, resorting to the community’s natural tendency for
egalitarian fusion. Any sense of oneself is opposed to the
collective identity. For the poet, the women to be enhanced by
her poetry represented a symbolic group of scapegoats set for
the alleviation of communal pressure, even if its effect is
temporary. The women continue the cycle of absorption and
production. In a sense, just like Prometheus, the female poet
desired to appropriate all the ubiquitous sunlight into her
illuminating language for a new societal connection; she is
equally a symbol of communal oneness. The equalizing sunshine
needs to shift from top-down to bottom-up, symbolized by the
tangled hair coming from Yosano’s female speaker. The protesting
poet must be legitimated as a feminist, though her challenging
poetry was published before the currency of the concept
“feminist” in Japan.3 She remarkably contributed to a catharsis
of the Japanese society by the individualistic scrambling with
her energetic tanka poems. Her first tanka collection, Tangled
Hair, “was an immediate sensation and sold an unprecedented
number of copies for a book of poetry” (Keene 24). The wonderful
collection is, however, not a heavenly gift to a solitary genius;
it is an anticipated fruit of the efforts of the poetic reformers
including Yosano Akiko’s teacher and partner, Yosano Tekkan.
The collection’s success owes much to Tekkan’s creative editing.4
The volume, Tangled Hair, bursts with the combined 399 tanka
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poems, each of which is exclusively self-assertive,
paradoxically within the identical framework of 31 syllables.
From another angle, Yosano Akiko’s collection of 399 short tanka
pieces constitutes itself as a unified long poem modeled on
Western works. There existed, in fact, a group of her contemporary
poets who abandoned the waka’s syllabic framework to create a
new-styled long poem under a direct influence of Western models.
Until the conscious reformation of Japanese poetics triggered
by the 1868 Restoration, the poetic domain of the country was
shared by the waka, designated as “song,” and the kanshi as “poem”
(Seki 8); the kanshi represents the works written in classical
Chinese by intelligentsia.
Yosano’s new art is kaleidoscopic, reflecting the ethos
of the time. Her long if crystallized first collection, Tangled
Hair, can be summed up by a suite of single words such as “passion,”
“protest,” “overheat,” “redness,” “explosion,” and
“positivity.” The individual words simulate each tanka piece,
the collection’s general title, “Tangled Hair,” its six chapters
named “Enji-Murasaki (Crimson-Purple),” “Ship of Lotus
Flowers,” “White Lily,” “Young Wife of Twenty,” “The Dancers,”
and “The Spring Thought,” as well as the author-speaker’s
distinctive self that is subjectively and naturalistically
endeared by herself in the modern individualistic consciousness.
One of the representative poems that symbolize the positivity
of the Yosano collection’s euphoric--that is, individual and
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collective--world is as follows:
淸水へ祇園をよぎる櫻月夜こよひ逄ふ人みなうつくしき
My literal translation of the above poem is:
Passing the town of Gion to go to Kiyomizudera temple, I have
found all the pedestrians beautiful in the moonlight which comes
through cherry blossoms in full bloom.
From another angle, the above positive poem grotesquely
distorts all the faces of the pedestrians; from a conventional
point of view, all of them could not easily become “beautiful”
without some sheer miracle which does not appear to be mentioned
in the poem. The seemingly-exaggerated humanism is not, however,
imposing nor irrelevant; the energy of the speaker’s joyous
celebration is sublimated into a transcendental light from the
cosmic body, i.e., the moonlight coming down onto earth for the
pedestrians through the nightly flowers. Prevailing in Japan,
the cherry flowers have embellished and consecrated the
springtime. Simulating the lachrymal Madonna, the flowers in
a whitish color tinted with pink represent one of the most beloved
symbols in the old waka. The poet Yosano reinforces a divine
power, by combining the cherry blossom’s influential power and
the seraphic moonlight. The poem’s central word, “櫻月夜” (the
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night with the moon and cherry blossoms), is of the poet’s coinage,
fusing the moonlight and the flowers in one word form. The
suggestive place names, “淸水” (“Kiyomizu”) and “祇園” (“Gion”),
help to strengthen the cosmic power drawn into the central word
linking the blossoms and the moon. “Kiyomizu” indicates the place
around Kiyomizudera temple, famous for its magnificent platform
set up on a steep mountainside, whereas “Gion” corresponds to
a representative town for seeking pleasure and liveliness.
