Concerning the Difficulties of Translation
Only half-a-dozen of the complete Nō and portions of a few others have been translated into English from all the many Japanese originals that are available. But this is scarcely surprising. In translating any of the Nō there are two supreme difficulties to be encountered. The first depends on the organic remoteness of the Japanese language from our own, which is common to any translation from the Japanese; and the second is the peculiar difficulty of translating the utai because the exact meaning of many portions of them is disputed even by Japanese authorities, and then even where the meaning may be clear to a Japanese expert the compression of the language is so great that it cannot literally be rendered into a European language. From a French or German, even from a Russian original, a literal translation is comprehensible even if it is not beautiful in English. A literal English translation from a Japanese original is arrant nonsense. The Japanese language is not merely unlike ours; the whole mode and order of the thought upon which it is founded is on an entirely different plan from our own. The more conscientious the translator the greater his difficulty. It is easy enough to translate “O yasumi nasai” as “good-night,” but how are we to say in English what it really means, i. e. approximately “honourably deign to take rest,” without appearing remote and stilted? And that is just a simple little common phrase; when the Japanese to be translated is contorted and coruscated with “pillow words” and “pivot words,” with a phrase from an old classical poem of which the reader is supposed to know the whole, and cannot “see the point” unless he does so, what is the translator to do? But suppose, further, that a couple of the words are the subject of learned controversy, as is frequently the case, is it likely two translations will coincide?