Macmillan - One hundred poets, one poem each: A Treasury of Classical Japanese Verse

Translated with a Commentary by
Peter MacMillan

---

ONE HUNDRED POETS, ONE POEM EACH

A Treasury of Classical Japanese Verse

PENGUIN CLASSICS

PETER MACMILLAN is a translator, poet and artist. His earlier version of the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin isshu) was awarded the Donald Keene Center Special Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature and the Special Cultural Translation Prize from the Japan Society of Translators, both in 2008. He has also published a collection of poetry, Admiring Fields, while his series of prints, Thirty-Six New Views of Mount Fuji, has been widely exhibited in Japan and other countries. His translation of The Tales of Ise was published in Penguin Classics in 2016. Peter MacMillan is Translator in Residence at the National Institute of Japanese Literature.

The illustrations in the book have been taken from Yasushi Yokoiyamas complete series of the Hyakunin isshus one hundred poets. All images are courtesy of Peter MacMillan.

This translation is based on the second edition of Shimazu Tadaos Hyakunin isshu (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1999). The first translation of the Hyakunin isshu, by Frederick Victor Dickins, was published in 1866 and since then there have been over a dozen translations of this work in English alone. The work poses many challenges to the translator. These include how to render the conventions of waka expression and the multiplicity of possible interpretations allowed by the poems; the treatment of punning and wordplay; the role of the subject marker; and other matters of form. One of the difficulties of translating the Hyakunin isshu is that classical Japanese is full of long-established conventions that are not always accessible to the modern reader. A number of common literary conventions are defined in the Glossary. One example is utamakura or famous place names with poetic associations and alternative meanings based upon the sound of a word. The place name Osaka, for example, was often used to signify a place of meeting, especially in the context of lovers, as the long o at the beginning of the word was written in the same way as au (to meet). The mere mention of the word would cause such associations to immediately spring to mind for the educated Japanese reader of old, but not for contemporary Japanese, much less for non-Japanese.

Another challenge is that, at times, the poets capture an extremely simple scene so subtly that, when translated, it can seem little more than a physical picture or part of a longer verse rather than a whole poem. Sometimes these poems have clever rhetorical features that buoy up the verse in Japanese, but it is not always possible to convey that in English. The simpler poems on the seasons are especially difficult to translate while preserving the poetic delicacy of the original.

Yet another challenge is the number of different interpretations that are possible. A classic example is . The word people (hito) in the poem can be taken to mean different people, some of whom are amiable and some of whom are not, or the same people at different moments in time. Another possible interpretation is that there are many sides to a person, only some of which are agreeable. Here are some of the ways in which the last two lines of the Japanese can be interpreted:

Some people are kind,

while others are hateful.

Some have been kind to me,

while others were hateful.

Sometimes people are kind,

sometimes hateful.

Sometimes I long for them,

sometimes I just hate them.

While it is unusual for there to be such a variety of different interpretations, two or three distinct interpretations are often possible, posing a considerable challenge to the translator.

Another reason for such ambiguity is that, at the time Teika was editing the collection, some of the poems preceded him by as much as five hundred years, which means that they came to him with variants and historical shifts in nuance and meaning. The way Teika read the poems is not always the way the poems original audience would have done. by Ariwara no Narihira is a good example:

Such beauty unheard of

even in the age of the raging gods

the Tatsuta River

tie-dyeing its waters

in autumnal colours.

(Chihayaburu / kamiyo mo kikazu / Tatsutagawa / karakurenai ni / mizu kukuru to wa)

Because in classical kana orthography there were no vocalization marks, the last line of the poem can be read both as mizu kukuru to wa ([the maple leaves] tie-dye the water) and mizu kuguru to wa (water streams below [the maples leaves]). It is fairly certain that readers of the Kokinsh, from which Teika took the poem, read it kukuru (to tie-dye), whereas Teika and his contemporaries almost certainly read it kuguru (to flow beneath). I have generally tried to follow Teikas interpretation, but in this instance I prefer the original reading.

In the following poem (no. ), one possible interpretation is that it is only the face of the moon that is cold, not the lover:

How cold the face

of the morning moon!

Since we parted

nothing is so miserable

as the approaching dawn.

Many scholars, however, think that cold refers to both, in which case the translation would be:

Since I parted from you,

nothing is so miserable

as that time before dawn,

the look on your face then

cold as the moon at dawn.

Such complications have meant that the Japanese invariably have read the One Hundred Poets with the aid of countless commentaries written since the thirteenth century. English translations, by contrast, have tended to include as few notes as possible, on the assumption that it should be possible to understand a poem simply by reading it and that knowing about the historical reception and background of a literary work is not essential. However, this edition includes a commentary, which I hope will contribute to a deeper understanding of the background and context within which the poems were written and increase the readers enjoyment of the poems.

Japanese poetry avoids rhyme and depends more on rhythm (onritsu) than on metre, which is quantitative, not accentual. English free verse is thus a very natural choice when translating classical Japanese verse. Some believe that classical poetry as well as contemporary tanka which uses the same form as classical waka should be translated following the syllable count of waka and tanka, 5-7-5-7-7. According to this view, all translations of poems have the same number of syllables (thirty-one), but this makes for an unnatural and meaningless constriction in English. In order to give a sense of the form