Translator's Note

The Japanese 5-7-5-7-7 waka form is the precursor to the later and more famous hokku (haiku). In Japanese history, waka served for nearly a thousand years as the standard poetic mode for well-to-do young ladies who wanted to be more eligible on the marriage market. These girls’ primary manuals of study were Heian-era (794-1185) literary classics like The Tale of Genji, the Kokin waka shū, and The Tales of Ise. In addition to a fixed meter, waka often rely on devices which have earned them the infamous “untranslatable” label in preface after preface: word play, epithets with no resonance in English, highly intertextual compositions. 

In my own translation practice, I am always intrigued and frustrated by how quickly we dismiss these poetic devices, in this case the core mechanisms of Heian poetry, as fodder for the editing room floor. Are there not poetic ways to engage with these devices in English translation? Modes by which we can make them sound as fresh and innovative as they did in the ninth century? Many years ago at an American Literary Translators Association Conference, I heard a talk from someone who was translating a book of poetry which utilized footnotes not as a space for academic exposition, but as another space for poetic ontology. This notion offered one avenue for exploration in my own project. Rather than using footnotes to explain in exhaustive detail a pun or intertextual reference or cultural facet otherwise lost on a contemporary audience, perhaps I could use the footnotes as a poetic expansion. This would have the added benefit of allowing me to finesse Komachi’s waka into one-line poems, which is how they appear in Heian manuscripts. I wanted to try for single-line verse (or nearly single-line) to better demonstrate the sense of continuation and linkage waka has in situ. These poems are not meant to stand alone but rather to produce a compounding collective poetic effect.

This collective effect, I feel, is particularly important for Komachi, who has become a palimpsest recording the motives and desires of those interpreting or imagining her existence. She’s been painted as a vixen toying with men’s emotions, a temptress to Ariwara no Narihira (who himself is sometimes equated to Japan’s own Casanova), an old woman vainly lamenting her lost beauty, and a ghost rotting in hell. Her translators into English, too, have often characterized Komachi as a sultry siren of female sexuality, the most sensual of the poetic immortals. While it is true that Komachi gives voice to overt desire and sexuality in her work, she’s hardly unique in that respect. Even male poets of the Heian court wrote waka from the sensual female voice—they were per forma responses to poems of masculine desire and thus necessary components in poetry contests and sequences. To characterize Komachi based solely on her sexuality is to ignore the other facets of her few surviving waka as well as the larger poetic milieu in which she operated.

As such, I have arranged her verses with a narrative arc in mind, imagining Komachi flirting with a suitor or suitors via traded waka, a suitor’s first visit, his exit, and his eventual waning interest: in other words, a standard Heian romance. In some ways I, too, am perpetuating the myth of Komachi-as-temptress, but my hope is that by placing her in a scenario all too familiar to her Heian successors—Michitsuna’s Mother, Sei Shōnagon, Murasaki Shikibu—she becomes less a tool of patriarchal vitriol and desire and more a figure with whom we can feel a sense of solidarity and understanding.

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Laurel Taylor