Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Jane, I've been thinking about "Women in Praise of the Sacred," and about
how putting it together - chosing the works, getting to know them well,
writing about them, and finally, feeling the whole uninterrupted thread take
shape between your fingers - had to have had a significant impact on you as
a woman, a wrinter, and a person with a spiritual practice.

I know it would have left me changed. Since reading it, I've wondered how
it affected you. I guess this is my chance to ask.
  

    
>the trick seems to be to enter an alchemical attitude: to realize
that >distraction is not distraction, but the eventual gold, only known
now >in its primary state.

A wonderfully perceptive remark! Itself pure gold. Thanks.
  

    
THank *you*, Indra.

Strega, it's interesting. "Women In Praise of the Sacred" for me was a
little like the Japanese co-translation, "The Ink Dark Moon," in that in
both cases the influence occurred before the books. The books came out of
the ripening of that influence, rather than being the inception of it. But
it's true that researching "Women" gave me a crash course in women's history
that I hadn't had before, as well as in world religion. For me the most
startling things were seeing so radically how virtually every woman in teh
book had experienced some fracturing in her life, and that out of that
breakage, often devastating, the person we know emerged. That was helpful to
me, enormously, in my own relationship to the various fracturings in my own
life. Even though one gets devastated all the same, some small part of the
consciousness recalls that larger framework. And the second startling thing
was finding out about the Beguines--what I now think of as the first women's
movement, occurring in the 12th-14th century in Northern Europe. Then there
were the occasional particular realizations--one I loved, because I had
already begun writing about those lions we were speaking of above in my own
poetry, was finding that association between the goddesses of abundance and
their companions the lions. That gave me, again, a larger framework to
understand something already a theme in my own unconscious.

I think that is part of how poetry works in our lives, in general--some
current already present in us meets an outer mirror, in someone else's poem,
and it suddenly clarifies and magnifies.
  

    
> was that silence a failure, or a gift?

Oh Jane! That's so lovely!
  

    
So many things are both. That's really one of the knowledges poetry causes
us to know.

Speaking of translations, Jane, there is something that I've always
wondered. Here, let me give you two poems from The Ink Dark Moon (Love
Poems by Women of the Ancient Court of Japan):

Shikibu

Why haven't I
thought of it before?
This body,
remembering yours,
is the keepsake you left


Komachi
 
Those gifts you left have become my enemies:
without them
there might have been 
a moment's forgetting.


I can feel such a difference between the two poets whose poems you
translate here.  Shikibu "feels" stronger, more muscular, more "used" by
the world.  As I read her poems, I can feel her humor and her power.  
Shikibu feels sadder, more fragile.  (I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. But
they do feel different.)  How did you manage to get the voice into these
translated poems, so that they actually "sound" like different poets?
  

    
Ummm, which of the above "Shikibu"s in your post ought to have been
"Komachi"? I have my own sense of this, but don't want to interfere with
finding out yours before I say anything. (For newcomers, the full names of
the two poets are Ono no Komachi, who wrote around the year 850, at the
beginning of the Japanese lyric tradition, and Izumi Shikibu, who wrote
around the year 1000, at the height of the Classical era.)
  

    
Ah! I hate that!

What I meant, of course, was that to me "Komachi" feels sadder, more
fragile.  

But my exact reaction to these poets is not really the point. My point is
that these two, in The Ink Dark Moon, have very different voices. I should
think that "voice" would be hard to get into a translation and thus all
short poems by long-ago and courtly Japanese women would sound much the
same to us .... if they were all translated by the same Jane Hirshfield.

However, I do hear a difference when I read them aloud.  And I'm wondering
if you worked to give each her own particular sound, if you knew enough
about them to make their voices different, you know, as a playwright or
novelist makes characters sound different.

Would you also talk generally about the act of translating. What did you
do to get this book together?
  

    
Well, the translator (or I, when I translate, in any case) serves the poem
at hand. If the voice of the particular poet comes through, the credit
should go to the poet, not me--it means that her sensibility so infuses what
she writes that it survives even the radical uprooting of actual words,
actual sound-qualities, and comes over into the new language. I think in the
case of Komachi and Shikibu, that is what you are seeing/hearing: the flavor
of their sensibilities, the ways they encounter the world and their own
emotional responses.

