SOURCE: “A Tale of the Heike,” in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 87-95.

[In the following essay, Naff discusses the difficulties in translating the Heike Monogatari and specifically criticizes the efforts of Kitagawa and Tsuchida.]

The Heike Monogatari occupies a seminal position in the Japanese literary tradition. For the greater part of a millenium it has been the model in Japan for treatments of the human and religious implications of war. Among epics and military tales, the Heike Monogatari is notable for its posture toward war, the occasions of war and the roles of the contending sides in war. It was developed by chanters whose most important audiences were the victors of the wars of the twelfth century and the heirs of those victors, yet it is the vanquished who are most frequently sympathetic. Although created for a society of warriors it is unflinchingly realistic about both the physical and the moral shortcomings of the warrior's trade. It is almost entirely free of the morbid and obsessive preoccupation with the minutiae of slaughter and mutilation which military tales the world around so often offer as a counterfeit of honesty about their subject. Although it tells of what was becoming a man's world, many of its most important and most fully-realized characters are women.

The twelfth century in Japan constituted a brutal and horrifying coda to the long centuries of peace and elegance that had been enjoyed by the artistically productive core of the Japanese aristocracy. The Heian period had been one of the world's great ages for humanistically oriented exploration of the human condition. Now that age of cultivation and courtly love had suddenly been replaced by a world of betrayal and terror and death and the ghosts seemed to outnumber the living, but much of the Heian sophistication and sensibility remained at the disposal of those who would try to comprehend this terrible new time.

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold's lines from ‘Dover Beach’ might almost have been written as an epigraph for the Heike Monogatari. It is this vision, informed by a world view in which Buddhism predominated, that calls forth the special ambience of the Heike. In its magnificent sweep from the tolling of the bells of the temple of Jetavana in India in the opening lines to the tolling of the bell of the small, poor temple of Jakkō-in deep in the mountains north of the capital on the death of the Empress Kenreimon-in, the Heike Monogatari tells one of mankind's greatest and most illuminating stories.

Medieval entertainers chanting the Heike to lute accompaniment played a key role in linking the entire nation together with a common heritage. The Heike has provided the source material for a large part of the repertoire of the Noh and Kabuki theatres. Down to the present day it continues to raise echoes, both direct and indirect, in fiction, theatre, and film. A work that has played such a role in a literary tradition as vast and rich as that of Japan must surely have an important role to play in world literature if its excellences can be made accessible to readers of other languages. The responsibilities that must be borne by the translators of such a work are of the heaviest and the expectations with which such translations will be met are unavoidably of the highest. A level of the translator's art which could lead to brilliant success with a lesser work might prove to be altogether inadequate for a work of such richness, range, and power as the Heike Monogatari. Such is the context in which the new translation of the Heike Monogatari must be read. To the extent that one agrees that the Heike Monogatari is worthy of a place alongside the Iliad or the Odyssey, one must hold the same standards in judging a new English translation of the Heike as in judging a new English translation of Homer.

The present translation makes a splendid physical impression in spite of a bulk that may make readers wish that it could have been bound in two volumes. Exactly the right tone of somber elegance has been struck in the slipcover, the dust jacket, and the interior layout. The reproductions from the Heike Nōkyō which they bear are appropriate in their restrained richness and sophistication for those who might wish to orient themselves through a brief reflection on the twelfth century in Europe and Japan. The calligraphic frontispieces for each of the twelve books of the Heike are a splendid inspiration beautifully realized.

Edward Seidensticker's foreword is graceful and informative for the general reader as it locates the Heike in the Japanese literary tradition. The translator's preface is also helpful, although it could have profited from both greater length and tigther focus. Appendices include an extremely useful chronological table, illustrations of the more important articles of clothing and their wearing, and maps of major sites and battles. Most readers would probably be grateful for some additions to these latter, particularly for such crucial and complicated actions as Yashima and Ichi-no-Tani. The volume is brought to an end with a bibliography and an index. Proofreading was excellent. Only one obvious typographical error was found: ‘the might roar’ on page 409, line 3, should be ‘the mighty roar’. In its physical layout and in the aids to the reader that have been provided in the introduction, the appendices, and the notes at the end of each chapter, the presentation is highly reassuring to the reader, but it is the text itself which must be judged.

