Translator’s Note

The above painting, titled The Gourd and the Catfish/瓢鲇圖, was done by Taikō Josetsu/如拙, a Zen monk active during the Muromachi period (1336-73). It features a male with an unkempt look, standing on a winding riverbank, holding a gourd in his hands, and attempting to capture or pin down a catfish swimming in the stream. Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimochi/将军足利义持 (1386-28), a connoisseur of Zen koan and patron of Kyoto’s Zen monasteries, asked Josetsu, the chief priest of the Taizoin Temple of Kyoto, to paint a riddle, “How does one catch a catfish with a gourd?” Yoshimochi also asked the best monks from the five top Zen monasteries (gozan/ 五山) of Kyoto to reflect over the situation. Each monk wrote a poem to respond to the riddle/應答詩, totaling the 31 poems on the painting. Poems 1-8 are four characters; poems 9-13 are five characters; poems 14-18 are six characters; poems 19-30 are seven characters; and poem 31 defies categorization due to lost characters. These poems are “jocular” and “witty” and even “mischievously” funny. Responding to the riddle or koan, which seems paradoxical and enigmatic, they embody the efforts of the monks to intuitively unravel the conundrum of the imponderability of the mind that is conveyed in a most absurd picture.

Zen Buddhism originated in China, as Chan, and the original scriptures were written in Chinese and transmitted to Japan in this form. The Japanese monks continued to use the Chinese writing system for centuries until mixing the Chinese characters Kanji with the Japanese syllabaries Hiragana and Katakana. This Chinese influence also shows in the poems the monks wrote. The poems are all written in the form of classical Chinese poetry, with fixed number of lines—in this case, all four end-stopped lines, varying from four characters a line to five, six, or seven characters—and with end rhymes. Due to different language nature, instead of using end rhymes (Poems 13, 14, and 22 fail to rhyme anyway) and all end-stopped lines, I translate the poems into today’s English with enjambment and rely on alliterations and sentence pattern for fluency, sound effect, jocular tone, and funny images. The goal is to capture the spirit of these poems and deliver reader-friendly translations. 

For example, a functional translation of poem 9 may look like this

Why press against a catfish

Use a big gourd

May or may not catch the fish

Only entertain or elicit laughter

This rendition sounds choppy because none of the original lines contains a subject, which is, however, fine in the Chinese original and an ordinary characteristic of the classic Chinese language. Also, the first three lines in the original poems rhyme, but as this translation shows, it is almost impossible to recreate that. Whereas, in my translation, I stop the first line at a natural breath group, “what’s the point of,”and follow that with a gerund phrase, “pressing a big gourd against a catfish.” This makes the first two lines not only raise a question but also reflects the couplet nature of the original first two lines with coherence. My translation of the last two lines reads crisply and clearly, and it offers a nice explanation to the question formed in the first two lines. Has my translation achieved the dynamic equivalence Euguene Nida talks about? I am not sure, but it certainly carries over the meaning and bantering tone.      

The painting is truly Zen in subject matter. Besides being Zenkizu/禅機圖 (a painting of incidents and encounters taken from the Zen textual tradition), the painting is also a poem-picture scroll, or Shigajiku/詩畫軸 (a painting that is accompanied by poetry and has its roots in China and where the painting and the poetry are inherently connected). Only four poems, all four-character quatrains, have been analyzed by American scholars. I have translated another six poems to help unfold more of the painting to the English readers. This act of unfolding helps perform how a poem-picture scroll was unfolded back then—with reverence and gentleness, slowly unrolling from right to left, or top to bottom, revealing one section at a time to appreciate the unfolding narrative or landscape. It also expands the long American scholarly study and translation of Eastern and Buddhist literature, which has broadened the field’s cultural and aesthetic horizons. These six poems, though humble in number, will certainly contribute to the growth of American Buddhist literature. My wish is that more English translations and study of Josetsu’s painting will occur.

As a Japanese national treasure, the painting is worth not a thousand words, but ten thousand words.