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Dispatches from the bungo frontier
Well, my class in classical Japanese ended on Friday, and I have to say, it was both pretty awesome and a fantastic use of six weeks: I went from zero knowledge to reading Genji monogatari in the original in just that amount of time, which is lightning fast. Apparently this amount of training would normally take two semesters at the college level--and as a bonus, we learned first principles for kuzushiji and hentaigana (pre-modernization handwritten forms), which is normally a whole other class in itself as well.
And in the end, my classmates and our professor and I had a pretty good time together; we were an odd group, but we were a group, particularly after we went drinking with some professors at Kandai as a group (long story) two weeks ago. I already miss them, though I don't miss getting up at 07:00 to get down to Doshisha on time.
Scattered notes:
# I really love classical Japanese. It gets something of a bad rep for being vague, but it's certainly no vaguer than, say, classical Latin, though I do find it interesting that between the three classical languages I know (classical Japanese, Latin, ancient Greek), they all have slightly different strengths and weaknesses. To wit, Greek has a deserved reputation as being both horribly subtle and exacting (case in point: the middle voice, the dual, the optative mood) (there's a reason that the greatest works of ancient European philosophy were written in Greek), while Latin was initially better suited for precision than it was for poetry (viz. the future perfect), and classical Japanese is…somewhere in the middle relatively speaking but on a different axis, I think. All the verbal prefixes/infixes/suffixes (there aren't really any actual infixes, but they can all be strung together for so long that some combinations start feeling like infixes after a while) and resulting piled-on associations and connotations give the prose a supple strength that's wonderful to read and wickedly difficult to translate.
# As previously mentioned, Kaguya-hime of Taketori monogatari is a complete bad-ass until she's brainwashed by her ostensible kinsmen, the moon-people, into being as affectless as they are. Three words: science fiction retelling.
# The Heike monogatari is hard-core. The death of Atsumori is also one of the slashiest pieces of literature I have read in a long time, right down to mutual crying before death (on a beach no less), and I was not the only one who picked up on this. Also, Taira no Kiyomori was a total bad-ass. Evil, but a bad-ass. It was constantly disconcerting to be reminded of The Iliad when reading an oral epic from in medieval Japan, eight hundred years ago: the events of the Iliad are roughly three thousand years old.
# The Genji monogatari is still amazing. We read most of the Aoi chapter, and I have to say…wow. I've read Genji in English, in the Tyler translation, which I would still recommend to people who want to read Genji, which everyone should because it's amazing, amazingly socially calibrated and psychologically real--kind of like Proust crossed with Austen crossed with James, except a thousand years ago in Heian-kyo, and it's also, despite the title, I think, a deeply--feminist is not the right word, but the female characters are very much the center of the novel, and one does catch hints of the author slipping in some very subtle criticisms of her society, or at least, of male behavior in her society--not so much in text but at the level of plot and device, but it's definitely there.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of the English translations (and the Tyler is far and away the single best version) are quite clued in to this aspect. The Aoi chapter (spoilers: she dies) is concerned, despite the name, principally with the Rokujô lady, whose liaison with Genji exacerbates her precarious social position and, it's clear, her own incipient mental instability. The creeping horror of Rokujô realizing that she can't even trust her own mind (in the full sense of the word, heart/mind, kokoro), that she is the spirit possessing Aoi, after pages and pages of obsessive rumination over the same confined psychological and emotional territory--it's a horror story, plain and simple, and Virginia Woolf, I think, would have recognized it. And this doesn't even add in the bodily horror of what happens to Aoi (it's very Rosemary's Baby, actually), who falls pregnant and says nothing directly after that and during her pregnancy is spirit-ridden, not just by Rokujô but by many random spirits who show up to use her as a mouthpiece for their grievances, and perpetually ill. A formerly spirited woman is reduced to a wreck of herself, so much that you can't tell whether she's alive or dead by looking at her; in their last interview, typically, Genji blathers on at her while she lies there semi-catatonic. It is a horror story, but Tyler's prose is too polished and urbane to do much more than barely hint at this.
# For reasons still not clear to me, our class decided that what the world needs is a Genji/Lord of the Rings fusion. I'm not going to disagree.
# Given that Genji is canonically called Shining Genji, and in light of his creepy creeper behavior, I'm having a really hard time not thinking of him as Sparklepire.
# Also, on some levels, the narrator of Genji is the Gossip Girl of her world. I kind of love that, actually. (Note: narrator ≠ author, though they obviously share somewhat similar social backgrounds.)
And in the end, my classmates and our professor and I had a pretty good time together; we were an odd group, but we were a group, particularly after we went drinking with some professors at Kandai as a group (long story) two weeks ago. I already miss them, though I don't miss getting up at 07:00 to get down to Doshisha on time.
