The Tanka

In ancient Japan, the language itself was thought to have mystical powers (as the great poet Kakinomoto Hitomaro wrote in Manyoshu 3254, "The Land of Yamato is a land/Where the word-soul gives us aid"). Perhaps as a consequence, the art of poetry achieved a reverential, almost religious status. Japanese is not the only language regarded as uniquely suitable for poetic expression (I've read the same claim applied to English and Farsi, and I'm willing to bet the poets of many other languages have held the same belief), but in my opinion the history and refinement of Japanese poetry and poetic theory are such that modern poets the world over should look to Japanese poetry for the essence of poeticness, and the Japanese language for the vocabulary to describe it.

The most significant ancient Japanese poetic form is the tanka, a short poem consisting of 31 syllables (or, more accurately, morae. A mora is a length of sound corresponding to a syllable of one consonant and one short vowel. A syllable with a long vowel or one ending in a voiced consonant is two morae long.) The first part of the poem, the hokku (from which haiku is descended), is seventeen syllables arranged in lines of 5-7-5. The second part, the ageku, is two lines of 7 syllables each. The tanka in ancient Japan was quite strict, not only in length but in the words and subject matter allowed. Puns and other forms of wordplay were commonly employed. As with poetry the world over, the most common topics were love and nature. Influence by Buddhism, a melancholy appreciation of the transience of the world is a thread that runs through Japanese poetry from early times to now, giving many poems a lonely, bittersweet flavor.

Due to the large number of homonyms in Japanese, the common wordplay in Japanese poetry, and the brevity of the poems, the meaning of a poem can be largely impressionistic. Poetry in every language is more subjective than prose: poetic symbolism depends on an individual's own unique combination of knowledge, thoughts, viewpoints, and past experience. What a poem means to a reader can even change based on that reader's mood. While this is a strength of poetry, it adds to the difficulty to translate it, as do different requirements of poetic structure in different languages. For example, in Modern English much poetry is rhymed, but finding rhyming vocabulary when translating it into a different language may require completely changing the meaning of the poem. People who translate tanka into English need to choose between staying true to the form of the poem (syllable arrangements of 5-7-5-7-7) or trying their best to preserve its meaning (which often requires choosing one meaning for a word when more than one meaning is visible in the original Japanese). Take for instance Kokinshu 325 by Sakanoue no Korenori, rendered with the original syllable count in the Rodd and Henkenius translation of the Kokinshu:

the white snows must be

piling thickly on lovely

Yoshino Mountain

for in the old capital

a bitter cold penetrates

And the same poem translated by Thomas McAuley, which does not strictly adhere to the syllable count:

 On fair Yoshino
Mountain white snow fall
Drifts high, it seems,
For in this ancient place the chill
Grows ever stronger.

Both translations capture the poem's basic meaning. Which translation method creates the superior poem in English depends on the specific poem.

The platitude that something is always lost in translation may be true, but something else is always gained in translation, even if it's just a wider audience for a treasure of world literature. The tanka is a poetic jewel that I believe can sparkle as brightly in English as it does in Japanese, with of course different facets bestowed on it by our language and traditions.

Which do you prefer:

the blazing sky at sunset

--waves of orange burn--

or that same sky, at sunset,

in a pool of melting snow?