SOURCE: Hoare, Sasha. “‘A Tricky Turn’: Basil Bunting and Kamo no Chōmei.” PN Review 24, no. 1 (1997): 39-42.

[In the following essay, Hoare examines Basil Banting's translattion of Chōmei, commenting on how the experience enriched Banting's other translations.]

Basil Bunting's translation of Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki was written in 1932, during the five-year period in which he lived in Rapallo, in close proximity to Ezra Pound. As is widely acknowledged, Pound's influence on Bunting was profound, and the older writer's theory and practice of translation played a significant part in shaping the ideas and experiments of his younger ‘disciple’ or ‘Poundling’. Pound believed that not only was translation ‘good training’ for a poet, providing lessons in style and structure (‘A Retrospect’, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 1954), but that it was essential to the health of a nation's literature: ‘English literature lives by translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation’ (‘How to Read’). In 1932, Bunting described Pound's book of translations, Cathay, as providing for ‘every subsequent translator a method and a model’.¹ Bunting's choice of a medieval Japanese text for his first major work of translation could be seen as directly influenced by the example of Pound's work with another Oriental writer.

In the early 1930s, Japanese literature was relatively new to the Western world. As Donald Keene points out in the preface to his Anthology of Japanese Literature to the Nineteenth Century (1968), ‘Japanese literature first became accessible to the Western world in the twentieth century’. Arthur Waley's influential translations of poetry were published in 1919, and remained the standard English text until 1955. Bunting, however, found an Italian translation (by Marcello Muccioli, published in 1930) of Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki (1212), itself ‘essentially a free translation of the Chinese prose of the Chiteiki’ (982), according to Shuichi Kato in A History of Japanese Literature: The First Thousand Years (1979). Chōmei's Hōjōki was written during the Kamakura period (1185-1333), in which aristocratic society was decaying in the ‘days of destruction and disaster’ which followed the collapse of courtly society and the uprising of the warrior class. Its content is generally regarded as pious, Buddhist, and typical of ‘recluse literature’, which bewails the changed position of the aristocracy and represents an attempt to escape to the consolations of a hermit's life (Kato). Its theme of the follies of men and its lamentation of evil in society are related to the biting social comment in some of Bunting's earlier poems such as ‘The day being Whitsun’ (1928), ‘Gin the Goodwife’ and ‘The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer’ (1930). Its style, however, is far more significant than its content in terms of Bunting's development towards his most distinctive and successful later work.

Kato describes Chōmei's ‘detailed concrete description’ and his interest in ‘facts and details’ and ‘sharp’ observation in Hōjōki as typical of the ‘indigenous world view’—a view which concentrated on ‘the concrete as opposed to the abstract’, believing that ‘the facts are more important than universal principles and everyday experience than transcendental concepts’. A concern with the precise and concise evocation of everyday experience and the ‘evidence’ of the senses was to become central to Bunting's aims later in his career. The changes he made to the medieval prose piece in translating it into free verse demonstrate that Bunting was interested in certain stylistic features of Japanese poetry (and of Chinese poetry as translated by Pound) which he attempted to apply not only to this particular translation but to the whole of his later poetry. Although Bunting insisted throughout his career that poets should write directly from experience—‘one has taken care to write about things one knows about’, ‘I try to persuade myself that I never wrote out of books, only out of what I knew for myself’²—translation can be seen as a legitimate way of writing about things the poet has not experienced, ‘an attempt to enter an unfamiliar world, develop in oneself the thoughts and feelings indigenous to that world’, as Hugh Kenner describes it in his introduction to The Translations of Ezra Pound (1953).

The most obvious feature of Bunting's version of Hōjōki is compression—a fifteen-page prose account has been rendered into a 330-line poem without leaving out any of the essential content. This compression takes several forms. Often Bunting shortens a long sentence or even a whole paragraph of factual detail in Hōjōki into the minimum number of words—for example, Donald Keene's translation reads, ‘People said in wonder, “We have whirlwinds all the time, but never one like this. It is no common case—it must be a presage of terrible things to come”.’ Bunting condenses all of this wondering speculation into one word, ‘Portent?’, putting into practice Pound's belief that ‘good writing’ is that in which the writer ‘says just what he means … with complete clarity. He uses the smallest possible number of words’ (‘The Serious Artist’). Another kind of compression is that which uses an image or images to sum up events. Bunting changes ‘They tried in their desperation to barter for food one after another of their possessions, however cheaply, but no one desired them’ to ‘Jewels / sold for a handful of rice’. This image, compressing twenty-two words into seven, neatly evokes the ‘desperation’ of the people and their extreme poverty, but also suggests far more than the prose—‘Jewels’ hinting that the ‘Drought, floods and a dearth’ have caused a famine devastating enough to affect the rich as well as the poor, and ‘a handful of rice’ presenting vivid visual evidence of the scarcity of food.

