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TRANSCRIPT
Takeda 1
A Word’s Power: The Additional “Snow” in a Japanese
Pre-Feminist Poem’s English Translation
Noriko Takeda
Hiroshima University, Japan
1. YOSANO Akiko’s cherry blossoms poem
The modernization of Japanese lyricism was executed
principally by a Japanese female poet named YOSANO Akiko.
Her first collected poems were given the general title
Midaregami (Tangled Hair) and published in 1901. As is
suggested by the dramatic title, Tangled Hair, Yosano’s
collection inaugurated a powerful voice for symbolically
expressing the sensibility of Japanese individuals under
waves of global modernization. With meaningful words such
as “stars,” “fans,” and “blossoms,” her first collection
emits an enlightening force with the potential--or at least
an engaging illusion--to dissipate any imposed limitedness.
At the time Tangled Hair was published, Japanese
modernization was being propelled by the government in the
form of drastic Westernization. The official reformation
had formally started with the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
The Restoration set up a capitalistic society within the
framework of a constitutional monarchy, and thus negated
the traditional feudal system. The old regime based on
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agricultural communities had existed for about 700 years,
officially since 1192, under the hegemony of succeeding
Shogunates, i.e., Generals, who held real power in place of
the symbolic emperor.
The aesthetic vehicle for conveying the Japanese
psyche under the feudal regime was the 31-syllable waka,
i.e., Japanese song. The waka represents the matrix of the
17-syllable haiku that was shaped as a poetic genre in the
early Edo period (1603-1867). At the publication of Yosano
Akiko’s collection, the waka had also enjoyed a history of
domination in Japanese literature for around 1,000 years;
the first court anthology, entitled Kokin waka shu and
established in about 913, authorized the waka as a primary
instrument for transmitting the Japanese mind. The
millennium of dominance includes the epoch of ancient
monarchy that decided upon the waka’s elegant conventions
around the imperial court, before the inception of the
military regime. The restricted form of 31 syllables
simulates Japan’s small land to be cooperatively cultivated
by communal groups of rice croppers. The minuscule poetic
form was actually not monopolized by the aristocrats;
according to Anthony Thwaite, the waka was, and still is,
“a poetry for everyone” in Japan for recording everyday
sensation (xxxvii). Haruko Wakita delineates the waka’s
popularization all over the country during the feudal
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period (132). Professionals or amateurs, the old poets were
nonetheless required to follow the waka’s conventional
demand for aristocratic elegance. Prestigious but
democratic, the waka symbolized imperial power coming from
one privileged family, which was ascribed to a source of
divine if naturalistic sunlight.1 The country of a
restricted size is based on a natural fusion and equality.
Yosano Akiko’s modern/modernist originality resides in
an idiolectal innovation of the traditional waka, which was
renamed tanka, meaning short song. Her reformation
revivified the waka in codified classicism with a
diversified coloration as seen in luminous expressions such
as “my surging blood” and “To whom should I speak / Of the
color of crimson.”