In order to translate successfully a great work of literature, it is necessary to find a voice or a set of voices for the work in the new language; to establish a style and stance which will give the readers of the translation a sufficiently clear perception of both the manner and the matter of the original so that claims of literary excellence made for the original will be credible. There are many ways in which this requirement may be met, but if a translation into English does not on some level come to life as English literature it cannot be counted a success, whatever may be said about the literal accuracy of the translation. It is never easy to bring a translated masterpiece to life and it is especially difficult for the Heike. Surely every foreign reader who has ever experienced the thundering majesty of the prologue has dreamed at least fleetingly of publishing his own version in his native language. That in a century of translations from Japanese literature this is only the second complete English version is testimony to the extreme difficulty of realizing such dreams. The present translators have had the courage to undertake a task of heroic proportions and the tenacity to see it through.

A. L. Sadler's pioneering English version,¹ a creditable first effort, is well over a half a century old and even his revised selections date from 1928. It has passages of great force and effectiveness even though the archaic English style that Sadler chose to affect was not always under firm control. His Heike did not find a place in world literature in any way comparable to that earned by Waley's Genji. But if it failed to provide a definitive English version of the Heike for our time, it nevertheless set a very respectable standard for those coming after. The first question that must be addressed to any new English Heike is whether or not it represents the kind of advance that it should after a half-century that has seen perhaps ninety percent of all Japanese-English translation. Unfortunately the answer here is by no means the clear-cut and simple one that we might wish for. The present Heike is an earnest version, obviously a labor of love and equally obviously the product of many thousands of hours of effort over many years. In spite of these sympathetic qualities, however, a careful reading of this translation raises many serious questions about its stance vis-à-vis the reader and its relationship to both the English language and the original Japanese.

Donald Keene is one of many distinguished and successful translators who have pointed out that successful literary translation into English depends first of all on ‘a love for the English language and a sensitivity to its possibilities and limitations’.² He goes on to agree that a thorough grasp of the original is also absolutely essential; that errors traceable to carelessness or ignorance before the original text are inexcusable, but that their absence in no way guarantees a successful translation. These considerations make clear that there are almost impossible demands on the translator from Japanese to English and these demands would seem to be best met by collaboration between a Japanese specialist and a writer whose native language is English. There have been some brilliant successes for this approach in the translation of Japanese poetry, but even in poetry the rate of success of collaborative efforts has not been impressive. The collaborative approach has usually been unsuccessful in the translation of prose. All too often the end product combines the felicity in English idiom of the Japanese collaborator with the English-speaking collaborator's grasp of the text. Something of the sort seems to have happened with the present Heike. I have no direct knowledge of the quality of Professor Kitagawa's English or of Mr Tsuchida's Japanese, but there are problems with both languages in the translations as it stands.

The first disappointment comes at the very beginning. The deep sonorities of bronze bells and the sharp clash of steel that lies behind the original has been replaced by the drone of the lectern. The reader is told with a fair degree of precision what the original said but he is given no idea of how it was said. The words of the original strike like great hammers; the words of the translation like great feather pillows. Their variance from the literal meaning of the original tends consistently in the direction of diminished specificity. In an inconsistency with Japanese terms and words of ultimate Sanskrit derivation, about which more will be said later, the failure to go back to the original Jetavana, staying instead with the Japanese Gion, will leave the non-specialist reader in Japan instead of in India unless he stops after the sixth word of the text to consult a footnote at the end of the chapter. The absolute concreteness of the original in its allusion to the Gion Zukyō is lost as is the great sweep from India to China, from China to an earlier Japan and finally to twelfth-century Japan and Taira no Kiyomori. We have a rather close paraphrase of the surface meanings of the text but the force of allusion, the sense of movement in time and space and the exquisitely controlled rhythms that give the original its magnificence are gone. The tiger has been reduced not to a housecat but to a jellyfish.

The rendering of the title of Book Five, Chapter xii, Gosechi no Sata, as ‘The Five Dancers Bountiful Radiant Harvest Banquet’, is symptomatic of much that makes the reader uneasy about this translation. It is as casual toward the literal meaning of the original (five dancers indeed!) as it is toward the limits of idiomatic English. Such grammar as the English title possesses is Japanese, not English. Comparable difficulties appear on almost every page although few are as extreme as this. If they had been, the translation would of course never have found a publisher. At this point a few more typical examples need to be considered.

On page 182, lines five through eight, is this description of an abandoned villa: ‘As the villa had not been occupied for many years, the walls were without a roof, and the gateway without doors.’ Then, five lines later we read, ‘The building still stood, though everything around it was in ruins.’ Since the first passage quoted seems from its context to be describing a ruined building, one is forced to turn to the original to account for its sudden restoration. The original of the passage is, ‘… tsuiji wa aredomo, ōi mo naku, mon wa aredomo, tobira mo nashi,’³ that is to say, ‘… although the earthen walls of the garden still stood, they had lost their protective roofs; although the main gate structure still stood, its doors were gone.’ The first passage was not about the house at all but about the garden walls. This is self-evident in the original but not at all so in the translation, even on rereading.