Scattered notes:
# I really love classical Japanese. It gets something of a bad rep for being vague, but it's certainly no vaguer than, say, classical Latin, though I do find it interesting that between the three classical languages I know (classical Japanese, Latin, ancient Greek), they all have slightly different strengths and weaknesses. To wit, Greek has a deserved reputation as being both horribly subtle and exacting (case in point: the middle voice, the dual, the optative mood) (there's a reason that the greatest works of ancient European philosophy were written in Greek), while Latin was initially better suited for precision than it was for poetry (viz. the future perfect), and classical Japanese is…somewhere in the middle relatively speaking but on a different axis, I think. All the verbal prefixes/infixes/suffixes (there aren't really any actual infixes, but they can all be strung together for so long that some combinations start feeling like infixes after a while) and resulting piled-on associations and connotations give the prose a supple strength that's wonderful to read and wickedly difficult to translate.
# As previously mentioned, Kaguya-hime of Taketori monogatari is a complete bad-ass until she's brainwashed by her ostensible kinsmen, the moon-people, into being as affectless as they are. Three words: science fiction retelling.
# The Heike monogatari is hard-core. The death of Atsumori is also one of the slashiest pieces of literature I have read in a long time, right down to mutual crying before death (on a beach no less), and I was not the only one who picked up on this. Also, Taira no Kiyomori was a total bad-ass. Evil, but a bad-ass. It was constantly disconcerting to be reminded of The Iliad when reading an oral epic from in medieval Japan, eight hundred years ago: the events of the Iliad are roughly three thousand years old.
# The Genji monogatari is still amazing. We read most of the Aoi chapter, and I have to say…wow. I've read Genji in English, in the Tyler translation, which I would still recommend to people who want to read Genji, which everyone should because it's amazing, amazingly socially calibrated and psychologically real--kind of like Proust crossed with Austen crossed with James, except a thousand years ago in Heian-kyo, and it's also, despite the title, I think, a deeply--feminist is not the right word, but the female characters are very much the center of the novel, and one does catch hints of the author slipping in some very subtle criticisms of her society, or at least, of male behavior in her society--not so much in text but at the level of plot and device, but it's definitely there.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of the English translations (and the Tyler is far and away the single best version) are quite clued in to this aspect. The Aoi chapter (spoilers: she dies) is concerned, despite the name, principally with the Rokujô lady, whose liaison with Genji exacerbates her precarious social position and, it's clear, her own incipient mental instability. The creeping horror of Rokujô realizing that she can't even trust her own mind (in the full sense of the word, heart/mind, kokoro), that she is the spirit possessing Aoi, after pages and pages of obsessive rumination over the same confined psychological and emotional territory--it's a horror story, plain and simple, and Virginia Woolf, I think, would have recognized it. And this doesn't even add in the bodily horror of what happens to Aoi (it's very Rosemary's Baby, actually), who falls pregnant and says nothing directly after that and during her pregnancy is spirit-ridden, not just by Rokujô but by many random spirits who show up to use her as a mouthpiece for their grievances, and perpetually ill. A formerly spirited woman is reduced to a wreck of herself, so much that you can't tell whether she's alive or dead by looking at her; in their last interview, typically, Genji blathers on at her while she lies there semi-catatonic. It is a horror story, but Tyler's prose is too polished and urbane to do much more than barely hint at this.
# For reasons still not clear to me, our class decided that what the world needs is a Genji/Lord of the Rings fusion. I'm not going to disagree.
# Given that Genji is canonically called Shining Genji, and in light of his creepy creeper behavior, I'm having a really hard time not thinking of him as Sparklepire.
# Also, on some levels, the narrator of Genji is the Gossip Girl of her world. I kind of love that, actually. (Note: narrator ≠ author, though they obviously share somewhat similar social backgrounds.)
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And yes, Heike is awesomesauce (though I've only read it in McCullough's translation). Very low Ninja replacement score. I also like how Tomoe Gozen appears in exactly four paraphraphs and still manages to steal the scene of her liege-lord's melodramatic last stand.
That takes work. Or serious badassery.
---L.
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You could totally read the Heike in the original, it's practically modern compared to the Genji or the Kokinshu.
TOMOE GOZEN FOREVER
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---L.
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---L.
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You've strung me along for so many months, dear
you're infixing me like a damn dirty dog.
Thanks!
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Some of my college friends had a cod-language where all the conjugation markers were infixes. Basically they were trying to make up the hardest language possible.
I don't know about country & western, but that might make a great enka.
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---L.
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To avoid making a third comment:
The class sounds really great, at least re: focus/speed.
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---L.
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This may be my inexperience here, but looks to me that when an explicit subject immediately precedes a verb, the case marker is not just optional but in fact always omitted, at least in the Kokinshu era. I haven't seen this specifically articulated as a rule, though. However, when a direct object immediately precedes a transitive verb, the case marker seems to be more optional. (KKS 2:115, for example, has two direct objects right before the transitive verb, one with and one without its を.) Can you confirm this?