Yosano’s new tanka poems mobilized, in fact, a fresh
vocabulary in the conventional 31 syllables. Though keeping
the old waka’s syllabic framework, the female poet broke up
the rule of the elegant waka that had strictly limited the
number of usable words.2 She was successful in conveying
the new women’s liberated feelings with provocative words
such as “breasts,” “skin,” and “blood.” The poet even
presented an audacious shot of the author-speaker’s naked
body, though under a translucent veil of aestheticism based
on figurative indirectness--for example, the comparison of
the speaker’s female body to oceanic waves. Through Yosano,
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the traditional waka in a monochrome sentimentality was
changed into an active body with stimulations. The waka was
transformed from a shadowy sign of arbitrary conventions to
an individual body as “objet” for transgressive
signification. The transgression should be ascribed to the
female poet’s critical insight into the feudal system’s
oppression and exploitation, resorting to the community’s
natural tendency for egalitarian fusion. Any sense of
oneself is opposed to the collective identity. For the
poet, the women to be enhanced by her poetry represented a
symbolic group of scapegoats set for the alleviation of
communal pressure, even if its effect is temporary. The
women continue the cycle of absorption and production. In a
sense, just like Prometheus, the female poet desired to
appropriate all the ubiquitous sunlight into her
illuminating language for a new societal connection; she is
equally a symbol of communal oneness. The equalizing
sunshine needs to shift from top-down to bottom-up,
symbolized by the tangled hair coming from Yosano’s female
speaker. The protesting poet must be legitimated as a
feminist, though her challenging poetry was published
before the currency of the concept “feminist” in Japan.3
She remarkably contributed to a catharsis of the Japanese
society by the individualistic scrambling with her
energetic tanka poems. Her first tanka collection, Tangled
Takeda 5
Hair, “was an immediate sensation and sold an unprecedented
number of copies for a book of poetry” (Keene 24). The
wonderful collection is, however, not a heavenly gift to a
solitary genius; it is an anticipated fruit of the efforts
of the poetic reformers including Yosano Akiko’s teacher
and partner, Yosano Tekkan. The collection’s success owes
much to Tekkan’s creative editing.4
The volume, Tangled Hair, bursts with the combined 399
tanka poems, each of which is exclusively self-assertive,
paradoxically within the identical framework of 31
syllables. From another angle, Yosano Akiko’s collection of
399 short tanka pieces constitutes itself as a unified long
poem modeled on Western works. There existed, in fact, a
group of her contemporary poets who abandoned the waka’s
syllabic framework to create a new-styled long poem under a
direct influence of Western models. Until the conscious
reformation of Japanese poetics triggered by the 1868
Restoration, the poetic domain of the country was shared by
the waka, designated as “song,” and the kanshi as “poem”
(Seki 8); the kanshi represents the works written in
classical Chinese by intelligentsia.
Yosano’s new art is kaleidoscopic, reflecting the
ethos of the time. Her long if crystallized first
collection, Tangled Hair, can be summed up by a suite of
single words such as “passion,” “protest,” “overheat,”
Takeda 6
“redness,” “explosion,” and “positivity.” The individual
words simulate each tanka piece, the collection’s general
title, “Tangled Hair,” its six chapters named “Enji-
Murasaki (Crimson-Purple),” “Ship of Lotus Flowers,” “White
Lily,” “Young Wife of Twenty,” “The Dancers,” and “The
Spring Thought,” as well as the author-speaker’s
distinctive self that is subjectively and naturalistically
endeared by herself in the modern individualistic
consciousness. One of the representative poems that
symbolize the positivity of the Yosano collection’s
euphoric--that is, individual and collective--world is as
follows:
淸水へ祇園をよぎる櫻月夜こよひ逄ふ人みなうつくしき
My literal translation of the above poem is:
Passing the town of Gion to go to Kiyomizudera temple, I
have found all the pedestrians beautiful in the moonlight
which comes through cherry blossoms in full bloom.
From another angle, the above positive poem
grotesquely distorts all the faces of the pedestrians; from
a conventional point of view, all of them could not easily
become “beautiful” without some sheer miracle which does
Takeda 7
not appear to be mentioned in the poem. The seemingly-
exaggerated humanism is not, however, imposing nor
irrelevant; the energy of the speaker’s joyous celebration
is sublimated into a transcendental light from the cosmic
body, i.e., the moonlight coming down onto earth for the
pedestrians through the nightly flowers. Prevailing in
Japan, the cherry flowers have embellished and consecrated
the springtime. Simulating the lachrymal Madonna, the
flowers in a whitish color tinted with pink represent one
of the most beloved symbols in the old waka. The poet
Yosano reinforces a divine power, by combining the cherry
blossom’s influential power and the seraphic moonlight. The
poem’s central word, “櫻月夜” (the night with the moon and
cherry blossoms), is of the poet’s coinage, fusing the
moonlight and the flowers in one word form. The suggestive
place names, “淸水” (“Kiyomizu”) and “祇園” (“Gion”), help to
strengthen the cosmic power drawn into the central word
linking the blossoms and the moon. “Kiyomizu” indicates the
place around Kiyomizudera temple, famous for its
magnificent platform set up on a steep mountainside,
whereas “Gion” corresponds to a representative town for
seeking pleasure and liveliness. Expressed by the full-
fledged Chinese ideograms, the place names embody a source
of miraculous potential for completing the cosmos.