Expressed by the full-fledged Chinese ideograms, the place names
embody a source of miraculous potential for completing the
cosmos.
The culminant heavenly light is caught by the walking viewers,
including the author-speaker herself whose glances send the
assimilated/reflected light back into the sky. The advancing
poem is a symbol of salvation, and the salvation eternally
circulates; the earthly pedestrians absorb the divine beauty
of the transcendental light, and the absorption endlessly
continues in a cyclical give-and-take. Fundamentally, in that
encircling and thus unifiable world, everyone reasonably becomes
beautiful. The circular movement is confirmed by the ending
adjective “うつくしき” (“beautiful”); the adjective is
ungrammatically in a form to be connected to substantives, thus
iteratively referring back to the preceding word for pedestrians,
“人.” The author-speaker’s apparently-outrageous admiration for
the pedestrians only causes the readers some sense of pain. The
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pain emerges from the reader’s sympathy with the young female
speaker’s struggle for salvation by making the most of the waka’s
strong convention; she is courageously trying to break up, or
rather, complete the waka’s small framework of authenticity.
“I” and “We” are both cooperative and conflictive, just like
idiolect and sociolect.
2. H. H. Honda’s English translation with the additional “snow”
In an English translation of the above poem, nevertheless,
the apparently negative word “snow” is found. This is
antagonistic to the Yosano original’s absolute positivity which
is based on the eternity of spring beauty. Decisively, the word
that directly corresponds to the word “snow” cannot be found
in Yosano’s original work. “Snow,” hence, arouses suspicion;
is it the negative term intended to innovate the Yosano original’s
overdetermined picture in its full spring-ness? Or, has the
translator just ironically interpreted the young author’s
apparently-optimistic tribute to everyone? The translation by
a Japanese male scholar, Heihachiro Honda (1893-1973), is as
follows:5
The cherries and the moon, how sweet!
So are the folks this night I meet,
As I to Kiyomizu go
Through Gion bright with lovely snow.
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At first reading, the conclusive word “snow” must be taken
as only additional. The extra word spoils the completeness of
the Yosano original with its freezing fatality. As a symbol of
the flamboyant collection, the poem represents a cheerful
applause to the spring cherry blossoms, as well as to the common
viewers, all of whom are extolled to be “beautiful” from a
humanitarian/feminist point of view. Placed at the ending, the
comprehensive adjective “beautiful” is a synonym of “immortal.”
The minus image of the temple and the night is engulfed by the
conclusive qualification for explosion. In the translation’s
restricted framework, consisting only of four rhymed verses,
the additional word “snow” that designates winter at the ending
of the whole text easily draws the reader’s attention in a negative
way; the word pushes him/her into a different world of Japanese
conventional transience. The deathly “snow” appears to deny the
Yosano original’s delightful world which challenges societal
restrictions. The extra word also seems to damage the crystalline
form of the translation itself that embodies a four-cornered
world; taking a square shape, the text consists of four verses
in tetrameter, reinforced by the sensually-animating adjective
“sweet” with an exclamation mark.
The seemingly far-fetched word “snow” may not be rejected
as a bad or wrong translation, nonetheless, once the Japanese
original’s intertextual connection with one of A. E. Housman’s
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poems is revealed. The revelation occurs, indeed, through the
intermediary of Honda’s translation with the very far-fetched
word “snow.” The word itself is poetic and suggestive. Without
any title, but numbered as II, the Housman poem is in A Shropshire
Lad (1896), connecting “the cherry” in full “bloom” to “snow.”
