14 DECEMBER 1991, Page 38

The appealing flavour of dead Herrick

John Whitworth

FROM THE MORNING OF THE WORLD: POEMS FROM THE MANYOSHU translated by Graeme Wilson HarperCollins, £l2, pp.93 The Manyoshu is the earliest surviving anthology of poems in Japanese, and is still the basis of the teaching of all poetry in Japan. Virtually every living Japanese knows about it, and can even quote from it, for poetry is fundamental to Japanese culture. That is what Graeme Wilson says in his introduction, and .I believe him. A number of my pleasant creative writing class did not know anything of the plot of King Lear, but then we don't make very good cars either.

Some of these elegant translations will already be known to readers of The Spectator. We get 76 for our £12, and I could have wished for more, but we get an illuminating introduction also which has things to say about translating poetry good things, things, that is to say, with which I agree. The main problem with most poetry in translation is that the result is so flat and uninteresting if the translation is close, and if the result is a good poem it often bears only a tangential relationship to the supposed original, as in the notorious case of Ezra Pound. Robert Conquest has a most appealing essay on the impossibility of translation (in The Abomination of Moab) where he wrestles with a single couplet from Rimbaud CO saisons, o chateaux,IQuelle ame est sans defauts?') and has to give it best.

Of course Pound's case is notorious because he did not know, or hardly knew, the language (Latin, among others) from which he was supposedly translating. I believe Christopher Logue is in the same case with Homeric Greek, and employs some needy scholar to put the stuff into English first. There is no real excuse for this practice, except to put bread into the mouths of Pound, Logue and the nameless scholar, but the problem remains. Suppos- ing you do know what this foreign stuff means, and you want other people to know, how do you go about it?

One way is to be absolutely literal, in other words to supply a crib for those with some knowledge of the language. I am an O level French man and can get something (well, quite a lot Actually) out of Baudelaire and Rimbaud with the aid of Penguin cribs at the bottom of the page.

But with Japanese it is different. Perhaps if we do not know enough, then we should consent to go without, but this seems rather ascetic. What is to be done with those curious syllabic forms, which, as Graeme Wilson rightly says, have an unfortunately comic effect in English? Wendy Cope exploits it in Strugnell's haiku ('The cherry blossom/ In my neighbour's garden — Oh/ It looks really nice.') Wilson ditches them in favour of a rhyming sextain (abcbdb) which has a flavour of Herrick about it. Is the flavour of Herrick right? I don't know, but it can be appealing.

You claim to be so modest And I will not say you lie, But no one wears a scarlet skirt Expecting to get by Without attracting notice From the quicker kinds of eye.

Sometimes it is Emily Dickinson (long

words in short lines):

If it were death to love, Dear love, believe you me, A thousand times a thousand times I shall have lived to see

My mortal flesh bear witness

To its immortality.

Something not quite right about that third line, don't you think? I'd mend it if I could, but I don't see how to do it.

Wilson achieves some fine phrases (`the sibilance of snow') and a few less felicitous hyphenations (`lie-champagne', 'Brief- swept'). I wonder if all these echoes (there's Housman there too) don't naturalise what should be strange, and when he says 'Linguists are not poets and scholars are not poets' he sounds a trifle peremptory, for surely they may be? Or at least poets may be the better for being scholars. My own attempts on Latin would be better if I knew the language better. Or so I think.

But in essence Wilson is right. What is the finest poem/translation in English? `Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night/ Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:' I gather there is no stone in old Khayyam, and Fitzgerald had second, chaster thoughts, closer to his original. But not half such good poetry.