The culminant heavenly light is caught by the walking
Takeda 8
viewers, including the author-speaker herself whose glances
send the assimilated/reflected light back into the sky. The
advancing poem is a symbol of salvation, and the salvation
eternally circulates; the earthly pedestrians absorb the
divine beauty of the transcendental light, and the
absorption endlessly continues in a cyclical give-and-take.
Fundamentally, in that encircling and thus unifiable world,
everyone reasonably becomes beautiful. The circular
movement is confirmed by the ending adjective “うつくしき”
(“beautiful”); the adjective is ungrammatically in a form
to be connected to substantives, thus iteratively referring
back to the preceding word for pedestrians, “人.” The
author-speaker’s apparently-outrageous admiration for the
pedestrians only causes the readers some sense of pain. The
pain emerges from the reader’s sympathy with the young
female speaker’s struggle for salvation by making the most
of the waka’s strong convention; she is courageously trying
to break up, or rather, complete the waka’s small framework
of authenticity. “I” and “We” are both cooperative and
conflictive, just like idiolect and sociolect.
2. H. H. Honda’s English translation with the additional
“snow”
In an English translation of the above poem,
nevertheless, the apparently negative word “snow” is found.
Takeda 9
This is antagonistic to the Yosano original’s absolute
positivity which is based on the eternity of spring beauty.
Decisively, the word that directly corresponds to the word
“snow” cannot be found in Yosano’s original work. “Snow,”
hence, arouses suspicion; is it the negative term intended
to innovate the Yosano original’s overdetermined picture in
its full spring-ness? Or, has the translator just
ironically interpreted the young author’s apparently-
optimistic tribute to everyone? The translation by a
Japanese male scholar, Heihachiro Honda (1893-1973), is as
follows:5
The cherries and the moon, how sweet!
So are the folks this night I meet,
As I to Kiyomizu go
Through Gion bright with lovely snow.
At first reading, the conclusive word “snow” must be
taken as only additional. The extra word spoils the
completeness of the Yosano original with its freezing
fatality. As a symbol of the flamboyant collection, the
poem represents a cheerful applause to the spring cherry
blossoms, as well as to the common viewers, all of whom are
extolled to be “beautiful” from a humanitarian/feminist
point of view. Placed at the ending, the comprehensive
Takeda 10
adjective “beautiful” is a synonym of “immortal.” The minus
image of the temple and the night is engulfed by the
conclusive qualification for explosion. In the
translation’s restricted framework, consisting only of four
rhymed verses, the additional word “snow” that designates
winter at the ending of the whole text easily draws the
reader’s attention in a negative way; the word pushes
him/her into a different world of Japanese conventional
transience. The deathly “snow” appears to deny the Yosano
original’s delightful world which challenges societal
restrictions. The extra word also seems to damage the
crystalline form of the translation itself that embodies a
four-cornered world; taking a square shape, the text
consists of four verses in tetrameter, reinforced by the
sensually-animating adjective “sweet” with an exclamation
mark.
