Epic Diction

I said to the man with his tongue stuck to a post-it-note that
when the world ends and all the Alexandrians and Alexandrines
measure up to little more than a chapbook no one wanted to buy,
people will continue to sing the songs they knew before language
was a word, songs that say what speech cannot and should not,
how the world is made of us and us of it like a geometric
figure with two sides but only one surface: we’ll be the worse
off for only having songs, repetitive and catchy, moody,
as fickle as the passions that order our regimented brains.

It occurs to me, sometimes, while running or engaged in some other relatively mindless activity that certain languages have nothing really comparable to epic, even some whose literary history is quite extensive. English has two epic traditions: one homebrew (think Beowulf) and one adaptation (think Faerie Queene), neither of which sound even remotely like the other. Old English epic is jerky, with regular stops and starts, verbal turns reminiscent of modern day freestyle, whereas the rump-dee-rump, or whatever Chaucer called it, has a tendency to flow on and on for several lines with little to break up the thought into manageable units. I don't think there is a modern corollary for this, and if there is one, I'm not sure I'd want to put it on my Meizu. But some languages, Japanese is one of them, don't have this "seven lines before you encounter and independent verb" style of speech or composition one generally uses to make language seem, well, epic.

So what would you do, if, say, you wanted to translate Homer into Japanese? It has been done (I'm not looking to be another greater Westernizer of the Orient [such things need capital letters, don't you think?]) but always in prose. The Japanese, for whatever reason, are loath to translate poetry into verse, perhaps "because Japanese culture is, like, so super special and unique." Yet, even this has been done. I'm currently writing about a poet whose revolutionary move, apparently, was to translate a Japanese poet into modern Japanese verse. Gasp! Be still my beating heart. However, Tawara Machi's efforts were of lyric to lyric. The form she was translating is largely unchanged in its modern incarnation; only the "meanings" needed updating.

So, to translate "epic" into "epic Japanese" one would have to invent a wholly new diction, one which the Japanese language hasn't managed to produce on its own. To use Homer as a test case, one could easily use a 5-7-5 syllabic line (which is, strangely, a haiku/hokku) for heavily dactyllic lines and a 7-7 for the ponderously spondaic. Metrically, I think that would work; it's akin to how the early Meiji writers created a 5-7 line to mimic the English pentameter. In fact it's not uncommon to see quatrains or stichic poems using this 5-7 line. I wonder whether it would "sound" right, though. The 5 and 7 syllable units that basically make up the totality of traditional Japanese poetry carry with them a lot of lyric baggage. Inevitably, I'm left with the question, "can you sound 'epic' in Japanese?"

The Axe Hitting the Koto

The following comes from what currently amounts to the very end of my second chapter on Yosano Akiko and Tawara Machi; I say "currently," because shortly I will append a brief discussion of Shiina Ringo's "Kono yo no kagiri," about which I've had a few things to say in the past. Those of you who have read my first chapter (or heard me go on about it ad nauseam) will recognize some striking similarities to the way that ends. At first, this was not intentional, but after realizing what I had done, I'm now going back to make the parallel more clear.

kami no sadame inochi no hibiki tsui no wayo (?)
koto ni ono utsu oto ni kikitamae

the gods decree, life takes its toll at the end of our world--
listen to the sound of the axe hitting the koto

"the axe hitting the koto" (a kind of long, plucked zither played on the floor) is even more gruesome in the Japanese than my translation allows. The verb utsu here is written without a chinese character to indicate which of three homophonic verbs it might be. Given the presence of an axe (ono), it is most likely "to hit" but "to take revenge" is equally plausible. "To hit" utsu and "to take revenge" utsu are, though they are written differently in modern Japanese (打つ and 討つ respectively), historically the same verb. Satake [super famous Japanese literary critic] is unwilling to take this doubled meaning into account, so I find his rendering of the final command, "listen with disconcern" (heinetsu toshite okiki ni natte kudasai), wholly unsatisfactory. He would have the poem be an act of consolation, as if to say, "everything has its ends, so this too will have its end," yet this approach fails to accept the violence inherent in the destruction of the koto. Machi's translation is as disturbing as I assume Akiko's poem to be, but for a different reason.

koi ga owaru inochi ga owaru ware ga owaru
koto ni ono utsu hibiki nokoshite

love ends, life ends, I end--
peals of the axe hitting the koto remain

You can take "remain" nokoshite two ways, I think, either as a simple present indicative or as a command. As an indicative, Machi's translation is an expression of melancholy that does not eviscerate the violence of the destruction of song--dare I say--as Satake would have it, but retains his sense of acceptance. As a command, it becomes something more than melancholy; it is an attempt on the part of the poet to remind herself by means of this unusually striking image not to take herself and her poetry too seriously. If anything it is a precursor to joy not melancholy, and it opens up a space for humor in the poem(s) that follows.

hito futari busai no niji o uta ni eminu
koi niman-nen nagaki-mijikaki

the two of us smile at the word "inept" in the poem;
twenty thousand years of love--so long, so short

"futari tomo sainou nai ne" to warai ori
uta yori omoki koi to iu mono no

I smile saying, "neither of us has any talent"--
deeper than song, this thing called love

This is how the first section of Akiko's, and thus Machi's [this chapter is about Machi's translation of Akiko into modern Japanese], Midaregami ends, likewise the world and likewise lyric itself, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a smile.