FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

"Japanese Poetry, an Historical Essay, with Translations", Curtis Hidden Page, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, Mass.

Those of us who have had the good fortune to hear Professor Page's own reading of his poems translated from the Japanese have awaited with eagerness their appearance between covers. Yet much as we coveted these translations withiii easy reach of the hand, perhaps we wondered whether they would mean quite so much to us in dumb type, without the translator's own voice to interpret them, or whether pagefuls of such tiny, though exquisite, intaglii would not leave us bewildered as before a kaleidoscope of flashing color. But the event has resolved any doubts and exceeded all of our anticipations— which was a very difficult thing indeed to do. Japanese Poetry, an Historical Essay, withTranslations, meets the peculiar difficulties of the presentation in the. happiest way. By inserting the translated poems in the body of his essay, Professor Page has held the reader back from surfeiting himself—an overwhelming temptation when the poems are only three or four lines long—and he has been able to suggest in the matrix of the text just the spirit and the symbolism of the Japanese poet which it is necessary to understand before we can fully appreciate the theme itself, or the skill and power with which it is handled. Moreover, he has contributed in his text a discussion of the history and quality of Japanese verse which is not only sound and well proportioned, but which is written with an illuminating insight and a charm and, withal, a fine humanness unexcelled in any other piece of literary criticism that I know. His little book is an example of literary criticism at its best, as well as a collection of translations quite as genuinely poetic in their own right as the renderings of the Rubaiyat by Edward Fitzgerald.

In praising the critical text I would not for a moment divert the attention from that which constitutes the primary value of the book: its poetry. There are others who can write sympathetically of Japan and acutely of literature. I know of no one else who has succeeded in rendering Japanese poetry into authentic English poetry with such an exact carrying over of the poetic quality of the original in both substance and form. Such an achievement is. not only a fine one in itself, it is one of exceeding difficulty, and depends on two unusual qualifications: a genuine poetic ability, ahd, also, such a familiarity with English poetry as makes it possible to employ its associations and suggestions with the most telling effect. Translation from any of the Contintental European languages is difficult enough—as those who have tried it will bear witness—but translation of Japanese poetry is many times more difficult—as previous essays at translation amply attest. Nearly all the best Japanese poetry limits itself to poems only five or three lines long, yet by reason of condensation, symbolism, and rich poetic associations, each of these tiny poems presents, and presents entire, a clean-cut, a moving,, and oftentimes a comprehensive poetic theme. Inasmuch as the conciseness, the suggestiveness, and the metrical form in which a poetic intuition is expressed are all essential parts of that expression, no rendering into another tongue is an adequate poetic rendering—is both true to the original and also in itself a poem— unless it reproduces that suggestiveness and that actual form as nearly as possible, at the same time that it reproduces the thought. It is because he has met all these requirements more nearly than they have been met before, and because he has achieved not merely a series of exquisite translations, but also English poems of moving power and haunting beauty, that Professor Page has put under so profound an obligation all of us who appreciate an interpretation of the rare spirit of the poetry of Japan and who love poetry for itself.

A comparison of other translations with those of Professor Page will point the quality of his work at once. Remembering that in Japan the cuckoo is the bird of Love the equivalent of the nightingale to Romeo and Juliet—listen to this rendering of a Tanka by Aston: This morn at dawn The cuckoo's cry I heard. Didst thou hear it, my Lord, Or wast thou still asleep? and then this by Professor Page: When dawn first flushed the sky I heard a cuckoo cry. My lover and my lord, Hast thou not heard? Or, again, this rhymed version of another Tanka by Chamberlain: Oh Love! who gave thee thy superfluous name? Loving and dying—is it not the same? and this from Page: Who was it gave a name To Love?—'Twas wated breath. For are not love, and death, One, and the same?

Or, finally, this passage which I quote because it not only enshrines a poignant expression but at the same time gives a hint of the swift suggestiveness of the Japanese Hokku:

There is a trinity of loveliest things: Moon, flowers—and now I go

To find the third, the snow. On which Professor Page's comment is: "One can guess meaning; but to appreciate its quality fully, one must know the double sense of a word which does not even appear in the (Japanese) poem, but which leaps to the mind of every Japanese hearer, since inevitably the "trinity of beauty" is the flowers, the moon, and the snow. And the word for snow, yuki, means also, "the going" and so, here, the dying: There is a trinity of loveliest things Moon, flowers—and now... To find the third."

Lest I seem uncritical in not also pointing out flaws, I shall have to confess that the most serious fault in the book is that there is not more of it—both of the critical text and of the translations. Even so, however, in a hundred and seventy pages of text and over two hundred poems there is much to console oneself with. There is a Japanese saying that one cannot have too many books. Not of such books certainly!

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