Bunting's translation, using more stylistic variation than the prose, heightens the impact of the content of Hōjōki, eliciting a more complex response. From the section on the earthquake in the prose, which lists the effects in short dry sentences—‘boulders were sundered and rolled into the valleys’—Bunting creates a more horrifying and dramatic scene using heightened language and anthropomorphism: ‘Scream avalanche, boulders amok, strangle the dale’. Conversely, humans are described in natural terms in a way which emphasizes the idea of the interrelation of humanity and the natural environment—Bunting describes the area near the Kamo River mentioned by Chōmei as ‘flooded with gangsters’. (Chōmei writes: ‘there was considerable danger of flooding as well as the threat of bandits’.) In one word, ‘flooded’, human criminal nature is conflated with another image of the hostility of the natural world, suggesting the stupidity of humankind to add to the trials of the natural disasters they are already faced with. Occasionally Bunting clouds the baldly stated meaning of Hōjōki by compressing detail into a single image which is less literal and more open to interpretation. Near the end of Hōjōki Chōmei writes: ‘Now the moon of my life sinks in the sky and is close to the edge of the mountain. Soon I must head into the darkness of the Three Ways’. Bunting substitutes a metaphor which does not explain itself as that of Chōmei, nor refer to Buddhist doctrine, but delicately suggests danger and uncertainty:

The moonshadow merges with darkness
on the cliffpath,
a tricky turn ahead.

The old man's fear of rapidly approaching death is implied rather than stated, and the image powerfully suggests his (and everyone's) vulnerability on the path of life in less specific and more universal terms.

In the text of Chōmei at Toyama there is evidence that Bunting had read examples of Japanese poetry (perhaps directed by Muccioli's ‘learned notes’, which he described himself as ‘indebted to’ in the notes to the version of Chōmei published in Poetry in 1933). In Donald Keene's translation, Chōmei feels himself ‘short-lived as the white wake behind a boat’ and goes to the river to ‘compose verses in the style of Priest Mansei’. Keene adds in a footnote that this is an allusion to a famous poem by Mansei which he includes in his anthology (trans. Arthur Waley):

To what shall I compare
This world?
To the white wake behind
A ship that has rowed away
At dawn!

In Chōmei at Toyama, Bunting describes:

A ripple of white water after a boat,
shining water after the boats Mansami saw
rowing at daybreak
at Okinoya.

The mention of ‘daybreak’ (not included in Keene's translation) suggests that Bunting had read Mansei's/Mansami's poem. He then goes on to use sections of poems which are alluded to in the text (according to Keene, this section is ‘full of allusions to old poems’), italicising what seem to be quotations, such as the five-line stanza which he introduces as the words of ‘Semimaru’, ‘a poet of the Heian Period who lived in a hut’ (according to Keene). He then inserts a three-line stanza in the style of the previous ‘quotations’, which is a paraphrase of a line in the prose, and which is not italicised: ‘A shower at dawn /sings / like the hillbreeze in the leaves’. These three lines seem to be a deliberate imitation of the style of the Japanese poetry of the Heian period (794-1185), such as this poem, taken from the examples Keene includes in his anthology:

The hanging raindrops
Have not dried from the needles
Of the fir forest
Before the evening mist
Of autumn rises.

(The Priest Jakuren)

In ‘How to Read’, Pound describes one of the ‘three “kinds of poetry”’ as ‘phanopœia’—‘a casting of images upon the visual imagination’, an art which requires ‘the greatest drive toward utter precision of word’. He also states that ‘the Chinese, (more particularly Rihaku and Omarkitsu), attained the known maximum of phanopœia’. We know that Bunting was greatly influenced by Pound's presentation of Rihaku's poems in Cathay, where one finds similar examples of simplicity and directness of images which suggest far more than is actually stated. In ‘The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter’, the speaker describes her surroundings: ‘The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind./The paired butterflies are already yellow with August’. The premature falling of the leaves and the ageing of the ‘paired’ butterflies suggest the wife's anxiety about losing the time which should be spent with her husband. In ‘Separation on the River Kiang’, the image ‘The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river’ suggests that the speaker's eyes are full of tears, subtly invoking his grief at parting. As demonstrated above, Bunting was also influenced by the style of earlier Japanese poetry (which in turn was fundamentally influenced by Chinese literature). It seems to me that Bunting strove to condense the Japanese prose text using the style of Japanese poetry. This style, which is famous for its ‘terseness and concision’ in presentation of image (in the words of Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry, 1977), its compression, succinctness and simplicity, as well as its reliance on the power of suggestion, seems to have had a significant impact on the nature of Bunting's creative work after Chōmei. Poems such as ‘On highest summits’ (1935), which is an exercise in brevity and suggestion, and which consists of two lines—‘On highest summits dawn comes soonest. / (But that is not the time to give over loving)’—bear witness to Bunting's continuing interest in the style.

