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Japanese Poetry by the Heart
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19033 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,145 Words |
| Author
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Graeme Wilson
Graeme Wilson, now deceased, was a British poet who made
numerous translations of poems from the Orient. |
Any practitioner of any form of magic (and what, if not magic, is the composition of poetry?) is likely to be loth to explain his practices: Indeed, such is the nature of magic that magicians may well be entitled to that forgiveness due to those who know not what they do: How then can they explain themselves?
The Why
My interest in Japanese poetry stems from my discovery; comparatively late in life, that the concepts underlying Japanese poetry (as first exemplified in the Manyoshu of A.D. 759 but first stated in Ki no Tsurayuki's preface to the Kokinshu, the First Imperial Anthology, of A.D. 905 and incessantly reiterated since that latter date) are in fact precisely what I myself have always believed to be the nature and purpose of poetry: expression "in the leaves of words" of uncontainable emotions, a matter essentially of the heart (kokoro) requiring no ratiocination or, to quote Fujiwara no Tameie, "any depth of learning in the poet." Such criteria may seem to justify mere gush but, just as the Japanese criterion for justification of any act is the intensity and quality of commitment in the actor ("be it to nothing more than the head of a dried sardine"), so equally unremitting is the requirement for emotional commitment and conviction in a would-be Japanese poet.
I have written poetry since childhood but, for some forty years, felt myself out of sympathy with the emphasis on head-thinking fundamental to the European tradition. There are, of course, some European poets whose work shows an affinity with Japanese prosody (much as Blake's poetry shows curious likenesses to Chinese Taoist verse); but it was not until my Foreign Office work took me to Japan that I began to discover a whole long-established poetic tradition that corresponded with (and indeed seemed completely to justify) all those concepts that, in my native land, had been regarded as "outlandish." My own early poetry, struggling toward Japaneseness, inevitably suffered from being written in a society where its basic beliefs were not shared either by critics or other poets. There is nothing more irritating to members of any distinctive culture than persons from another culture seeking cross-acculturation; and anyone raised in the West is, willy-nilly and inextricably, structured into the Pauline pattern of Hebraic Hellenism, crucified on Christendom. Nevertheless, this discovery of Japanese poetry was for me a kind of "homecoming."
Initially, I was especially captivated by haiku, but now consider them untranslatable out of Japanese and, as I stated in
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