The seemingly far-fetched word “snow” may not be
rejected as a bad or wrong translation, nonetheless, once
the Japanese original’s intertextual connection with one of
A. E. Housman’s poems is revealed. The revelation occurs,
indeed, through the intermediary of Honda’s translation
with the very far-fetched word “snow.” The word itself is
poetic and suggestive. Without any title, but numbered as
II, the Housman poem is in A Shropshire Lad (1896),
connecting “the cherry” in full “bloom” to “snow.” The text
Takeda 11
is as follows:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Various features common and essential to both the above
English poem and the Honda translation of Yosano’s Japanese
original can be immediately recognized: both are based on
four rhymed lines in tetrameter, both end with the word
“snow,” both the texts’ second-to-last lines are awkwardly
terminated with the intransitive verb “go,” and in both
poems the cherries are embellished by “snow,” as well as
qualified by the adjective “lovely(-loveliest).” The
Takeda 12
unstable line-stop by its ending verb without a direct
object produces a harassing up-and-down melody that
entangles silence: “I will go / To see. . . .” The abrupt
tone is characteristic of the Housman poetry, adding to it
a refreshing modernity. John Sparrow indicates Housman’s
naïve and thus all the more charming wording in his
introduction to the Collected Poems of A. E. Housman in the
following comment: “[Housman’s poems] express a few
unsophisticated moods in a few pronounced and simple
rhythms” (10). In his translated work, The Poetry of Yosano
Akiko, which includes his apparently far-fetched
translation with the word “snow,” H. H. Honda does not
mention the Housman poem. Nevertheless, the evident
similarity between the Housman poem and the Honda
translation makes the reader think of the two texts’
intertextual connection without difficulty; precisely, the
connection represents an influence of the Housman poem
(published in 1896) on the Honda translation (published in
1957). The oldest Japanese translation of A Shropshire Lad
in a book form which includes Housman’s cherry poem dates
back to 1940; the translator is Tatsuzo Hijikata (3-4).
Furthermore, after the Second World War, which ended in
1945, it may not have been difficult to read the Housman
poem’s original in English because of the resumed
internationalization in Japan. According to Hatsue Kawamura
Takeda 13
(224-25), the translator Honda was versed in English poetry
as a teacher of the language at some Japanese universities.
The English poem may well be considered his translation’s
model.
An apparent reason for H. H. Honda’s connecting of the
two original poems is that the Japanese poem’s summarizing
word may be “love,” whereas the English poem begins with
the word “Love(liest),” insinuating the speaker’s affection
toward the cherry, the poem’s vegetal heroine.
Incidentally, Honda designates the Japanese poet as “A
Poetess of Love” in the introduction to his translated work
which includes the translation with “snow,” and the poet’s
cherry blossoms piece in question is one of her
representative humanitarian poems. On the other hand, the
Housman poem’s primary symbol is the white cherry blossoms,
representing purity, while the Japanese poem begins with
the ideogram “淸,” signifying purification. Another reason
is that the English poem represents a triple form in three
stanzas, each in four verses, as if containing three
separate texts; according to Hatsue Kawamura, Honda thought
that a tanka poem should be translated into English as a
four-line verse (227). The four lines remind one, indeed,
of the waka’s syllabic division into five parts. The
English poem’s Trinitarian form may have suggested to Honda
the playful connecting of the two original poems by his own
Takeda 14
translation that may equally be viewed as a creative and
original work. His playfulness can also be detected in the
contrast between the Japanese original’s first word “淸水,”
which literally means “pure water,” and the translation’s
final word, “snow,” representing a wintry form of water. It
is more conceivable that the Honda translation should have
been modeled on the Housman poem than that the translation
might have respectfully followed the Yosano original.
3. The poetic Trinity
With scrutiny, however, it is revealed that H. H.
Honda’s seemingly far-fetched translation indicates an
unnoticeable but essential connection between the Yosano
original and the Housman poem, presumably without a
relationship of influence. The two texts’ formal features
are too distinctive to suspect any direct interaction
between them.6 The Honda translation suggests, nonetheless,
three kinds of accidental but fundamental commonalities
concerning the two original poems. First, the Housman
poem’s latent syllabic structure, that is, 32 syllables in
the first two stanzas and 31 syllables in the final stanza,
is closely connected to that of the Japanese waka in 31
syllables. Second, the two poems’ mutual theme may be
summarized as follows: “Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may.”