For anyone who doesn't know The Ink Dark Moon, I must say right off that I'm
only half a translator--not the best way at all, but the way this book had
to be done. I know about Japanese poetry, about the Buddhist worldview that
so suffuses these poems, about the realm of eros which equally suffuses
them; I know some vocabulary, and some of the grammatical particularities of
Japanese poetic technique. But I cannot read one character: the book had a
co-translator, Mariko Aratani, to whom I was introduced by the Well's own
<green> when she was editing the magazine Yellow Silk. She was doing a
special issue on Asian themes, and called me to see if I had any work for
the issue. I said I didn't, but that she ought to get some of the Heian era
women poets' work for it. She asked me if I might do that, and I answered
that I couldn't, not knowing Japanese. Then she offered to put me in contact
with Mariko, her cousin by marriage, a native speaker of Japanese who came
to this country when she was 27 and was a weaver and pianist.

Mariko turned out to be an ideal collaborator. She got a copy of the
Collected Poems, a scholarly annotated edition, which oddly enough contained
both the poets I was interested in working on, and only those two. I had
fallen in love with Komachi and her myth and the No plays about her when I
was eighteen, studying Japanese literature in translation in college. And
Shikibu is considered the greatest woman poet in the tradition. After doing
a couple dozen poems together for Yellow Silk, we were both so happy with
the project that there was no question about continuing on. I was sure I
could find some publisher for the book, and did: Scribner's for the original
hardback, and then Vintage Classics for the paperback, which is in something
like its 14th or 15th printing now.

We would go through the book together in once a week meetings, with Mariko
giving me a sight translation and then, if the poem had any potential at all
to work out in English, me writing down the Japanese words in our alphabet,
and below each word the English possibilities, and any background cultural
notes Mariko thought to give me. She was both thoroughly versed in what I
needed to know and transparent enough that occasionally I would come back to
her, after my week working with these notes, and propose that the poem might
have a different meaning than she'd proposed; sometimes she would explain to
me why that was wrong, but other times she would agree that I was right. The
whole year we spent meeting and working this way, I felt as if I were
headily in love--the poems were so extraordinary, such a field of discovery.

(For anyone who wants a closer look at the process, there's an appendix on
translation, giving some examples, in the back of the Vintage edition; and
also a chapter about translation in my essay collection, Nine Gates:
Entering the Mind of Poetry. In the essay I go into a number of different
philosophies of translation and what it means to me in general, as well as
talking about the particular problems/excitements of doing The Ink Dark
Moon.)

Basically, I feel as though what a translator must do is immerse herself so
thoroughly in the original poem that she is steeped in its qualities--its
images, sensibility, music. Then comes a moment when all that has to be let
go, when everything vanishes, and the poem reemerges, through the
translator, in the new language. Then, of course, one double and triple and
quadruple checks that new poem; refines and tests and questions. Mariko and
I did at least three major stages of review for the whole book, and I did
many many drafts on my own along the way. Between us, I hope we made a
whole, though I still think it would be better if I myself had known both
languages. BUt I didn't, and it was a book I'd waited fifteen years fro
someone else to do...
  

    
Well, thank you for taking on the task because I get to read their poems
over and over. Sometimes one poem will spend a whole day in my mind. Has
given me a place to go during faculty meetings.  Kept my mouth shut on
soming tasty instead of open in argument.

Can you tell me what difference you see in the two? How are their
characters different to you?  How would you protray them if, say, you
would write a play that contained them both?
  

    
I am terribly bad at portraying character--one reason I write the kind of
poem I do, and not plays, or fiction. But my view of the two is I think the
mirror of yours--no doubt influenced by the No plays about Komachi I've also
read, I see her as a fiercely proto-feminist woman, able to be both undone
by desire and eros and utterly independent; sometimes filled with longing,
other times virtually sarcastic in turning a man away from her door.
According to the legends, when she grew too old to serve any longer at
court, she went into the mountains outside of the city of Kyoto (then Heian-
kyo) and lived as a half-wild crone, growing wise in the ways of Buddhism as
well as poetry. She epitomizes connection to the natural, and a wisdom
outside of convention. Shikibu has left us (probably just because she lived
150 years later) a much larger body of work, so we see more sides of her
perhaps. Both women must have been immensely strong, both broke with
convention in their youth and later, both developed artistic originality,
emotional vulnerability, and sheer intelligence to an astonishing degree--
but Shikibu in the end seems to me somehow more integrated into the society
she was part of. I hesitate to say frailer (both women show both frailty and
strength in their work, and the exposure of the frailty is one sign of the
strength), but as a simple example, she ended her life within the framework
of the society, married, a student of the dharma; while Komachi in the
stories ends her life a wild woman, and teacher to wandering priests who
encounter her on the mountain pathways.

The stories about Komachi actually differ, so one can pick the myth one
likes: broken or whole, suffering or liberated.

This abandoned house,
shining
in the mountain village--
how many nights
has the autumn moon spent here.

To me, that is a portrait of both wreckage and enlightenment. In its very
complexity rests its triumph.

