Two passionate poets of Japan from 1000 years ago
Written: Dec 19 '02 (Updated Dec 19 '02)
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Pros: Exquisite poems by Komachi and Shikibu; beautiful translations; scholarly apparatus; affordable price
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: This collection is a rare, in depth focus on two great women poets of Japan. Their poems speak directly to us today. A great translation with helpful notes.
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| trust12345's Full Review: Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani - The Ink Dark... |
A thousand years ago in Japan, the arts, and particularly poetry, were dominated by women. The men of the court, centered in Kyoto (later it will move to Tokyo), were engaged in clamoring for higher posts in what was probably history’s most stratified hierarchy. They wrote poetry, too, and some of it is great. But the women, confined to a fairly sedentary and secluded existence, were able to hone their crafts to unsurpassed levels of polish, allusion, subtlety and sophistication. From this "Heian" era that lasted from 794 to 1185 (Heian Kyo is the old Japanese name for Kyoto), emerged women authors whose works transcend time and place to enter the pantheon of great authors: Murasaki Shikibu (whose "Tale of Genji" is considered the world’s first novel); Sei Shonagon, a kind of Montaigne of Japan who recounted her meditations on things large and small in her "Pillow Book"; Ono no Komachi, legendary as much for her beauty and many lovers as for her poetry; and Izumi Shikibu. There are many others.
Unfortunately, these women are not as well known in the West as they are in Japan. Murasaki is certainly the most famous of these mentioned, and sales of the work of Sei Shonagon may have enjoyed a brief resurgence after Peter Greenaway’s mediocre film, "Pillow Book", but I doubt it. This is distressing, because their work is so beautiful, humorous, sad, timeless, accessible, and rich. There have been a number of good collections of Japanese poetry from the Heian period, such as those collated and translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Arthur Waley. But there have been scant books in English translation devoted in a more focused way to single authors. To fill this void, we have Jane Hirshfield (with the help of Mariko Aratani) to thank for their collection, "The Ink Dark Moon" (Vintage Books), which is devoted solely to the poetry of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu.
The poems these women wrote are known as 'tanka', which are like their more famous descendents, the 17 syllable haiku (poems with lines of 5-7-5 syllables), but with the addition of two extra lines of 7 syllables. (I wish later generations had not lopped off the extra 14 syllables: the haiku is king, now, but for my tastes, the tanka was ideally suited for the expression of a single thought, observation, or feeling).
Ono no Komachi, who flourished in the middle of the 9th Century, is considered one of the masters of her craft. Many of her poems are featured in the Manyoshu, the first collection of Japanese poetry, and they keep appearing in later court compendia. Komachi had numerous lovers, but was always frustrated in love, and in her later years, mourned the loss of her beauty, keeping apart from the world, and adopting a Buddhist outlook on the transitory nature of existence. Her poetry is quintessentially passionate. She wrote of longing, of love, of loneliness, of nature, all with such passion that her voice seems to speak directly to us out of time:
No way to see him
on this moonless night—
I lie awake longing, burning,
breasts racing fire,
heart in flames. (page 6)
Another poem, inscribed "To a man who seems to have forgotten," runs:
Truly now I’ve grown old
in the winter rains.
Even your words of love
have altered,
falling leaves. (37)
As with many of the great Japanese poets (form any period), Komachi links human emotions to occurrences in nature, finding sympathetic parallels between the two. Her poems, and to a greater extent, those of Izumi Shikibu, exemplify the Zen notions of 'mono no aware' (for which we have no English equivalent, but means something like the deep feeling sadness of things); 'wabi sabi' (which conveys, among other things, loneliness and the bittersweet beauty of decaying things); and 'mujo' (the fleeting nature of terrestrial existence.
One of Ono no Komachi’s most celebrated poems, written late in life, combines all these qualities:
While watching
the long rains falling on this world
my heart, too, fades
with the unseen color
of the spring flowers. (43)
The translators, Hirschfield and Aratani, do an excellent job throughout this marvelous book. Japanese court poetry is notoriously difficult to translate because 1) authors enjoyed using many double entendres, 2) some words and concepts have no English equivalent, 3) certain Japanese words are obsolete, and 4) the poems are highly allusive, and their authors expect their readers to enjoy the game of determining stylistic and content-based references, all of which would be lost on anyone out of the loop. To supplement the paucity of this kind of information that is lost in translation, Hirschfield includes excellent notes on each poem. Also very helpful for anyone with at least a little knowledge of Japanese are the 'romaji' transliterations of every poem in the index. I never buy Japanese poetry collections that do not include these transliterations, because even though my understanding of the language is far from perfect, I feel it is necessary for all poetic translations to give a chance to refer to the original. This way, we can at least begin to appreciate the poem’s true sound and verbal properties.
Izumi Shikibu (c. 974-1034) dates from a much later point in time than Komachi in the long, Heian epoch. Less promiscuous perhaps, but no less passionate in her approach to love and life, Izumi brings the tanka to its apotheosis, filling this small form with as much artistry, philosophical inquisitiveness, beauty of assonance and sounds, and poignance, as it would seem possible. She sustained a double tragedy (the death of her beloved second husband, Prince Atsumichi, as well as of a baby daughter), and conveyed her grief in hundreds of poems that are deeply affecting. The totality of her oeuvre is highly varied, but the central themes of love, longing, and transience pervade her poems. I am always haunted by this poem, one of the loveliest and saddest of all, written on the death of her daughter, who was cremated:
Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world. (153)
Izumi’s poetry is so relevant, that in times of distress, I have often turned to her if not for advice, then at least for consolation and a sense of solidarity. One of my favorite poems of hers, actually a sequence of four tanka entitled "Things I Want Decided," asks some provocative questions:
Which shouldn’t exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?
Which is better,
to love
one has died
or not to see
each other when you’re alive?
Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?
Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things—
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world? (81)
"The Ink Dark Moon" borrows its title from a line in one of the poems, and is so named because both Komachi and Izumi wrote many poems directly or obliquely about the moon. Each poet found inspiration there, transfixed by its luminous beauty and finding in its paradoxical mutability and perennial sameness a mirror for human existence. These poets were consummately attuned to their surrounding and to their own feelings, and they had exquisite gifts for conveying to us, in a fresh and direct manner, both their surrounding worlds and their innermost feelings. As Hirshfield writes in her introduction, "One of the deep pleasures in reading their poetry is discovering the way that, for these women, the metaphysics of religious teaching and the tumultuous course of the heart in love confirm a single truth, the impermanence of being. The endeavor to come to some acceptance and understanding of this unavoidable transience profoundly illuminates their work" (xx).
This collection is furnished with an excellent, accessible appendix featuring discussions about Japanese court poetry and translation, a biography of the poets’ lives, and extensive notes on selected poems. I give this book my strongest recommendation.
Recommended:
Yes
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