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  • Translating "To pile like Thunder to it's close" into Japanese
  • Takao Furukawa

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Kaminari-no yoni Saigo-made Takamari To pile like Thunder to it's close
Yagate sodai-ni Kuzure-saru Then crumble grand away
Suruto Tukurareta-mono-wa kotogotoku Sugata-o Kesu While Everything created hid
Korekoso Shi-de-aro This—would be Poetry—
Aruiwa Ai-nanoda—Ryosha-wa Doji-ni yatte—kuru Or Love—the two coeval come—
Watashi-tachi-wa Ryosha-o Taitoku-surushi mata Taitoku-dekinai We both and neither prove—
Dochiraka-demo Keiken-suruto tachimachi Hatete-simau Experience either and consume—
Kami-o Mite Ikirareru-Mono-wa inai-noda For None see God and live— [End Page 177]

This great poem (P1247) appeared for the first time in The Single Hound, edited by Martha Bianchi in 1914 and was cited by Frederick Burrows, a reviewer, as one of the most superb poems of Emily Dickinson (166). In translating this poem into Japanese, we do not feel that it is a particularly difficult one, for it does not contain unusual words, even in the context of cultural differences between America and Japan.

We often experience tremendous thunderstorms in Japan, as depicted in Dickinson's first three lines. So we have no problems in translating these three extraordinary lines into Japanese. But when faced with the great logical leap between the third and fourth lines, we are rather more embarrassed. Cynthia Wolff says that the introduction of "Love" is also puzzling (475). Why "This—would be—Poetry"? or "Love"? Dickinson does not explain why it would be poetry, or why poetry is related to love, or why "We both and neither prove—" in line 6. Though the original lines 4-7, except the last, have no logic in themselves, we have to put these lines into the same context in Japanese, for translators should not add any comments or explanation to the original ones. We readers have to solve these problems, inferring why they are so and why "Love" and "Poetry" come together.

Cleanth Brooks notes the logical gap in Wordsworth's Lucy poems which "reveal gaps in logic that the reader is forced to cross with a leap of imagination—they hint at analogies that cry out to be completed—and yet which can only be completed by the reader himself" (quoted in Culler 36). The key to the solution of the logical leap might lie in the poem itself. If we paraphrase the first three lines, we might say that everything created in the world has its own ecstatic moment and its moment of decay. We have, for instance, distinctly different seasons in Japan, and in the rainy season of June and July, "Everything created" fresh in May and June is covered with heavy rain and threatening thunder for many a day and night and is made quite dull. On the other hand, "Rainy season over / the running shadows of wooden piles / reflected on the water" (a Japanese haiku by Koko Kato) may suggest the survival of everything that is alive on the earth.

This is, in other words, a thought by which we see death in the midst of life. Dylan Thomas, for example, imagines an oak tree falling down within a small nut. We Japanese have inherited such paradoxical feelings concerning the world through Buddhism, and we at once can easily appreciate Dickinson's notion of a climax in life and its decay. John Cody mentions this idea: "The tremendous climax of Love, its fading into remembered glory, and the final sinking into despair and death constitute the topography of Emily Dickinson's love affair" (367). Cody also adds that this is a romantic notion of the nineteenth century. [End Page 178]

Roland Hagenbüchle also states in his article that "this is Dickinson's version of the Romantic sublime. Language, she claims, should ideally be able to build and unbuild its own creation. . . . Dickinson's are poems of process, are processes themselves" (150). It is important for us that Hagenbüchle uses the word "language" instead of "Love" or "Poetry." So we might say this is a meta-poem, that is, a poem about...

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