The text is as follows:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Various features common and essential to both the above English
poem and the Honda translation of Yosano’s Japanese original
can be immediately recognized: both are based on four rhymed
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lines in tetrameter, both end with the word “snow,” both the
texts’ second-to-last lines are awkwardly terminated with the
intransitive verb “go,” and in both poems the cherries are
embellished by “snow,” as well as qualified by the adjective
“lovely(-loveliest).” The unstable line-stop by its ending verb
without a direct object produces a harassing up-and-down melody
that entangles silence: “I will go / To see. . . .” The abrupt
tone is characteristic of the Housman poetry, adding to it a
refreshing modernity. John Sparrow indicates Housman’s naïve
and thus all the more charming wording in his introduction to
the Collected Poems of A. E. Housman in the following comment:
“[Housman’s poems] express a few unsophisticated moods in a few
pronounced and simple rhythms” (10). In his translated work,
The Poetry of Yosano Akiko, which includes his apparently
far-fetched translation with the word “snow,” H. H. Honda does
not mention the Housman poem. Nevertheless, the evident
similarity between the Housman poem and the Honda translation
makes the reader think of the two texts’ intertextual connection
without difficulty; precisely, the connection represents an
influence of the Housman poem (published in 1896) on the Honda
translation (published in 1957). The oldest Japanese translation
of A Shropshire Lad in a book form which includes Housman’s cherry
poem dates back to 1940; the translator is Tatsuzo Hijikata (3-4).
Furthermore, after the Second World War, which ended in 1945,
it may not have been difficult to read the Housman poem’s original
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in English because of the resumed internationalization in Japan.
According to Hatsue Kawamura (224-25), the translator Honda was
versed in English poetry as a teacher of the language at some
Japanese universities. The English poem may well be considered
his translation’s model.
An apparent reason for H. H. Honda’s connecting of the two
original poems is that the Japanese poem’s summarizing word may
be “love,” whereas the English poem begins with the word
“Love(liest),” insinuating the speaker’s affection toward the
cherry, the poem’s vegetal heroine. Incidentally, Honda
designates the Japanese poet as “A Poetess of Love” in the
introduction to his translated work which includes the
translation with “snow,” and the poet’s cherry blossoms piece
in question is one of her representative humanitarian poems.
On the other hand, the Housman poem’s primary symbol is the white
cherry blossoms, representing purity, while the Japanese poem
begins with the ideogram “淸,” signifying purification. Another
reason is that the English poem represents a triple form in three
stanzas, each in four verses, as if containing three separate
texts; according to Hatsue Kawamura, Honda thought that a tanka
poem should be translated into English as a four-line verse (227).
The four lines remind one, indeed, of the waka’s syllabic division
into five parts. The English poem’s Trinitarian form may have
suggested to Honda the playful connecting of the two original
poems by his own translation that may equally be viewed as a
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creative and original work. His playfulness can also be detected
in the contrast between the Japanese original’s first word “淸
水,” which literally means “pure water,” and the translation’s
final word, “snow,” representing a wintry form of water. It is
more conceivable that the Honda translation should have been
modeled on the Housman poem than that the translation might have
respectfully followed the Yosano original.
3. The poetic Trinity
With scrutiny, however, it is revealed that H. H. Honda’s
seemingly far-fetched translation indicates an unnoticeable but
essential connection between the Yosano original and the Housman
poem, presumably without a relationship of influence. The two
texts’ formal features are too distinctive to suspect any direct
interaction between them.6 The Honda translation suggests,
nonetheless, three kinds of accidental but fundamental
commonalities concerning the two original poems. First, the
Housman poem’s latent syllabic structure, that is, 32 syllables
in the first two stanzas and 31 syllables in the final stanza,
is closely connected to that of the Japanese waka in 31 syllables.