Again, on page 213, two men are trying to flee from the wrath of the Heike, who were still at the height of their power and arrogance. As the fugitives discuss their limited possibilities, they say, ‘Is there any manor in Japan that is not controlled by the Heike?’ The reader is puzzled and impatient. If these men are really so hard-pressed, why do they insist on going to a manor? Why do they not flee into the wilderness that still had not vanished in twelfth-century Japan? But the original says, ‘Nippon-koku ni, Heike no shōen naranu tokoro ya aru’⁴ or, ‘Is there any place in Japan that is not a Heike manor?’ The difference is small but crucial. In the original we can share the despair of the fugitives because we understand that they are trying to hide in a country where even the backwoods seem to have become Heike manors. The imprecision of the translation has betrayed the sentence. This sentence is the key sentence of the opening paragraph of Book Three, Chapter xvii. The entire thrust of the chapter becomes vague because of its failure.

There is a similar example at the beginning of the fifth paragraph of page 24. Where the original text says, ‘Giō motoyori omoi-mōketaru michi naredomo, sasuga ni kinō kyō to wa omoiyorazu’,⁵ the translation says, ‘Lady Giō had long brooded over the possibility of such a turn of events, but she had not expected her lot to change so precipitously, favor yesterday and banishment today.’ Here the English line is considerably longer than the Japanese line, but it says less than the original and says it less clearly. The allusion to Narihira's poem is probably unsalvageable in translation, but the grace of the original is replaced by a heavy, unnatural, and slightly pedantic tone. The translation also makes two misleading additions. There is no reason why a female entertainer from a tradition that was a distant forerunner of the geisha should be gratuitously given the title ‘Lady’ with its specifically aristocratic implications and every reason why she should not. Nor is there anything in the original that in any way hints that she had ‘long brooded over the possibility’. The original simply says that she had been aware all along that such a thing might happen. ‘Brooding’ ascribes a weakness which is nowhere hinted at in the Heike's treatment of Giō, whose failing, if any, seems rather to lie on the side of impulsiveness.

The translation of the Heike involves the translation of a great deal of poetry, mostly waka. In some ways this is the greatest challenge of all. The waka is notoriously resistant to translation. Yet it is necessary to say that the translations of the waka and imayō made by Kitagawa and Tsuchida are for the most part disappointing. It is often difficult to tell just what the English versions are supposed to be about. There is seldom anything particularly poetic about them either in phrasing or imagery, which is not surprising since in many cases (e.g., pages 35 & 69) they are not translations of the poems in question at all but of the prose paraphrases given in the headnotes of the Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei edition.

These examples would not make a significant case if they constituted anything remotely approaching an exhaustive list. They are, however, unfortunately typical rather than exceptional. An exhaustive citation of similar blurrings or distortions of the original would in itself run to several hundred pages. Even more unfortunate is the fact that translations with such shortcomings are likely to have other kinds of shortcomings as well.

There are usually a few howlers in the most careful translation. There are very few in this translation. On the next-to-last sentence of page 372, issaikyō becomes ‘the sutra of Issai’. A far more frequent and serious problem is the rendering of proper nouns as common nouns and vice versa. In the first line of the second paragraph of page 620 is the phrase ‘the Shōjō-den of Hongū’. To render this as ‘the Shōjō-den of the main shrine [of Kumano]’ is not simply more helpful to the reader who has no Japanese; it is also more accurate. This is only one of many such cases, all of which in turn are part of a strange reluctance to come all the way into English with the translation.

If the reader's intelligence seems sometimes to be underrated by the translation, his probable knowledge of Japanese is highly overrated. The linear measurements shaku and ken are consistently left untranslated and unexplained, making the passages in which they occur unnecessarily mystifying to the general reader. The term on-pei-shi is defined in a note at the end of the chapter in which it first appears, but since the word appears at other places in the work the general reader would probably be better served by an English term whose inevitable shortcomings could then be explained in a note. On p. 178, shakujō (a priest's staff) appears without explanation. On p. 60, marōto (guest) is given as marouto, which lies somewhere between a phonetic representation and the kana spelling and is no guide to pronunciation for the unprepared reader. The term nyūdō is left untranslated in the text although its first appearance in the text is footnoted (page 6, note 12). Unfortunately the note is partially inaccurate and wholly misleading: nyū does mean ‘entering’, but dō of course means ‘way’, not ‘priesthood’. The general reader will know a little bit less after reading this note than he did before. Why not use the term ‘lay priest’ as both Waley and Sadler have? It eliminates the need for a note and helps the reader instead of confusing him.

