Invitation to Comment

Pardon my recent disappearance. 150 exams and 44 papers just hit my inbox, and I need to slog through them before I can return to second-tier hobbies (first tier this semester includes actually writing my dissertation). In the meantime, I heartily encourage whoever is following this blog (both of you?) to comment on any of the translations posted so far. Hopefully, I'll be able to finish up the first stanza next week. I told you it would be slow!

The Continuing Adventures of the Redcrosse Knight through the First Stanza

その身を固めた頑丈な鎧と銀の盾には
幾多の血腥い戦場のむごい記念の
深くくぼんだ古い打ち傷が残っていたが
武器は今まで一度も振るったことはなかった。

sono mi o katameta ganjouna yoroi to gin no tate ni wa
ikuta no chinamagusai senjou no mugoi kinen no
fukaku kubonda furui uchikizu ga nokotteita ga
buki wa ima made ichido mo furutta koto wa nakatta.

And many trips to many dictionaries later, there is the second sentence of the first stanza. Only four more verse lines to go!

訳しにくい, but I will try to translate:

(rough version)
as for his body hardened by sturdy armor and silver shield
deeply dented old wounds of
the cruel commemorations of many bloody battlefields
remained but
as for his weapons until now he had never swung them.

You may recall the original version:

Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:

Japanese syntax isn't always clear to me, and I'll have to think more about what exactly is happening here. Perhaps apposition is not something Japanese easily does, given the string of の-clauses used to translate the second and third lines (in reverse order). I assume the past tense verb 固めた, hardened, is being used in some sort of adjectival (past participial?) sense here and that the に is instrumental. 血腥い, smelling of raw fish or blood, was a real pain in the ass. I'm doubtful it's really a word in that form, and I doubt even more that the average Japanese person can identify 腥 (my friend Sonoko couldn't, at least). The 血 is probably there to reinforce the "bloody" meaning. Again, there are some verbs in kana here that have kanji forms, such as 惨い and 凹んだ. 振るったことはなかった is my first encounter with what I believe to be a Japanese pluperfect. I was genuinely excited to figure this out, though I wonder why the topic particle and not the subject particle is used?

Argument Transliteration

It occurred to me that some people may be reading this who don't know Japanese. I don't know why you'd be interested to do so, but I am flattered and will have to assume you would want to know the Japanese transliteration (romaji) for whatever I translate. I neglected to do that for the argument:

真の神聖の守護者は
汚らわし迷妄を打ち破り、
偽善はこの守護者を陥れようと
その館へいざなう。

makoto no shinsei no shugosha wa
kegarawashi meimou o uchiyaburi,
gizen wa kono shugosha o otoshiireyou to
sono yakata e izanau.

I could do this in kana, too, if anyone wants.. perhaps either those who are studying along with me or those who might like to offer advice but need to know how I'm reading the kanji.

Incidentally, the name of the salon where I used to get my hair cut when I was living in Japan was Makoto. Any idea if that might be related to the above character? It was Hawaiian-themed. They gave me coconut-flavored coffee and a massage with my haircut. I loved it.

Argument

I spent the last few days grading papers. As usual, it totally demoralized and nearly killed me (or at least my will to live). So, to shake things up a bit, I went back to have a look at the "argument" (introductory verse that summarizes the canto) of Canto 1, which, even in English, is fairly convoluted, and provokes gloss and commentary in the Japanese:

The Patron of true Holinesse,
Foule Errour doth defeate:
Hypocrisie him to entrappe,
Doth to his home entreate.

The translator seemed not to know whether to transliterate the names "Errour" and "Hypocrisie" into katakana (which appears in the notes and as furigana) or analogous kanji. I respect the dilemma, since these are just as much characters as they are allegorical representations. Calling a creature "Error" in English draws our attention right away to the connotation. A faithful Japanese rendering would be, as indicated by a furigana gloss, エラー. But "eraa" doesn't mean anything in Japanese, so the regular text uses 迷妄, めいもう, illusion, fallacy, delusion. Even "Holinesse" gets the kana treatment. The transliteration of "Hypocrisie," however, is too horrible to behold, and I dare not repeat it here.

The Japanese argument:

真の神聖の守護者は
汚らわし迷妄を打ち破り、
偽善はこの守護者を陥れようと
その館へいざなう。

I will try to render this in English:

The helper of true holiness,
Foul fallacy defeats;
Hypocrisy, this guardian to trap,
To his mansion tempts.