Bunting's published poetry prior to Chōmei consists of twenty short ‘odes’, Villon (1925), translations of Horace, Lucretius and Villon, and the two ‘sonatas’ from 1931, Attis: Or, Something Missing and Aus Dem Zweiten Reich. As Anthony Suter demonstrates in his essay ‘Time and the Literary Past in the Poetry of Basil Bunting’ (Contemporary Literature, 1971), Bunting's early poems ‘depend heavily’ on earlier literature, in the form of ‘references, translated passages, and closely imitated techniques from other writers’. As Bunting himself admitted much later in 1977, speaking of ‘his’ generation of writers: ‘The world doesn't spend all its time reading books, and we all assumed that they do. We have far too many references to things’. In the same interview he singled out Yeats as an exception to this rule: ‘His references are those you can find in the life around you, and that is much easier, and much better’.³ Bunting's early work is often over-complicated, highly referential and obscure in meaning. Villon, for example, is a patchwork of different themes and locations, as well as different metres and kinds of diction. As Anthony Suter states, the main theme of the poem is closed off to the modern reader unless he or she happens to have ‘a knowledge of Villon's life and poetry’. The identity of the speaker and the occasion of the poem are obscure. Imagery such as the ‘trumpets’, ‘the Emperor with the Golden Hands’ and Bertillon's ‘thumbprints for filing’ have to be laboriously researched in order to piece together their meaning and the relationship between them. The image of the sea at the end of the poem is described in abstract terms—there is no sense of it as a real, experienced object from ‘the life around you’. The meaning of the metaphor is explained, rather than suggested to the reader:

The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.

‘After the grimaces’ (1926) describes the sun in elevated, abstract language which presents ideas about it, rather than a visual image: ‘universal face’, ‘grin of diurnal farce’, ‘performer of unveilings’. The syntax seems deliberately complicated, the diction swings uneasily between colloquialisms (‘bums’) and classical invocatory style: ‘O Sun! Should I invoke this scorn …’. Far from ‘making an honest report of things’, presenting ‘an expert's knowledge of his world’, ‘allowing merely the accumulation of things, things you can touch, things you can hear, things you can see, to do all the suggesting’ (Bunting's descriptions of the most effective poetry—and perhaps applicable to medieval Japanese poetry⁴), these early poems use abstractions, references and images from classical literature—‘The distant gods enorbed in bright indifferences’ (‘Loud intolerant bells’)—to make intellectual points.

By providing Bunting with a ready-made and distinct time, place and perspective, Chōmei's Hōjōki provided the poet with an exercise in limits. The imagery and detail in the prose text are historical, local and particular. Limiting himself to the perspective of a historically dated persona limited the range of associations, references, and also appropriate imagery possible. As Suter points out, Chōmei ‘stands entirely on its own. The reader need have no acquaintance with its source … which is entirely assimilated into both the design and the subject matter’. This seeing through another person's eyes—a person very distant geographically and historically—seems to have, perhaps paradoxically, helped Bunting to introduce into his poetry what he saw with his own eyes. After Chōmei come poems such as ‘The Orotava Road’ (1935), The Spoils (1951) and Briggflatts (1965), in which the poet is concerned with the qualities of specific known places and physical detail. There is also a greater reliance on images which suggest meaning to the reader in the style of Japanese and Chinese poetry. Several critics have remarked that as the images in Bunting's poems become more ‘personal’, in other words, not ‘out of books’, the more powerful and successful his poetry is.