Buddhist terms are treated with a casual inconsistency, sometimes presented in Sanskrit or Pali, sometimes in Chinese, and sometimes left in Japanese, a Japanese which is often incomplete, making it impossible in many cases for the reader who cannot consult the original to follow the references and allusions. There is nothing to suggest that the translators ever really came to grips with this problem, in spite of the central role that Buddhism and Buddhist ideas, texts, traditions, and historical figures play directly or indirectly in setting the tone and establishing the themes of the Heike. Here again, the English reader, although often not credited for knowing things that he can hardly help knowing or deducing, is left to his own devices in areas where he can scarcely be expected to know anything at all unless he happens to be a specialist.

The mixed Japanese-Chinese language of the Heike is a difficult style in the original, making great demands on its readers or listeners, but bestowing great rewards in turn. In its careful control of the mixture of soft, flowing yamato-kotoba and terse, pithy Chinese loan words to suit the mood and set the tempo of each passage, the Heike makes the first full use of what was to prove to be one of the greatest resources of one of the world's great literary languages. An English version which consistently risks boring its readers and sometimes comes close to insulting their intelligence through its blurring of the impact and evasion of the difficulties of the original is not going to be able to make credible or even perceptible the central concerns of the Heike. Careful comparison of this English version with the original immediately demonstrates that the problem is not solely one of English.

On page 268, in note 2, is found this remarkable sentence: ‘To honor the prominence of the Heike among war tales, the translator rendered this passage faithfully in the style of the original Japanese.’ Even if we sidestep the host of philosophical problems that this statement raises, it remains an extraordinary remark for a translator to make. It raises the question of just what the translator was doing elsewhere. The passage in question, which begins on the bottom of page 264, is much closer to the original text than is the general rule for this translation. It is also an exceptionally effective passage. It shows that the translators were entirely capable of standing in a more rigorous relation to the original text than they generally did. It further shows that the effectiveness and accuracy of the translation would have been greatly improved had they done so consistently as a matter of policy. Why did they choose to do otherwise? Why did the translators not place more trust in a text which they so obviously and so rightly revere?

Here, then, is the central failing of this translation. Almost every sentence is longer than its original and almost every sentence says less than its original. Far too many of the sentences say something significantly different from their original. The defense that the demands of literary English necessitated such departures might be brought forward if the English of the translation were of the quality that was needed, but the English of the translation not only fails to be adequate for the recreation of a literary masterpiece but sometimes seems to be actively hostile to the very idea of literary English. The taut, austere, demanding, but ultimately magnificent language of the original has become a slack, prolix, unfocused, patronizing, and ultimately alienating retelling in English.

Very few people develop an adequate literary style in any language and particularly in one that is not their own. At the same time the process of translation between languages as divergent as Japanese and English tends to distort even the soundest style unless constant vigilance is maintained. Theory would therefore suggest that successful literary translation is inescapably the nearly exclusive province of native speakers of the language of the translation. Experience so strongly supports theory that it would seem to be scarcely necessary to make the point one more time here. Just how seriously would (or should) a publisher take the most conscientious effort by an American professor to render Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory into Japanese, even if he had had copious assistance from Japanese friends?

This translation attempted much and much was expected of it. The fact that it constitutes an astonishing accomplishment given the conditions under which it was done cannot, unhappily, make it the translation of the Heike for which we have been waiting.

The question of whether or not the present translation represents an advance over that of Sadler has to be answered in the affirmative but not a strong affirmative. If a reader of English wants to know what the Heike Monogatari was about in general terms, this translation will tell him in great detail. If he wishes to understand why the Heike has played such an important part in Japanese literary history, this translation will stand in his way more often than it helps him. The state of the art of translation demonstrated here is much closer to that of 1920 (always excepting the work of Arthur Waley, who made his own epochs) than to that of 1975. The introduction of the Heike Monogatari to its proper place in world literature, an introduction that can only be made by a brilliantly successful translation into a language more widely read than Japanese, still remains to be done.

Notes

1. A. L. Sadler, trans., ‘The Heike Monogatari’, in tasj, xlvi, 1918, & il, 1921; reprinted in The Heike Monogatari, 2 vols., Kimiwata Shoten, Tokyo, 1941.

2. Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits, Kodansha International, Tokyo & Palo Alto, 1971, pp. 322-3.

3. Takagi Ichinosuke et al., ed., Heike Monogatari, i (Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, 32), Iwanami Shoten, 1959, p. 229.

4. Ibid., p. 259.

5. Ibid., p. 98.