In Shikibu's work, though, we find motherhood, humor, independence, fierce
eros, dharmic understanding. I'm happy to have them both, to have learned
from them both, at an early stage in my own life, some of the lineaments of
human existence.
  

    
Such an evocative description of the translating of these poems...
  

    
So I'll grab you here to ask if you found them possessing your own poetry
while you were working with them?  And can you find traces of them in your
own creativity these years later?
  

    
I think the influence came long before the translation--the influence came
when I first fell in love with the few poems I read when I was 18, that led
me to do the translation 15 years later. The feeling of a compressed image
capturing a single gesture of the heart's turning affected me immensely as a
young poet. While I was doing the translation, though, I resisted as much as
I could having it influence my work--for instance, I've never written in the
tanka form myself. It would be too easy to enter their strategies, but I am
the product of a different time, and the hybrid product of multiple poetic
traditions, and for me to work too closely to the way they worked, much as I
love it, would be a lie of a kind. So yes, the influence is there, but in
subterranean ways.

The one very clear effect that doing the translation had on my work was a
liberation from attachment to the first draft. In translating, you try many
different solutions, you play with word choice, order, grammatical voice.
Some of that spirit entered the process of my own writing, and made me a
much more joyous reviser of my own poems.

(Let me add here a technical point: trying different grammatical voices is
something that comes up in translating from the Japanese because many of the
poems aren't placed in first person, second person, third person at all. But
in English, they have to be most of the time. So to choose a voice for the
poem, in the grammatical sense, isn't taking a liberty, it's just something
that needs to be done. The same is true of choosing articles: definite
article "the", indefinite article "a," no article--all are possibilities the
translator must entertain. Doing that, you notice what a strong effect
changing an article has upon meaning. This is a lesson I've taken with me,
and tried to pass on to students, ever since: the immense power of very
small changes.)
  

    
"the immense power of very small changes"  

So  (no surprise to those of us who sweat at the desks!)  it's not just
inspiration alone!  The great  attention to detail required of a
translator is, perhaps, also required of an artist.  Some of my students
object that such attention is not natural, is artificial.  They want to
just let it flow naturally.  I tell them that art is artificial. And, of
course, that makes them mad at me. 

In Nine Gates , you write that the artificial nature of poetry allows one
to tell or hear a deeper truth.  I'm thinking of the way a poem is not
natural language. You write that poetry "looks different on a page"  to
give the  reader "instructions to enter the changed consciousness that
poetry asks." 

Can we discuss the craft side of  poetry?  Especially of your poetry? 
  

    

This is a fascinating discussion and exploration of your work, Jane, and
Carol you are doing a fabulous job of asking questions I would never have
known to ask, so I almost hesitate to interrupt this glorious flow to ask
for some clarification so that I can understand better:  what is the tanka
style you referred to in your last post, Jane?
  

    
Linda! Please ask. I welcome and encourage anyone to chime in any time.
I'd love to hear other questions. 

And thank you, Linda for your kindness.
  

    
Yes, Linda--not an interruption, a useful question. "Tanka" is the name for
the basic form Japanese poetry was written in from the seventh century until
the addition of the better-known haiku form a thousand years later--the form
is also sometimes referred to as a "waka". It consists of five "lines" of
poetry, written in measures of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, 7
syllables, 7 syllables. Rhyme in the usual sense is not present, though the
sound qualities of the words does matter. This thirty-one syllable poem is
translated freely in my versions: I kept the five lines, but not the
syllable counts, since English and Japanese "use" syllables at rather
different rates.

Carol, my response to your students' comment was instantly to think, "Not
natural? Lordy, *life* demands a concentrated attention, let alone art."
When I turned to sitting zazen, it wasn't so much to learn to pay attention
to my writing (though that was one thing that happened), it was to learn to
pay attention to existence. And that is also, I think, one effect that comes
to our lives through our relationship to art, both the art we may make and
the art we receive from others--by participating in the concentration of
art, we learn to bring that kind of attention to our daily lives. We do, of
course, sleepwalk through many of our hours and days, even years. But I
wouldn't say that's something to hold up as a desirable thing. To be fully
human is hard work, but part of being human seems to be liking to do hard
work, it it's real work, worth doing.

So sure, let's talk about craft. Poetry is art, is artifice, is *made* as
well as inspired. I love getting down in the trenches--like those tours they
give, I hear, in Paris, of "underground Paris." The waterpipes and sewers,
the foundations of the buildings, the vaults filled with bones. Yeats's rag
and bone shop was a reference to the psyche, but there's also the rebar and
mortar shop to be acknowledged.
  

    
Can you start with lining?  Lining is a big puzzle in this house.
  

    
I'm still laughing at your waterpipe and sewer picture there!
  

    
Glad you liked it!