That's my attempt to reproduce some of the poeticism while still being quasi-literal in the translation. More boringly, this sentence says:

As for the guardian of true holiness, he defeats dirty illusion; as for hypocrisy, he intends to entrap this guardian by luring him to his palace.

Actually, it's difficult to translate completely literally without it sounding stilted. Spenser's original English is surprisingly close to the Japanese, even in word order. This is no doubt because Spenser is affecting an archaic style, which would tend to be more Germanic (German, like Japanese, has a SOV word order).

真 is glossed as まこと, even though it's just ま in the dictionary. If I'm interpreting the entry correctly, まこと is an older or obsolete reading of the kanji. It's interesting that it would even get furigana, as if the experience of reading the poem requires one to archaize, even mentally, familiar words, so the feel of the original is maintained (impossible in the ideogrammatic Japanese language, since an older reading is not noted by any visible morphology). We are, in effect, being told how to read the damn thing. 守護者 seems to be a word invented by the translator, though the meaning is clear enough. 陥れようとその館へいざなう sent me to the grammar guide, where I discovered that the volitional form of a verb plus と and another verb indicates that something is "about to happen" or is an intention. I had to confirm the meaning of 陥れる, which I thought was going to throw me, but it turned out to be a normal godan verb (that, naturally, looks like either a passive/potential or an ichidan verb). It is an unusual form, I think, but perhaps it's just a transitive form on the 'e' line. I don't know why いざなう is in kana or why it's in plain form.

By the way, I am using the following websites to (consistently) supplement my Kanji Learner's Dictionary and Kanji Fast Finder:

http://jisho.org/
http://www.saiga-jp.com/kanji_dictionary.html

Thanks also to the various Wikipedia articles on Japanese grammar and verb conjugations.

Table of Contents entry for Book 1

Incidentally, I also translated, as a first exercise, the entry in the Table of Contents for Book 1, which is also the full name of the book. In English, this is:

THE LEGENDE OF THE
KNIGHT OF THE RED CROSSE,
OR
OF HOLINESSE.

In Japanese:

赤十字の騎士の神聖の物語

Transliteration:

akajuuji no kishi no shinsei no monogatari

"Aka" means red. "Juu" usually means ten, but, in this case, retains its older meaning, cross. With the "ji" suffix, it becomes crucifix. Interestingly, "Akajuuji" is the word for the Red Cross Society, so I suppose St. George ought to be driving an ambulance rather than advancing a steed. "Shinsei" means either holy, as an adjective, or holiness, as an abstract noun--I think the latter. "Monogatari" is the common word for story (maybe you know the Tale of Genji or Genji no Monogatari). Remember that の is the possessive particle (also used for objective genitives), so this is an easy phrase that means:

The story of the holiness of the knight of the red cross.

Reading it backwards helps, since Japanese word order (and, therefore, the order of meaning) is the reverse of that of English. You might also read it as the Red Cross Knight of Holiness Story. Whatever.

Book 1. Canto 1. Line 1. That's FQ 1.1.1.

The translator was clearly trying to be poetic, using difficult kanji and words that are even archaisms in Japanese, in order to imitate Spenser's medievalizing style.

This is the first stanza of the FQ:

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

I cut and pasted this from Renascence Editions, which is presumably good enough, though the initial 'A' was cut off (it was probably in a calligraphic image).

Here is the first line in Japanese:

気高い騎士が野に駒を進めていた。

English transliteration:

kedakai kishi ga no ni koma o susumeteita.

Kanji explanation (from memory, not dictionary):

気 -- mind, spirit, intention (looks like 氣 in traditional Japanese and Chinese, 气 in modern Chinese)
高 -- high
い -- this is an adjective that means "noble" or "high-minded" ergo "gentle" (there's even a note showing the English word)
騎 -- horseman
士 -- military professional suffix, so the compound together is "knight"
が -- subject particle
野 -- field
に -- in this case, a sort of locative indicator particle
駒 -- an old fashioned word for horse, which today means "chess piece"
を -- direct object particle
進 -- verb root for "to advance"
め -- 'e' row stem (or base or root I don't f*ing remember the diff) indicating a transitive verb
て -- 'te' form
い -- progressive action modal suffix?
た -- past tense
。-- funny Japanese "maru" period that can also be used for a question mark

My translation:

A noble knight was advancing his steed in a field.