---L.
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あづさゆみはるの山辺をこえくれば道もさりあへず花ぞちりける
This one? Where's the second direct object?
…And what's the connection of the azusayumi to the rest of the poem? Damn it, Tsurayuki…
trying a very rough translation
The azusa bow--
Since I crossed the mountain pass in spring,
The flowers that avoid the road,
They scattered!
Hmm. There's wordplay going on with azusayumi, obviously (the flowers avoided a curse as well?), but I take yamabe + wo as direct object + case particle and haru + no as a case particle too, though not of a direct object, it's the use of no that's the same as modern ga--possessive subject = adjectival. Michi + mo looks to be bound emphatic because of sariaezu in the shushikei. So yamabe is d.o., haru is the subject, and azusayumi is the (grammatically unmarked) topic.
Re: trying a very rough translation
My current draft translation is:
When I cross over
(with my catalpa bow drawn)
the mountains of spring,
I cannot keep to the road --
the flowers are scattering.
A bit of gallantry to the ladies-as-flowers, spiced with the wit of a pivot-word.
---L.
Re: trying a very rough translation
---L.
Re: trying a very rough translation
I don't walk along the road
or
I avoid the road
which without the headnote is a little opaque, and not much different from your version except for the potential ('cannot') connotation.
Re: trying a very rough translation
But an ah-ha! moment for that michi mo usage. I missed that in my dictionary (and I'm calling privilege of recuperation to justify being too lazy to cross the house to doublecheck check mine -- but man to I so like finally having a kogojiten; SO much easier to sift these things with one). So "cannot keep to" is pretty close.
Now to work on the sound of the translation, because like everything else Tsurayuki wrote, his is much more graceful than my draft.
---L.
Re: trying a very rough translation
This would be impossible without a bungo dictionary, seriously.
It is graceful, but the point about the azusayumi engo only going as far as haru sort of reinforces my sense that this is not quite his best effort--I can't get the split in the meaning to line up with the usual division between the 5/7/5 and the 7/7, no matter how I try.
Re: trying a very rough translation
In the Kokinshu, the division after the third line was still far from universal -- maybe half of the first hundred poems fall that way (I haven't counted). The remainder have the old style of division after the second line and other patterns, with break after the fourth surprisingly common (see also 119, just a few on). Tsurayuki in particular is prone to mixing it up, including sometimes writing with a clear tripartate structure.
That said, no, not his best -- it's a bit of spur-of-the-moment social poetry, and I get the sense he's not as good at that as, say, Mitsune. But it's better than a good number of his love poems, several of which are not very convincing.
---L.
Re: trying a very rough translation
Yeah, it would have to be, wouldn't it?
Re: trying a very rough translation
And yeah, it wouldn't be metrical if azusayumi were marked, would it? It's frustrating how it's almost impossible to ever translate just one layer all the way through, because of course 'azusayumiharu' crosses the line division, but my translation, as we saw, makes no bloody sense in English as-is.
Re: trying a very rough translation
I don't think the azusayumi is engo with anything else in the poem, though. I'm not exactly expert at all the associations, though.
---L.
Re: trying a very rough translation
Re: trying a very rough translation
Re: trying a very rough translation
That said, the other two verbs are not completed, giving mixed tenses if we follow that in English, which sounds off: "when I crossed, I cannot keep to the road." And the final -keru can (among all its other functions) indicate continuing state, which seems likely here.
All part of the juggling act.
---L.
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But boy, it sure seems likely.
---L.
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Yeah, it looks that way to me too--but I'm still content to treat the rule as basically sound, barring rare exceptions. And this being poetry, I'm sure の is in there for the meter.
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---L.
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My experience with classical Japanese was getting dropped mid-year into a college bungo course for native speakers, only because my adviser taught classical Japanese. It was a pretty brutal sink-or-swim situation. (Sadly, McGill didn't offer Classical Japanese either year I was there and at a level to take it.)
Shimizu Reiko's Kaguya Hime manga is an amazing mishmash of science fiction melodrama and Kaguya-hime mythology, with organ-donor clones and bonus badass heroine. I'd recommend it more if I actually understood much of it.
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Our course was taught in English, except for how we kept breaking into modern every so often, to come up with examples and such, and I don't think we could have done it in Japanese. Well, we could have, but we wouldn't have learned anywhere near as well.
Which reminds me, I need to go to the bookstore and pick up one of the "crib bungo for the college entrance exams!" books they sell here. And Genji as chestnut heads.
Oo, I'll have to check that out!
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*is jealous*
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I'm not sure that was the fault of bungo, though.
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All of which is to say, ack! Fwiw, I feel the same way around people who can speak better than I do, such as some of my classmates. My accent in particular has been slipping, I need to try to remember to get it right when I speak.
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