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#251: TWO WORKS FROM HEIAN JAPAN.

#251: TWO WORKS FROM HEIAN JAPAN.   Rather as we read Tao Yuan-Ming, the great fourth-century poet, not only for the depth of his work but as the archetype of the gentleman farmer, fond of his reclusion and his glass of wine, who is the figure of Chinese poetry for centuries to come, so in reading The Tales of Ise, the Ise Monogotari, we feel we’re watching the formation of the Japanese sensibility as it will create poems, stories, paintings and plays, basically until the modern era. Ise is the very earliest of the great Japanese works of fiction, 125 short short stories—a page or three long, what today we would call flash fiction—but, crucially, stories that hinge on and usually climax with a tanka, the five-line verse that becomes the defining form of Japanese poetry until it comes to share the stage, centuries later, with the haiku.  Its themes—above all, the evanescence and fragility of erotic love—eventually complexify and elaborate until reaching their apex with the Genji Monogotari, The Tale of Genji, the work of Japanese literature most widely read in the West.  But in the tales and poems of Ise, echoing in later poems and as the scenarios of Noh plays, Kabuki, and contemporary manga, we sense we have the great original.

        We know remarkably little about its composition, its authorship, its date (it certainly precedes Genji, which references it); no one is certain about the source of its title, any more than we know for certain why the Louvre is called the Louvre.  Its ostensible hero, the historic figure Ariwara no Narihira, is usually just referred to as “the man,” and we accept him as a typical fairy-tale hero rather than one person, who probably in a single life could not have had time to get up to the romantic adventures ascribed to him. (I recall a friend who, reading The Three Musketeers, said amazedly to me, “When do they sleep?”)  In truth, we read the Tales of Ise not as a continuous narrative but as representations of the possible variations of love.  The work’s most recent translator, Peter Macmillan, pegs it nicely:  “All kinds of love are portrayed: reciprocated and unrequited; between males; between generations and individuals of different rank; between the sophisticated hero of the capital and a simple countrywoman.”  Each tale is part of the prism, one page in the catalogue, one variation on the theme.

      The poems, in their original language, can disguise an almost Byzantine complexity, with puns, references, aural echoes, and acrostics complicating their surfaces; inevitably, these short verses read much more baldly in English.  Still, the mood, so essentially Japanese, less stark than the Greek epigram, more gently, differently affective, often takes hold, haunting as moonlight.  Because we very likely come to the Tales of Ise not as the first thing we read in Japanese literature, but working our way back to it, the poems seem to echo to us—we are coming back to them, rather than watching them reach forward.  And in reading them, as with so many of the classics, we recognize our own experience, unchanged across the distance of time.  No matter where we go, there we are.

 

       The survival of poems in Heian Japan depended largely on inclusion in one of the twenty-one imperial anthologies edited and assembled between the tenth and fifteenth centuries.  Of these, the first was the Kokin Wakashū, more commonly the Kokinshū, completed around 920.  It overlaps in time and content with the Tales of Ise; poems from the Ise show up in the Kokinshū, in some cases with headnotes that alter the reading of the poem’s intent.  It inevitably stands in comparison with the earliest collection of Japanese poetry, the Man’yōshū, which contains poetry dating from between the seventh and eighth centuries.  The poems and songs of the Man’yōshū were written by everybody from emperors to street performers to peasants, feasting songs and love songs and elegies, short poems and long poems (well, long by Japanese standards: hardly anything above forty lines), and are still thought to be the height of Japanese poetic expression; it has, in the words of Earl Miner, “the appeal of an art at its pristine source with a romantic sense of venerable age and therefore of an ideal order since lost.”  Coming to the Kokinshū, we immediately see a narrowing of range: written almost entirely in the five-line form, the tanka, and entirely court poetry.  Though still intermixed with Shinto, the influence of what Kenneth Rexroth called “the all-dissolving doubt of Buddhism” had deepened, resulting in poems that seemed to be made only of the most evanescent elements.

                                       Why should we say “dream”

                                    only of that which we see

                                       while we lie asleep?

                                    This fugitive world itself

                                    is scarcely reality.

And:

                                       Now that Spring is here,

                                    how readily we see them

                                       as falling flowers—

                                    those drops in the scattering spray

                                    where waves dash against the shore.

 

Love poems are made of separation and almost ghostly, unanswered dreams:

 

   So it is like this 

between a man and a girl!  

   I yearn for someone  

heard of as we hear the wind,

and no easier to see.”

 

Even in a genre devoted to punning on the syllables of the names of flowers and fruits, we find:

    Like clouds setting forth  

from the foot-wearying hills  

   to wander the skies,  

so people drift in a world  

without fixed resting spaces.”

 

         There is a generous selection of the Kokinshū poets in Steven D. Carter’s Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, with the poems grouped by author.  In

Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, in the edition translated by Helen Craig McCullough, the work is given in its entirety, with the poems grouped in twenty sections and arranged by topic.  T.S. Eliot’s essay speaks of “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; in Carter’s anthology, we get the individual talent; in McCullough’s we get the tradition, the common voice of the culture, and of the poetry of its time.  Grouped thematically, the mood of the poems is strengthened by repetition.  In a later chapter of laments, the reiteration of the sense of loss is heartbreaking; here we see most sharply of all the contrast between the definiteness, the stark daylight of the Greek Anthology and the gentler, sadder light of the Japanese verses.  In the Kokinshū you get as well that prismatic effect that’s in the Tales of Ise.  In the first of the seasonal books, for instance, on Spring, we see how many variants there can be utilizing the warm breezes melting the snow, the appearance of the flowering plum, the song of the warbler.  Made from the most fleeting of circumstances, of only the most momentary of elements, and many of them composed in what must seem to us the most alien and ethereal circumstances, at the poem-writing soirees of a tiny, fabulously privileged elite, these poems became one of the enduring works of Japanese literature, forming and occupying the Japanese soul to this day. 

 

   “Unlikely, we know  

with nature in winter’s grip—

   and yet to the eye  

snowflakes resemble blossoms  

fluttering between the trees.”

 

Give each of these short poems their moment, and they steal over you with that piercing moonlit sense of melancholy and impermanence.

 

                                       Ancient pine standing

                                    on the borders of the sea:

                                        during what era

                                     might someone have sown your seed,

                                    thinking of ages to come?

 

   “Simply as a test,  

please say you will be with me  

   for a few moments.  

Let us see if that promise  

restores the dying to life.”

 

 

 

       The Tales of Ise has been well translated previously by H. Jay Harris and by Helen McCullough, and, as The Ise Stories, by Joshua S. Mostow and Royall Tyler (University of Hawaii Press, 2010) but I recommend the recent version by Peter Macmillan (Penguin, 2016), which is excellent, readable, and illustrated, with a helpful commentary, glossaries, and texts of the poems in romaji.

        We very much need a new and complete translation of the Man’yoshu: the largest selection in English, 1000 Poems from the Man’yōshū, the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translation, reprinted in 2005 by Dover, is a reprint from 1940; it’s not terrible, but it has the faint air of nipponery about it.  Happily, both Samuel D. Carter’s anthology and Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry are still in print from Stanford University Press.  McCullough’s translations have an oh-so-slight touch of an older literary English, which turns out to be exactly right for the work.  Her edition is not cheap, but it’s complete; the notes good, it has the romaji texts and includes versions of the Tosa Nikki, the earliest of the Japanese poetic diaries, and the Shinsen Waka, a later collection. An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry, by Earl Miner, is an excellent and readable book, also from Stanford.

 

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