Mr. Donuts Musings

Yet another installment in things that come out of Nicholas' brain:

So Tawara avoids excessive explication; there isn't a single note in her text to explain why it is one poem was translated this way and that one another. all the reader has to go on is Tawara's stated intention that she wishes to communicate something of the poem's 匂い (nioi) to the kind of reader who may not be familiar with intricacies of poetry written in the classical style. yet, with this ignorant audience in mind she gives nothing but Akiko's verses and hers with little to link the two besides the mere fact of proximity and little to distinguish whose is whose besides the fact one is written in literary Japanese and the other isn't.

おもひおもふ今のこころに分ち分かず君やしら萩われやしろ百合

鉄幹を思う心に差はなくて君が晶子か我が登美子か

thinking/yearning now in my heart I'm wondering/doubting
whether you're the white clover and I the white lily...

with Tekkan in my heart and no clear state of affairs,
are you Akiko, and am I Tomiko?

So bare, so spare, so evenly matched this translation, this modernization if you must pedantically insist, interrupts and intrudes upon its original. there is nothing here to defend Akiko from Tawara's insistence via nudity that one can be reasonably equated with the other: no notes to reveal what Akiko might have had in mind, no annotations to give the lie to what Tawara has perpetrated, no third voice in the text (with the possible exception of the ignorant reader) to make sense of what has transpired in the maddening silence of an otherwise blank page.

Tawara takes the tabloid writer's approach to revelation. having saddled herself with the artificial constraint of re-presenting Akiko's 31 syllables with 31 of her own, she has little recourse but to name outright those people whom Akiko has concealed beneath the elaborate floral vocabulary that runs throughout the Midaregami. of course, Tawara can't necessarily be faulted for making use of nearly a century of scholarship that revealed long ago how the word "white clover" stands for Akiko, "white lotus" for her husband Tekkan, and "white lily" for her friend Tomiko, whose amorous relationship with Tekkan has peaked the interest of more than one literary historian. Tawara can be forgiven, then, for naming Akiko and Tomiko for the benefit of Our ignorant reader, as their floral counterparts do make an appearance. but the inclusion of Tekkan's name is suspect at best. The subject of おもひおもふ is not explicit; is Tawara trying to read Akiko for us? what is an ignorant reader to do? what if not knowing was the point all along? Tawara provides her reader with no consistent guide through this morass as 3 poems later she decides to keep the floral nomenclature intact. it is possible Tawara intends to make up for her fit of yellow journalism by pointing to the literal use of these words on top of their figurative usages. Though in the following poem, she reverts back to naming Tomiko outright.

The elegists were not the first to veil the amorous objects of their poetry (be they direct or indirect), but with them the practice became relatively standardized. Ovid had Corinna, Tibullus had Delia, and Propertius had, err... whoever it is Propertius had. if Our understanding is correct, the practice is in fact quite straightforward: all one need do is compose as if she were writing to her lover--name and all--then immediately prior to publication substitute a metrically identical name. if this follows, at some point Catullus' "vivamus, mea Clodia, atque amemus" became Our "vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus." similarly, if Juliet had wished to keep her love a public secret, perhaps instead of "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" she could have substituted "O Julio, Julio, wherefore art thou Julio?" though now the simple substitution has become anything but. the overarching existential question in Juliet's speech (why does it matter so much that you are a Montague and I a Capulet?) is compounded by a new frustration (why, if your name is so important, must I call you something else?). is she, in the end, merely talking to herself? after all, what is Julio if not the masculine (perhaps less diminuitive) reflection of her own name?

A few notes: 1) The word nioi is most commonly used in modern Japanese to mean "scent," but its aesthetic range is not limited to the olfactory. A better description would be any of the ephemeral qualities that radiate off something (e.g. shine, taste, scent, sound, etc.). 2) The real genius of Akiko's poem lies in the doubled verbs (omoi-omou and wakachi-wakazu), as they mirror the doubt made manifest in the second half of the verse. In my mind, not-knowing is the point or at least a large degree of doubt. 3) I wrote most of this while sitting in a Mr. Donuts in Kanayama.