Second, the two poems’ mutual theme may be summarized as follows:
“Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may.” The Japanese poem enhances
a precious moment of passing blooming in springtime, whereas
the English poem foregrounds the speaker’s will to live out his
privileged moments; the moments are symbolized by the white
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cherry blossoms in this transient world. According to B. J.
Leggett (Land 12-15), among 63 lyrics of Housman’s A Shropshire
Lad, the lyric II on the cherry flowers specifically emphasizes
the “transience which characterizes existence” (Land 12), a
strong motif of A Shropshire Lad. Different from the English
poem whose transient theme is evident, the Japanese poem almost
completely dissimulates a hint for inconstancy with its dazzling
flamboyance. It is the Honda translation that turns the reader’s
eye to a minimal shadow of transience in the Japanese poem. Since
the pedestrians are all mortal, the speaker prays for their
eternal beauty. The distance between Honda’s English translation
and the Japanese original is, hence, longer than that between
the translation and Housman’s English poem, even though the
length is suggestive and cathartic.
Third, the two original poems share an obsession of
calculation: Housman’s 12-line verse in the triplex four-line
stanzas takes the speaker-author’s reckoning of his age as its
central part, whereas the Yosano poem is based on the author’s
syllabic count superimposed on the poem speaker’s recognition
of each pedestrian’s face. The two texts’ obsession for
arithmetic is preserved by the Honda translation that is made
up of the symmetrical four rhymed lines, in eight syllables each.7
The emotional reckoning leads to that of the flowers and of the
people born in this world. The reckoning represents an inveterate
desire of the modern self wishing to be endlessly expanded,
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dissipating the self’s existential dilemma as an isolated whole.
It also embodies an incantation for privileging this passing
moment and one’s mortal self.
In traditional Japanese poetics, the ambivalent cherry
flowers symbolize the evanescence of human life, and especially
that of feminine life, while simultaneously celebrating the
rebirth of springtime. An old court lady named Ono no Komachi,
who was renowned for both her poetic talent and physical beauty,
wrote the following waka: “The lustre of the flowers / Has faded
and passed, / While on idle things / I have spent my body / In
the world’s long rains” (Bownas and Thwaite 84). In the old waka,
the word “flower(s)” (“hana”) exclusively designates cherry
blossoms. The popular flowers still retain a symbolic status
in Japan. On the other hand, Yosano’s poem, the original of the
Honda translation, competitively emphasizes the living force
of cherry blossoms, by calling them “sakura.” “Sakura” is the
cherry flowers’ specific name, with the morpheme “saku” meaning
“bloom.” The poet keeps the uniqueness of the cherry blossoms
that live their prime, without dissolving them into a floral
generality represented by the unifying term that designates all
the flowers, “hana.” Yosano’s cherry blossoms even use death
for life, as with T. S. Eliot’s “Lilacs” in “the cruellest month.”
In contrast, cherry blossoms have not constituted a thematic
topos in Anglo-American poetry. The white flowers are not
Christian symbols. In A Concordance to Milton’s English Poetry,
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the entry of “cherry” is not seen. According to A Concordance
to the Writings of William Blake, the poet mentions the cherry
fruits, but not flowers (327). The English cherries for red fruits
are different from the Japanese flowering cherries for blossom
viewing (Suzuki 68). A. E. Housman’s cherry poem may be viewed
as a riposte to the natural beauty of cherry fruits developed
in the Romantic tradition, concretized by William Wordsworth
as “Feasting at the Cherry Tree” and “Is red as a ripe cherry”
(Cooper 133).8 Housman’s Victorian poem seeks for an originality
of the unnoticed white flowers and their exoticism. The flowers
are, in fact, ambivalent; they represent life and death,
spirituality and physicality, heartiness and skinniness, bridal
veil and winding sheet, or virile power and virginal potential.
