Peasants, Exiles, and Spring
more on Dostoevsky // a few translations of Tanikawa Shuntarou
Dear - - -,
Rain has caught up to spring, rain which is the eternal un-season out here in the tropics. A British friend was surprised recently when I called our weather here “gloomy.” That was probably an overstatement — at the very least it was inaccurate, island rain isn’t cold and therefore doesn’t provoke melancholy so much as malaise — but at any rate I haven’t adapted to it yet and suspect I never will. Pacific rain is one rain undivided, waves shaved off of the ocean which fall onto the green mountains like scraps of wood fall from a carpenter’s table onto the floor. Looking at Kochi on the map, you can see how it opens its arms to accept these shavings, its twin capes pleading like the hands of a humiliated peasant or an exile glad for company, any company at all.
Perhaps my mind turns to peasants and exiles because I am about 800 pages deep into The Brothers Karamazov (my translation, by Ignat Avsey, renders the title as The Karmazov Brothers; how accurate this is I cannot really say, but I find my ear and tongue are trained to the traditional rendering). The further I progress, the more I find myself reading all of Dostoevsky’s characters as emanations, each one linked to the next by a common thread which is the author himself, and I have to confess that I don’t really imagine the story taking place in rural Russia circa 1880, but rather inside the mind of one man, the narrator character, who is a version of Dostoevsky himself. I don’t think I could advocate for this perspective against more reasonable, scholarly interpretations. I certainly couldn’t advocate for it according to their rationale. But in spite of all the references to Russian life at that time, The Brothers Karamazov seems to me to be a timeless piece of writing, a novel which could either be a lost book of the Bible or one of today’s self-published doorstoppers. Please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean to say that the book is forever contemporary or that it deals in Biblical themes. No, both of those claims are too obvious to be worth making. But it comes from those aspects of Dostoevsky (the man) which are eternal, and therefore ready to detach from context.
And in time the distinction between Dostoevsky and myself becomes difficult to grasp. This is the way good literature is. As Kobayashi says, one is drawn closer and closer to the author, so close that you believe you may finally grasp them, at which point they turn you away and command you to be yourself. In some instances — I think Proust is a perfect example — this rejection coincides with the denouement of a novel. But Dostoevsky has a bipolarity to him, the way he can swing between heaven (the final words of Starets Zosima) and hell (Dmitry’s misadventures not long after) which draws me in and pushes me out. The popular connection between Dostoevsky and asceticism perhaps stems in part from the fact that one can only make it through his books if one is willing to give their mind up to these waves. Writing about any great book is difficult, perhaps impossible, the truth of the matter may be that the only way to write about an author is to write about the difficulty of writing about them, to describe the struggle instead of aiming for victory (which is futile). If this is indeed the case, suffice it to say that the difficulty of The Brothers Karamazov is like trying to have a conversation over the sound of crashing waves.
Speaking of conversations, I’ve begun reading Tanikawa Shuntarou for the HAIKYO BUNGAKU series, and in doing so have translated some of his debut collection, Two Billion Light-years of Solitude, including the following poem, “spring,” which ends with a conversation of a different tenor from Dostoevsky:
crossing flowers, a white cloud. crossing the cloud, the deep sky. across flowers, across clouds, across the sky, i can climb forever. for an hour in spring god and i had a quiet talk.
I have not yet decided what I think of Tanikawa. Sometimes he is surprising in his lyricality, his formal inventiveness, his astronomical sense of time. At other times, however, he reminds me of Paulo Coelho, someone who strings together a few provocative yet comforting ideas — a quiet talk with God! in spring! above the clouds! — and leaves it at that. Or it could simply be that I am reading Dostoevsky and this sort of image Given that Two Billion Light-years of Solitude was his first published book of poetry and that he was only 21 at the time of publication, perhaps I should withhold judgment until I’ve read more of his mature work.
The original poem is written in hiragana, not kanji, and to reflect that simplicity I chose to translate it into unpunctuated lowercase. I hesitate, however, to remove the capitalization of two words: “God” and “I.” But this is one circumstance where translation clarifies the distance between oneself and an author. Tanikawa’s choice to write his poem in hiragana not only softens the tone of the poem — thus mimicking the “quiet talk” in the last line — but also serves to equalize every element of the poem. “i” and “god” do not stand out from “cloud,” “flowers,” “deep,” or “rise.” My instinct in writing my version of the poem is to capitalize the interlocutors, because their action seems necessarily more important than that of the cloud or sky. But I think part of Tanikawa’s intent is to subvert the hierarchy of man, nature, and God by writing a poem in which one crosses the other to reach the last, and yet none of them bears any orthographic distinction. The clouds pass over the earth, the “I” is lyrical and sympathetic, and God is addressed with the lordly honorific sama — everything in this poem is readily recognizable. But the use of hiragana and the sense of cosmic scale present throughout Two Billion Light-years of Solitude flattens all of these.1 (Yet for all this technique “spring” remains one of Tanikawa’s more superficial poems.)
Here’s another poem from Two Billion Light-years of Solitude, “Surroundings,” which presents the better, more surprising side of Tanikawa:
The ten million years inside of yesterday. The ten million years inside of tomorrow. The businesslike discussion concerning Earth Which is had by the Andromeda and Orion nebulas. The hyacinth and The chocolate snack beneath my desk. A human brain With a volume that is as limitless as possible And, following from this, The worth of its feelings.
I wish you the best over this next week.
Sincerely,
W. L.
A note on that title, by the way: it is quite a literal translation, and, having been published in 1951, Tanikawa predates Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by 16 years. Presumably, these were the 16 Years of Loving Community.