The Japanese poem enhances a precious moment of passing
Takeda 15
blooming in springtime, whereas the English poem
foregrounds the speaker’s will to live out his privileged
moments; the moments are symbolized by the white cherry
blossoms in this transient world. According to B. J.
Leggett (Land 12-15), among 63 lyrics of Housman’s A
Shropshire Lad, the lyric II on the cherry flowers
specifically emphasizes the “transience which characterizes
existence” (Land 12), a strong motif of A Shropshire Lad.
Different from the English poem whose transient theme is
evident, the Japanese poem almost completely dissimulates a
hint for inconstancy with its dazzling flamboyance. It is
the Honda translation that turns the reader’s eye to a
minimal shadow of transience in the Japanese poem. Since
the pedestrians are all mortal, the speaker prays for their
eternal beauty. The distance between Honda’s English
translation and the Japanese original is, hence, longer
than that between the translation and Housman’s English
poem, even though the length is suggestive and cathartic.
Third, the two original poems share an obsession of
calculation: Housman’s 12-line verse in the triplex four-
line stanzas takes the speaker-author’s reckoning of his
age as its central part, whereas the Yosano poem is based
on the author’s syllabic count superimposed on the poem
speaker’s recognition of each pedestrian’s face. The two
texts’ obsession for arithmetic is preserved by the Honda
Takeda 16
translation that is made up of the symmetrical four rhymed
lines, in eight syllables each.7 The emotional reckoning
leads to that of the flowers and of the people born in this
world. The reckoning represents an inveterate desire of the
modern self wishing to be endlessly expanded, dissipating
the self’s existential dilemma as an isolated whole. It
also embodies an incantation for privileging this passing
moment and one’s mortal self.
In traditional Japanese poetics, the ambivalent cherry
flowers symbolize the evanescence of human life, and
especially that of feminine life, while simultaneously
celebrating the rebirth of springtime. An old court lady
named Ono no Komachi, who was renowned for both her poetic
talent and physical beauty, wrote the following waka:
“The lustre of the flowers / Has faded and passed, / While
on idle things / I have spent my body / In the world’s long
rains” (Bownas and Thwaite 84). In the old waka, the word
“flower(s)” (“hana”) exclusively designates cherry
blossoms. The popular flowers still retain a symbolic
status in Japan. On the other hand, Yosano’s poem, the
original of the Honda translation, competitively emphasizes
the living force of cherry blossoms, by calling them
“sakura.” “Sakura” is the cherry flowers’ specific name,
with the morpheme “saku” meaning “bloom.” The poet keeps
the uniqueness of the cherry blossoms that live their
Takeda 17
prime, without dissolving them into a floral generality
represented by the unifying term that designates all the
flowers, “hana.” Yosano’s cherry blossoms even use death
for life, as with T. S. Eliot’s “Lilacs” in “the cruellest
month.”
In contrast, cherry blossoms have not constituted a
thematic topos in Anglo-American poetry. The white flowers
are not Christian symbols. In A Concordance to Milton’s
English Poetry, the entry of “cherry” is not seen.
According to A Concordance to the Writings of William
Blake, the poet mentions the cherry fruits, but not flowers
(327). The English cherries for red fruits are different
from the Japanese flowering cherries for blossom viewing
(Suzuki 68). A. E. Housman’s cherry poem may be viewed as a
riposte to the natural beauty of cherry fruits developed in
the Romantic tradition, concretized by William Wordsworth
as “Feasting at the Cherry Tree” and “Is red as a ripe
cherry” (Cooper 133).8 Housman’s Victorian poem seeks for
an originality of the unnoticed white flowers and their
exoticism. The flowers are, in fact, ambivalent; they
represent life and death, spirituality and physicality,
heartiness and skinniness, bridal veil and winding sheet,
or virile power and virginal potential.
