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?"