I know. It's very literal. But I used "steed" to re-translate the archaic "koma" for horse ("uma" in modern Japanese) to preserve some poetic effect. Also, Japanese does not have articles, so the difference between "a field" and "the plain" is insubstantial, though I take the English to mean no plain in particular but rather an abstract sort of plain "out there." Japanese does have demonstratives, though, so it is possible to be specific when (and only when) it's necessary. The same goes for personal pronouns. There are ways to indicate possession, but, in this case, we must infer that the horse belongs to the knight (is the use of 駒 with 騎 some kind of kanji wordplay? Koma, Kishi? They do have two parts, including a radical, in common.).

A more literal translation, according to the word order:

A noble knight on a field his steed was advancing.

Sounds like John Milton. Yes, Japanese can be quite Latinate, with its SOV word order. Note that there is no mention of a horse in the English first line. I guess it was difficult to convey the sense of "pricking" given its highly idiosyncratic sense, existing across a broad spectrum of Indo-European (mostly Germanic) languages, but hard to express out of context. "Advancing" is a weak way to suggest the pricks given by a knight to his horse. "Spurring" might have been a better choice, but Japanese has a different kanji for this. How free should I be in my translation of a free translation? To what extent should I even refer to the original?

Welcome to my insanity! 私の狂気の沙汰でようこそ！

I don't know why I'm doing this. But here goes.

Above are the first two pages of my Japanese edition of The Faerie Queene, which show the "argument" of Book 1, Canto 1 and the first three stanzas. Japanese, as you may know, is written (at least in books) from right to left and top to bottom, making it, like the rest of the culture, completely and incomprehensibly the opposite of Western practice. On the bottom of the page are notes, which I will probably ignore for now. I will also skip over the prefatory material in this volume, which includes the "Letter to Raleigh" and some dedicatory emblems. I may return to them later. I may skip around the poem, as well. Since I don't know Japanese perfectly (or pera pera, as they say), and even Japanese readers would find some of this stuff difficult, I can only take on challenges I am adequate to.

For this, the first and experimental post, I will just do the title.

妖精の女王
エドマンド　スペンサー

The kana の in the title above is a possessive particle. The first word, which means "fairy," is a typical Japanese compound comprised of two Chinese characters, or kanji. Unlike Chinese characters in Chinese, which have one (or only a few) readings, Japanese kanji often and typically have multiple readings. There is a "Chinese" reading used, as here, in compounds (the "om-yomi"), and a Japanese reading ("kun-yomi"), used when the kanji stands alone. The first character above means charming or bewitching. It is itself comprised of the root, or radical, 女, woman, and another character (the right side), which looks to me like the character for sky or heaven, but it could also be, less probably, a rare radical that seems to mean either heaven or nothingness. In the latter case, of which I am more confident, we can safely assume that the East Asian mentality assigns the attribute of "bewitching" to women from the sky. Is that misogynistic? The fact that 女 is supposed to be a boob might be.

The second character in the compound means spirit, sprite, energy, etc. It is also used in the word 精子, which means semen. It is pronounced "seishi" which sounds like "sushi," and I believe the Japanese get a lot of mileage out of this. Very amusing. Its radical is the kanji for "rice," though here it probably doesn't carry a meaning. 米 is, incidentally, the kanji used to identify the United States. We're not Rice Land, though. 米 also carries the meaning of beautiful, so the USA is the beautiful country (米国). The other two components of this kanji mean, from top to bottom, born and moon. So put these two kanji together and you get "yousei," a bewitching spirit born of the moon, or, fairy. With の, we can expect the second kanji compound to complete a possessive phrase, something of the fairies. Note that Japanese doesn't distinguish between singular and plural. This can be confusing.

The second compound is easy. We already saw the kanji for woman (we? who am I talking to?). The second one means king. Even if you don't know how to pronounce it, the meaning is obvious: a woman king is a queen (or queene). Yes, you need the qualifier when it's a woman. A man king is just 王. So, the title of this poem is "The Woman King of the Bewitching Moon Sprites" or:

"The Faerie Queene"

by Edomando Supensaa, if you transliterate exactly the katakana used to render Spenser's name in Japanese.

That's it for today. Ideally, the fact that I'm doing this on a blog, whether or not anyone ever sees it, will keep me plugging away. I won't go into so much detail in most future posts, because it's time-consuming enough just translating the damn thing. For example, it took me like an hour just to find 妖 in a dictionary. Looks like a pretty simple character, right? Ha ha! It's not! It's Grade 8 out of nine grades, which means very uncommon, and it's not part of the standard 1945 character set certified for use in daily life. What a pain. But when the muscles hurt, we're getting the best workout, right?