“The waters flow, the flowers fall,
forever lasts the Spring,
The moon shines cold, the wind blows high,
the cranes do not fly home.
The flowers that grow in the rocks
are scarlet, and light up the stream.
The trees that grow by the caverns
are green and contain the breeze
The blossoms open like brocade,
the brimming pools are deep and blue.”
All the time we are reading this the magic of suggestion is working, and we would fain let our minds float away into the land of spring; but our attention is brought plumping down to the bodily presentation of the thoughts and our intellect is set at work to see how the lines might have been made to scan, or to run in some form of rhythm. So long as they do just scan and have a passable rhythm, we do not think of the poetical qualities of the translation, but when they jolt us along our attention is constantly diverted from the higher theme to the lesser subject of English grammar and versification.
So that I have endeavoured in my translations to make the lines run smoothly enough to be read aloud without much irritation; and though I have doubtless not fully succeeded, I have tried to give them as much verbal beauty as was possible within the narrow limits afforded me by the literal Japanese meaning. In this my collaborator, Prof. Sakurai, has held the rein on me at times when I would have liked to run away with some poetical conceits, and it is owing entirely to his tireless exertions that the result has a fair degree of accuracy. I must relieve him of too great a responsibility, however, for I confess that here and there where it seemed to me imperative to put in a word or two more than was in the original in order to convey the necessary impression to an English reader, or where several lines of metre would have been upset if he wouldn’t let me have the word I wanted, I have just taken the bit between my teeth and run away from him. But this has happened seldom, and on the whole I think it will be found that the English version bears close comparison with the Japanese.
Now a word regarding the type of verse that is used by those who translate into a recognisable English form. Of these the translations in Prof. Chamberlain’s Classical Poetry of the Japanese of four of the finest and most renowned utai of the Nō are models to be considered by any later translator. Prof. Chamberlain puts the “words” into prose, and the “songs” into rhymed verse.
The chorus at the end of the Robe of Feathers is a good example of this easily flowing verse (p. 146)—
“Dance on, sweet maiden, through the happy hours!
Dance on, sweet maiden, while the magic flow’rs
Crowning thy tresses flutter in the wind
Rais’d by thy waving pinions intertwin’d!
Dance on! for ne’er to mortal dance ’tis giv’n
To vie with that sweet dance thou bring’st from heav’n:
And when, cloud-soaring, thou shalt all too soon
Homeward return to the full-shining moon,
Then hear our pray’rs, and from thy bounteous hand
Pour sev’nfold treasures on our happy land;
Bless ev’ry coast, refresh each panting field,
That earth may still her proper increase yield!”
But to my ear such consistently rhymed verse does not convey any suggestion of the sound of the Japanese chants. As Captain Brinkley has it, “by obeying the exigencies of rhyme, whereas the original demands rhythm only (‘the learned sinologues, their translators’), have obtained elegance at the partial expense of fidelity.” It is true that a less formal versifying, such as I have used, does not represent truly the Japanese effect either—nothing can; but it seems less out of harmony with its character than do the rhyming stanzas. Then also I found that short rhymed lines render one liable to strain the sense a little in order to make things fit in. Longer lines, without such regular rhyming, allow one more play, and this enables one to follow the words suggested directly by the Japanese. Since then also Prof. Chamberlain’s own taste has changed and he has “gone over to the camp of the literalists.”
In two of the pieces I have put the “words” into a longer metre to indicate the difference between them and the “songs.” But I find this makes an added difficulty for any one reading aloud, without much enhancing the accuracy of the whole, so that in Kagekiyo I have made no distinction between the various parts of the text. In listening to a Japanese Nō performance one could not really tell where the “words” left off and the “songs” began, and also, as I have previously noted (p. [24]), the poems are connected to the prose by irregularly dispersed poetical lines. Finally,