In the Trinitarian 3-stanza verse, the English poet
foregrounds the transience of white flowers that is
Takeda 18
connected to the “Eastertide” spirit from the tradition of
Christianity. The word “Easter” includes, however, the
pagan “East.” The new religious symbol, the white cherry
blossoms, is an ironically-reversed version of the full-
grown red fruits, the metamorphoses of Eve and Adam’s red
apple. It may be possible to trace the Japanese waka’s
influence on the ambiguous Housman poem presumably through
various English translations which were available at that
time.9 In A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E. Cirlot, “the
cherry-tree” is classified into “Chinese symbology” (350).
The newly developed flowers are, however, chastely
harmonious with the English lyrical tradition. The purified
whiteness leads to the French symbolist poet Stéphane
Mallarmé’s celestial beauty. It can be suspected that
Housman’s flowery whiteness is shadowed on Ezra Pound’s
representative Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro”
(1916): “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; /
Petals on a wet, black bough.” The Pound poem shows a trace
of influence from a Japanese haiku poem (Brooks and Warren
71-72). Shropshire’s cherry flowers blooming in early
spring with an image of snow may be an apparition, or
imaginative invention of Housman; according to John Bayley,
the poet “had never spent much time in Shropshire, and that
the details in his poems were ‘sometimes quite wrong’” (3).
Incidentally, cherries and roses belong to the same
Takeda 19
botanical family.
H. H. Honda’s translation with “snow” embodies a
condensed fusion of the Yosano original and the Housman
poem. The hornlike, obtrusive word “snow” is a foregrounded
sign which condenses the three poetic works, including the
rhymed translation. The “extra” word is, in fact, symbolic,
inviting the reader into an ever-growing world of imagery
and concepts.
It should be affirmed that, under a heap of forwarding
presence, the Yosano original conceals a shadow of winter
snow. The Yosano poem refers to the beauty of spring,
thereby finally reaching the contrastive winter.
Nevertheless, in the poem’s overall vividness supported by
the individualistic flower name “sakura,” the reader’s
evoked image of dead winter is slight and temporary. The
momentary image pinpoints, however, a traditional Japanese
sense of beauty summed up by the compound word “snow-moon-
flower”(“雪月花”). The word symbolizes the seasonal beauty
of the hilly but oceanic country, Japan, psychologically
nuanced by the Shintoist/Buddhist notion of transience.
Moreover, the word posits the seasonal division as
dissoluble, suggesting a Japanese tendency for overall
fusion enhanced by the Yosano original. From another angle,
Yosano’s modern compound, “櫻月夜,” may be viewed as the
poet’s conscious revision of the old one, “雪月花.” Keeping
Takeda 20
the traditional waka’s syllabic framework, the Yosano poem
conceives at its depth a long history of Japanese
classicism. The intralingual/intertextual basis embodies a
fertilizing springboard for Yosano’s poetics of
unexpectedness, optimism, and salvation. The Honda
translation has supplied a clear image of snow to the
Yosano original, so that the original reveals a popularized
beauty of “雪月花” (“snow-moon-flower”). A translation is
generally an interpretation of the original work which
indicates the original’s potential of signification, as is
suggested by C. S. Peirce.10 The Honda translation’s
additional word “snow” is the peak of a verbal pyramid onto
which the poetic Trinity sublimates itself.
4. A poem as a flowering word
From a word, a cosmos of imagery blooms, as is
suggested by Stéphane Mallarmé (368).11 In making a
syntactical sequence, the language user easily recognizes
that a single word, as a formal and semantic unit, has an
endless potential of signification, depending on the
combined words. A single word makes no sense, or rather,
means everything. On the other hand, a poem represents a
unified form of semantic parallelism and may thus be viewed
as a development of a single word. The notion of the poem
as a word is also presented by Jurij Lotman,12 based on
Takeda 21
Roman Jakobson’s following thesis: “The poetic function
projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection into the axis of combination” (27). Jakobson
suggests that a poem is only a succession of the equivalent
words. A poem’s semantic parallelism owes much to the
formal and semantic repetition characteristic of the poetry
genre, and contributes to the condensation of each poem to
be reduced to a single word in the reader’s interpretative
consciousness based on linguistic knowledge. The typical
shortness of poetry, which is indicated by E. A. Poe, also
pushes a poem into an isolated world/word of unity.13
As for Yosano’s original poem, it may be viewed as a
flowering expansion of the single word “love,” whereas A.