In the Trinitarian 3-stanza verse, the English poet
foregrounds the transience of white flowers that is connected
to the “Eastertide” spirit from the tradition of Christianity.
The word “Easter” includes, however, the pagan “East.” The new
religious symbol, the white cherry blossoms, is an
ironically-reversed version of the full-grown red fruits, the
metamorphoses of Eve and Adam’s red apple. It may be possible
to trace the Japanese waka’s influence on the ambiguous Housman
poem presumably through various English translations which were
available at that time.9 In A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E.
Cirlot, “the cherry-tree” is classified into “Chinese symbology”
(350). The newly developed flowers are, however, chastely
Takeda 17
harmonious with the English lyrical tradition. The purified
whiteness leads to the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s
celestial beauty. It can be suspected that Housman’s flowery
whiteness is shadowed on Ezra Pound’s representative Imagist
poem “In a Station of the Metro” (1916): “The apparition of these
faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The Pound
poem shows a trace of influence from a Japanese haiku poem (Brooks
and Warren 71-72). Shropshire’s cherry flowers blooming in early
spring with an image of snow may be an apparition, or imaginative
invention of Housman; according to John Bayley, the poet “had
never spent much time in Shropshire, and that the details in
his poems were ‘sometimes quite wrong’” (3). Incidentally,
cherries and roses belong to the same botanical family.
H. H. Honda’s translation with “snow” embodies a condensed
fusion of the Yosano original and the Housman poem. The hornlike,
obtrusive word “snow” is a foregrounded sign which condenses
the three poetic works, including the rhymed translation. The
“extra” word is, in fact, symbolic, inviting the reader into
an ever-growing world of imagery and concepts.
It should be affirmed that, under a heap of forwarding
presence, the Yosano original conceals a shadow of winter snow.
The Yosano poem refers to the beauty of spring, thereby finally
reaching the contrastive winter. Nevertheless, in the poem’s
overall vividness supported by the individualistic flower name
“sakura,” the reader’s evoked image of dead winter is slight
Takeda 18
and temporary. The momentary image pinpoints, however, a
traditional Japanese sense of beauty summed up by the compound
word “snow-moon-flower”（“雪月花”）. The word symbolizes the
seasonal beauty of the hilly but oceanic country, Japan,
psychologically nuanced by the Shintoist/Buddhist notion of
transience. Moreover, the word posits the seasonal division as
dissoluble, suggesting a Japanese tendency for overall fusion
enhanced by the Yosano original. From another angle, Yosano’s
modern compound, “櫻月夜,” may be viewed as the poet’s conscious
revision of the old one, “雪月花.” Keeping the traditional waka’s
syllabic framework, the Yosano poem conceives at its depth a
long history of Japanese classicism. The
intralingual/intertextual basis embodies a fertilizing
springboard for Yosano’s poetics of unexpectedness, optimism,
and salvation. The Honda translation has supplied a clear image
of snow to the Yosano original, so that the original reveals
a popularized beauty of “雪月花” (“snow-moon-flower”). A
translation is generally an interpretation of the original work
which indicates the original’s potential of signification, as
is suggested by C. S. Peirce.10 The Honda translation’s additional
word “snow” is the peak of a verbal pyramid onto which the poetic
Trinity sublimates itself.
