Customer Reviews

String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi (Shaps Library of Translations)

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I must begin...this is a very good translation. The monostich style is much truer to the original format of waka...by not confusing "ku" (something like "sections") with "lines." The translations, however, are not as explanitory as some people would like, but they're annotated well and if you have some prior knowledge of Heian Japanese poetry the underlying meanings of the poems are still pretty clear. Ms. Sato includes the original Japanese, which is very important to help an individual become familiar with the style...and to have the option to look at the original. Princess Shikishi's grace is in her ability to be unique despite the ridgid conventions of waka. She still writes about the same old cherry blossoms and "wet sleeves," but often does so in a refreshingly original way. It reminds me of the Kyogoku-Reizei school of thought (which existed not until after her lifetime). If you like Lady Daibu or Fujiwara no Teika, you'll like this. If you're not familiar with Heian Japanese literature, this would be an excellent book to start with, since the translations are very palatable and the notes and footnotes are very well done and offer a lot of valuable information.

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Overall I found this to be a very good book, though I probably read it too soon after the "Kokinshu"--the whole cherry blossoms and wet sleeves thing kind of started wearing thin after a while. The format worked really well, though: taking the poems from three of Princess Shikishi's 100-poem collections (each one arranged much along the by-then classical Kokinshu order) gives the reader a good idea of which poems she herself felt to be above average, and then including other of her poems from the imperial anthologies shows us which of her poems her contemporaries found compelling--and the exchange with Fujiwara Shunzei concerning the death of his wife grants us an interesting and moving glimpse of how poetry was used socially in the aristocratic court. And through all of this the reader gets a fairly clear picture of the style and range of her poetry, and the voluminous footnotes helpfully make clear their intertextuality with the imperial anthologies as well as with "The Tale of Genji" and "Tales of Ise"--references and resonances she would have assumed her intended reader to know as a matter of course.

Now, the translator clearly has an axe to grind, arguing that tanka poems should be translated as one-liners rather than the usual five. This is more true to the original format, he maintains adamantly. Perhaps so. It makes for an interesting experiment, and I approached the idea with an open mind as I started reading, but after finishing the book I have to say that in general it is not a very effective approach. Tanka have no rhyme and no meter, so the only thing making them poems really is their musical rhythm--and perhaps the gracefulness of their imagery. The one-line format in English though totally flattens out any potential rhythm so that more often than not the poems end up sounding like flat, declarative statements. In translating literature, half the battle is being true to the original, true, but the other half is making the text sound like literature in its new language. If sacrificing a rigid adherence to the relatively insignificant format (based probably on the conventions of calligraphy in any case) saves the poetic feel of the poem as a whole, this seems like a worthwhile sacrifice. Making Princess Shikishi sound like she has a penchant for making random, blandly observational statements on the seasons and her mood-swings betrays her poetry far more than fiddling with the lines to bring out her poetry's beautifully musical tones.

And the poems do have this quality, even if the range of subjects is extremely limited and they rely way too much on an intimate familiarity with previous courtly literature---these were the poetic conventions of the day, after all, so it's not quite fair to take her to task for successfully following them, though sometimes the stuff gets a bit dang monotonous. It is clear that with all the rules, regulations, and restrictions on poetry here these folks were painting themselves into a corner. There are only so many possible permutations on how to express cherry blossoms being mistaken for snow, after all. Still, though, Princess Shikishi makes the most of the situation, and her poems have a poetic freshness that comes through, though this will be more evident to those who can read the original (helpfully given in romanji after the translation). And this book has been carefully and meticulously prepared and annotated, so the student of Japanese Literature should find it very useful, certainly.

This excellent book, compiled, edited and commented on by Hiroaki Sato should be in the the library of anyone interested in Asian, specifically Japanese, poetry. Sato San should be highly commended for his excellent work explaining what could have been extremely opaque poetry.

As a poet I do not travel far without bringing this book with me because it is the kind of amazing work that keeps meaning more the more I read it. I have studied Japanese and know that the translations are first rate. And sometimes I just read the footnotes for the exquisite poems there; or the annotations in the back for the odd stories behind the one-line pieces. It is a treasure for anyone who loves words and loves feeling deeply.