Line length in free verse is probably an abiding mystery to all of us. And
yet, one gets a feeling when it's right or when it's wrong for any
particular poem. Poets definitely use line differently from one another.
Philip Levine likes very regular line-lengths, no doubt the residue of his
early use of syllabics (making every line of a poem the same length). Galway
Kinnell's lines, from the beginning, are highly irregular and Whitmanesque.
I think each of develops an early prediliction for how we use the line,
which might then change some over a lifetime. I know mine has. But my
relationship to it has remained the same: I see it as a kind of hybrid cue
to both ear and eye. A line break sets up a certain unit of words as
functioning together, but not necessarily an audible pause. For the pauses
and flows, I rely on my punctuation and the reader's sense of natural spoken
phrasing. So line break draws attention to certain subterranean rhythms,
sometimes smoothing a poem, sometimes roughing up its surface; but for me it
signals to the mind more than to the ear.

For people who have difficulty parsing free verse poems at all, I always
suggest that they read it aloud, ignoring the line breaks. Follow the
punctuation and the meaning first. For most poets' work, the sense of the
thing will step forward that way, by letting the ear lead. The pleasures of
the line break are more subtle. I see them as a kind of counterpoint, though
definitely an additional dollop of meaning and aesthetic pleasure. Like a
jazz drummer, they sometimes work with the other elements of the poem,
sometimes tug interestingly against them.

I always feel a great certainty about a finished poem's line breaks, though
it may be that no one else could "justify" them. The shape of the poem on
the page as a whole signals something about it: its speaking voice, its way
of evenness or crescendo, the nature of its mind. But I think that in
reading any particular poet, first we have to let the poet instruct us in
his or her own particular use of the line; then we can enjoy the
understanding of line use that they've set up.
  

    
quick note:

Free verse:  "rhythmical lines varying in length, adhering to no fixed
metrical pattern, and usually unrhymed.  The pattern is often largely
based on repetition and parallel grammatical structure" (Burto, A
dictionary of Literary, Dramatic and Cinematic Terms)
  

    

What a wonderful answer Jane.  Thank you.  You really give me something to
say to those who charge that free verse is no more than strangely lined
prose. 

I think readers, as well as writers, have early predilections for how a
poem looks on the page. When I was a little girl,for example, I didn't
want anything to do with "skinny" poems.  I liked the long, fat  kind with
story and sentiment and big tones.  I liked poems that filled a page as
does  Noyes' - The Highwayman - 

"The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight ovr the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding -
Riding - riding
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
...."


Or poems that made a large noise as in Kipling's -  If -

"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you:
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for  their doubting too;
...."

I only liked the big ones until I found Rosalie Moore's, Catalog.  Do you
remember that?

"Cats sleep fat and walk thin.
Cats, when they sleep, slump;
When they wake, pull in --
...."

It still can make me laugh.
  

    
And thinking this way makes me want to ask you what were your favorite
poems when you were very young.   

But before  I do,  I want to finish our talk of technique - of craft.
Which of the technical  poetic elements, especially which of the elements
of sound (rhyme, rhythm, etc) interests you most right now?  How does
sound play in your poetry?
  

    
I just want to pop in here to say how much I'm enjoying this online
interview.  Thank you Jane and Carol -- it's obvious that you're both
putting a lot of time and energy into creating something for our pleasure.
  

    
Thank you very much, judy! It is nice to know that there are some
listeners, and anyone reading this should feel free to ask a question, offer
an opinion, whatever.

Carol, your question interests me because it reminds me how sometimes the
poem emerges from one set of energies, sometimes from another. The technical
elements of poetry are essential, integral, fascinating, exhilarating to
me-- but they don't drive my writing. The poem comes forward as words,
rhythms, sounds, a mysterious arrival I then work with; but no technical
element is something that I might be particularly "interested" in in an
abstract sense at any given time. Even when the techniques of my poems have
shifted (say, when I began using stanza breaks after a long time of mostly
not having any), it's more something I notice after the fact: "Oh, isn't
that interesting, I've started writing poems that think with stanza breaks."
Rather than, "I think I'd like to explore the stanza break for a while." If
anything like that does happen, it is more in the level of cognitive
terrain; somewhere along the line I notice I've begun to write about the
heart, or lions, or objects, or the idea of the self as being composed of
many selves... and I get conscious enough to be interested in that as a
driving phenomenon of my work. But even then, there's always a receptive
quality to the interest. It's not an act of will, but an act of inner
listening. "Will another poem with a lion in it arrive?" "Will there be any
more objects?" For me, poem-making is always a very mysterious collaboration
of conscious and unconscious perception; of listening and making; of active
curiosity and total surrender. And for me, the receptive part is the
stronger.