‘The Orotava Road’ is a poem which is made up of a series of observations of a single scene. Aural, visual and tactile images are expressed in simple, minimal vocabulary and syntax: ‘ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway’, ‘Jolted / cans clatter’, ‘the black silk curve of the wimple / under the chin’. The poem moves through a sequence of images as the sequence of travellers pass along the road, describing what ‘You can see’, identifying the speaker as a perceptive observer, as if the experience of working with Chōmei's intently observational work, which focuses on the simple details of the natural environment around the poet, helped Bunting to use the life around him in the same way (Bunting had moved to the Canary Islands in 1933). In the first part of The Spoils, a succession of ‘definite and visual sensual images’ (Victoria Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting, 1991) describe the way of life of the sons of Shem and convey the Eastern attitude towards life, which Bunting contrasts with Western attitudes in the third section of the poem. The effect is to draw the reader into this world through everyday particulars, which, as in Pound's Rihaku poems and traditional Japanese poetry, are described in the present tense, creating the impression of the immediacy of both life as it is lived from moment to moment and of perception: ‘Kettles flash, bread is eaten, / scarabs are scurrying rolling dung’, ‘the towpath striped with palm-trunk shadows’. The meaning of the poem is intended to be conveyed through this slow accumulation of local, particular details and, although Bunting saw this poem as ‘lopsided. And too obscure’ (letter to Victoria Forde, 1972), these details running through the poem, expressed in economical and direct language, vividly evoke experience to the reader—a method Bunting developed further in Briggflatts.

In his essay ‘What the Slowworm Said’, Thom Gunn describes Briggflatts as ‘a world of matter as compressed as any poem written in English’ (PNR 27, 1982). Bunting's most famous poem, described by the poet as ‘An Autobiography’, is grounded in the poet's experiences and knowledge of Northumberland. It is a poem which, for the most part, describes events and the physical world in which they take place in simple, sensual and economical language. The environment in which the poet first falls in love is used to suggest the innocence and freshness of the experience, and above all, its close connection to the natural world, something lost later in the poem (although it could be seen as being rediscovered at the end). The style of the majority of Briggflatts—short lines, an avoidance of the definite article, the use of the present tense, series of images which are conveyed in two or three words (‘Copper-wire moustache, / sea-reflecting eyes’)—is reminiscent of the style of Bunting's Chōmei, as well as the style of Cathay as described by Thom Gunn:

… a picture (or an exclamation or a statement of fact or of feeling) to a line, and often an independent clause to a line. The image is represented with great economy, rather than being explored sensuously …

As Victoria Forde notes, in Briggflatts Bunting uses a variety of syntactical devices, such as ‘not repeating the verb in a long sequence’ or ‘the minimum use of a verb or adjective’ in order to achieve ‘directness and brevity’. The presentation of images from the physical world seems to me to try to achieve the quality of the best ‘phanopœia’ according to Pound: ‘utter precision of word’.

In an unpublished essay entitled ‘The Lion and the Lizard’ (1935), Bunting develops his own ideas about the presentation of objects by contrasting unfavourably Shakespeare's technique with that of Dante. Dante, according to Bunting, ‘says a thing once and exactly. His outlines are sharp and precise’, while Shakespeare ‘makes three or four casts at an object, three or four approximations, by comparing which we arrive at his exact meaning … the drawing, however marvellous its design, is blurred’.⁵ In Briggflatts, Bunting's ‘objects’ are frequently presented ‘once and exactly’: ‘Stone smooth as skin’, ‘wheat stands in excrement / trembling’, ‘Thole-pins shred where the oar leans’, ‘granite numb with ice’, ‘frost spangles fleece’. The poem demonstrates ‘the natural, physical simplicity’ which Louis Zukofsky named as one of the qualities of the ‘best examples’ of poetry (‘A Statement for Poetry’, Prepositions, 1967). It is clear that both the concentration on the physical world and the style of its presentation in Bunting's later poetry are strongly influenced by both the poet's encounters with Japanese and Chinese poetry (through translation of Hōjōki and through Cathay), and Pound's theories on poetry. Lucien Stryk describes the Zen Buddhist view of the world as ‘a network of particulars, each reflecting the universal and taking reality from its relationship to all others’. Analysis of Bunting's poetry after Chōmei at Toyama reveals his developing emphasis on the particulars of the poet's experience and environment, in a distinctive style that with a ‘paring away of inessential elements' and a compression of language’ achieves a closeness to ‘the feeling which generated [speech] and to the object it describes’ (Kenneth Cox, ‘The Aesthetic of Basil Bunting’, Agenda, 1966).

Notes

1. Basil Bunting, ‘Mr Ezra Pound’, The New English Weekly (1932). Quoted in: Dale Reagan, ‘Basil Bunting obiter dicta’, in Carroll F. Terrell (ed.), Basil Bunting: Man and Poet (Orono, National Poetry Foundation, 1981).

2. Basil Bunting in interview, meantime (1977), in Reagan, as above.

3. Basil Bunting in interview, St Andrews Review (1977), in Reagan, as above.

4. Basil Bunting, unpublished interview (1977), and Open University programme on Ezra Pound, BBC2 (1975), both in Reagan, as above.

5. Basil Bunting, ‘The Lion and the Lizard’, in Reagan, as above.