E. Housman’s English poem can be considered a development
of the word “passion” in the double meaning of love and
suffering. The Housman poem is numbered as II, using the
coupling number, and the symbolic white flowers are
pregnantly ambiguous, contrastively evoking bloody scenes
along with the suspicious expressions “Is hung,” “score,”
“little room,” and “hung with snow.”
The function of the translated word “snow” is
multilateral; the apparently extra word should be counted
as a summary of the two original poems--the Yosano tanka
and the Housman poem--while simultaneously claiming the
importance of translation, this indispensable medium of
Takeda 22
communication and understanding. It also emphasizes that a
literary text’s basis is no other than a word, exemplified
by the symbolic “snow” for eliciting totality. The “snow”
in overall appropriation refers to the incessantly-growing
territory of poetry as the interactive combination of the
author’s original writing and the reader’s re-creative
interpretation as indicated by William Empson. In his Seven
Types of Ambiguity, Empson accepts the reader’s
compensating “invention” as “the essential fact about the
poetical use of language” (25). The invention corresponds
to “a mental need for sense-giving configuration” (Valdés
6). The crystallizing/foregrounded word “snow” may also be
recognized as a comprehensive poetic form, i.e., a complete
poem. At least, the word represents an intertextual and
thus melting node of the three related poetic works.
In this transient but encircling world, real snow
represents a seed of spring, or rather, a crystallization
of spring. In the same vein, the extra word “snow”
designates the powerful if paradoxical advancement of the
pre-feminist Yosano Akiko’s world of fullness; the ironical
word is endowed with ontological positivity as a verbal
form, despite its concept of fugitiveness. The
circular/sunlit world’s struggling advancement was for the
reformation of the conventional waka under a prevailing
impact of Western models. Though fictional, language has
Takeda 23
also the force to change this real world that concurrently
affects and stimulates language. As a translation of the
spring in the image of erupting water, the saturated word
“snow” conclusively, if temporarily, symbolizes a maternal
repository of powerful creativity.
Notes
1 Before the end of World War II, the imperial family
was traced back to the ancestral goddess representing the
sun (“Amaterasu omikami”).
2 For the waka’s limitation of its vocabulary, see
Kawamoto 85-87.
3 Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair initiated the feminist
movement in the following liberalist era, Taisho (1912-26).
The poet’s influence is clear in the symbolic expression of
the movement’s manifesto: “Once women represented the
sunshine” (“Seito”).
4 According to Kumi Okina (23), Tekkan may have been
concerned with the order of the poems and the selection of
titles.
5 The translator’s first long name, Heihachiro, is
abbreviated as H. H., perhaps simulating the Western
combination of first and middle names.
6 To date, I have not seen any indication of a
possible literary influence between A. E. Housman and
Takeda 24
Yosano.
7 Concerning the Housman poem’s second scholarly
stanza, B. J. Leggett states that “There is more attention
to arithmetic than to feeling here” (The Poetic Art 48).
8 Tomio Suzuki indicates Shakespeare’s usage of cherry
fruits (66), to which Housman’s flowery image may be traced
back.
9 For the Japanese waka’s translations published by
English scholars in the 19th century, see Kawamura 71-171.
10 David Savan indicates that “according to Peirce,
interpretation is translation” (17).
11 In his “Crise de vers,” Mallarmé states: “Je dis:
une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun
contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices
sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de
tous bouquets” (368).
12 See Lotman 86-87, 165, 168, and 185.
13 For further discussion on a poem as a word, see
Takeda 11-17.
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