4. A poem as a flowering word
From a word, a cosmos of imagery blooms, as is suggested
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by Stéphane Mallarmé (368).11 In making a syntactical sequence,
the language user easily recognizes that a single word, as a
formal and semantic unit, has an endless potential of
signification, depending on the combined words. A single word
makes no sense, or rather, means everything. On the other hand,
a poem represents a unified form of semantic parallelism and
may thus be viewed as a development of a single word. The notion
of the poem as a word is also presented by Jurij Lotman,12 based
on Roman Jakobson’s following thesis: “The poetic function
projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection
into the axis of combination” (27). Jakobson suggests that a
poem is only a succession of the equivalent words. A poem’s
semantic parallelism owes much to the formal and semantic
repetition characteristic of the poetry genre, and contributes
to the condensation of each poem to be reduced to a single word
in the reader’s interpretative consciousness based on linguistic
knowledge. The typical shortness of poetry, which is indicated
by E. A. Poe, also pushes a poem into an isolated world/word
of unity.13
As for Yosano’s original poem, it may be viewed as a flowering
expansion of the single word “love,” whereas A. E. Housman’s
English poem can be considered a development of the word “passion”
in the double meaning of love and suffering. The Housman poem
is numbered as II, using the coupling number, and the symbolic
white flowers are pregnantly ambiguous, contrastively evoking
Takeda 20
bloody scenes along with the suspicious expressions “Is hung,”
“score,” “little room,” and “hung with snow.”
The function of the translated word “snow” is multilateral;
the apparently extra word should be counted as a summary of the
two original poems--the Yosano tanka and the Housman poem--while
simultaneously claiming the importance of translation, this
indispensable medium of communication and understanding. It also
emphasizes that a literary text’s basis is no other than a word,
exemplified by the symbolic “snow” for eliciting totality. The
“snow” in overall appropriation refers to the
incessantly-growing territory of poetry as the interactive
combination of the author’s original writing and the reader’s
re-creative interpretation as indicated by William Empson. In
his Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson accepts the reader’s
compensating “invention” as “the essential fact about the
poetical use of language” (25). The invention corresponds to
“a mental need for sense-giving configuration” (Valdés 6). The
crystallizing/foregrounded word “snow” may also be recognized
as a comprehensive poetic form, i.e., a complete poem. At least,
the word represents an intertextual and thus melting node of
the three related poetic works.
In this transient but encircling world, real snow represents
a seed of spring, or rather, a crystallization of spring. In
the same vein, the extra word “snow” designates the powerful
if paradoxical advancement of the pre-feminist Yosano Akiko’s
Takeda 21
world of fullness; the ironical word is endowed with ontological
positivity as a verbal form, despite its concept of fugitiveness.
The circular/sunlit world’s struggling advancement was for the
reformation of the conventional waka under a prevailing impact
of Western models. Though fictional, language has also the force
to change this real world that concurrently affects and
stimulates language. As a translation of the spring in the image
of erupting water, the saturated word “snow” conclusively, if
temporarily, symbolizes a maternal repository of powerful
creativity.
Notes
1
Before the end of World War II, the imperial family was
traced back to the ancestral goddess representing the sun
(“Amaterasu omikami”).
2
For the waka’s limitation of its vocabulary, see Kawamoto
85-87.
3 Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair initiated the feminist movement
in the following liberalist era, Taisho (1912-26). The poet’s
influence is clear in the symbolic expression of the movement’s
manifesto: “Once women represented the sunshine” (“Seito”).
4 According to Kumi Okina (23), Tekkan may have been concerned
with the order of the poems and the selection of titles.
5
The translator’s first long name, Heihachiro, is
abbreviated as H. H., perhaps simulating the Western combination
Takeda 22
of first and middle names.
6 To date, I have not seen any indication of a possible literary
influence between A. E. Housman and Yosano.
Concerning the Housman poem’s second scholarly stanza,
7
B. J. Leggett states that “There is more attention to arithmetic
than to feeling here” (The Poetic Art 48).
8 Tomio Suzuki indicates Shakespeare’s usage of cherry fruits
(66), to which Housman’s flowery image may be traced back.
9
For the Japanese waka’s translations published by English
scholars in the 19th century, see Kawamura 71-171.
10
David Savan indicates that “according to Peirce,
interpretation is translation” (17).
11
In his “Crise de vers,” Mallarmé states: “Je dis: une
fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour,
en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus,
musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous
bouquets” (368).
12
See Lotman 86-87, 165, 168, and 185.
13
For further discussion on a poem as a word, see Takeda
11-17.
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Takeda 26