"After great pain, a formal feeling comes—": The Problems of Translating Dickinson's "Poetry" into Contemporary Japanese "Verse"

The challenge for translators of Dickinson is how to transcribe her "poetry" into their own languages. From the point of form, rhymes and rhythms are essential elements for poems written in English. So far as I have observed in books on translation,¹ translators of English from the languages that have these two as their poetical elements take exceptionally great pains to preserve the original meter and rhyme in English in some way or other. And I have found the same in the case of translating Dickinson into French or German. Even when the two languages or cultures are close, the task of translation has its own problems because of the very affinity. But when the two languages and cultures are remote, translators have to strive in a completely different domain. Since Japanese belongs to an utterly different family of languages from English, we have to take it as a matter of course that we cannot expect her original rhythm and rhyme to be maintained in a translation. In addition, in Japanese poetry rhythm does not consist of the stressed and the unstressed, nor is rhyme considered a crucial element of poetry.

Rhyme and rhythm give to readers the joy of reciting. When you say you like Dickinson, it goes without saying that it is not so difficult for you to recite some of her works. You are helped by the existence of rhyme and rhythm, even if you don't intend to memorize on purpose. Sometimes without paying much attention to how to interpret this line or that, it is possible to enjoy the sounds of words that a poet selected. This joy is deeply connected with what poetry is. In the case of translation, however, it is seldom that we have this joy, much to our regret. We cannot follow the original words of the poet exactly, and there rarely exists the definitive translation to memorize and recite. For one poem, there could be several translations by different translators, and a translator sometimes polishes his/her own work of translation.

Deprived of the joy of reciting, non-academics who don't know the language get in touch with translated poems mainly through their content. This is especially true in Japanese, where not a glimpse of the original rhyme and rhythm can be expected. But when I look into the translation between English and the languages of its group, translators seem to be trying to render a translation that can be enjoyed when recited. I wonder how much Baudelaire or Rilke have permeated English; how much of them you can recite in English. Since we are talking about Dickinson, this question can be put the other way around: how much has she permeated the other Germanic and romance languages that share grammatical structures with English?

As an inevitable step, we have to cope with this question: how do we Japanese find "poetry" in Japanese? What does it take to make Japanese poetry? What is the equivalent of English meter in Japanese? It is not difficult to answer these questions: for our ear, syllable-counting, the alternating lines of five and seven syllables is music and "poetry." And this syllable-counting has been the basis of haiku and tanka(waka). These are literary forms with a long tradition that have been loved by the Japanese; in the case of tanka (waka), for over a thousand years.

One of the most famous examples of haiku—5-7-5 syllables—is this:

Furu ike ya	An old pond
Kawazu tobikomu	A frog jumps in—
Mizu no oto	Sound of water Sound of water.

And this is an example of tanka(waka)—5-7-5-7-7 syllables—:

Haru no yo no	This spring night
Yume no ukihashi	The floating bridge of my dream
Todaeshite	Fell apart:
Mine ni wakaruru'	Swirling away from the peak,
Yokogumo no sora	Dawn clouds in the eastern sky.
(both translated by Geoffrey Bownas & Anthony Thwaite)2

Here, at the risk of appearing to deviate, I shall explain a little further...