This book presents a stunning selection of Scève’s first book-length cycle of poems known as the Dèlie, first published in 1544. The poems were translated from the French by Richard Sieburth and are presented in both English and French. Maurice Scève (c. 1500-64) was recognized during his lifetime as the greatest poet of the city of Lyons, and the enthrallment his contemporaries must have felt for his inventive poetic leaps and his thrilling display of how love becomes the shape of the world is still accessible to readers today. This edition not only presents the music of his French, but also illustrates the poems with fifty woodcuts that were included in the original edition. Sieburth’s translations are in a layered, lovely English, reaching out of the time in which they were written. As John Ashbery writes, “[Sieburth] has found a contemporary equivalent for Scève’s extremely compact music and enabled it to breathe in English, while still retaining the tension of the original.”

 

THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA
New translations reveal new depths of classic works

 

Good, new and much needed translations of the stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) have recently begun to appear. Last year there was the Penguin edition of 18 stories, translated by Jay Rubin, and now comes this Archipelago edition of 15, translated by Charles De Wolf.

 

Both contain works never before translated into English. The Rubin collection (reviewed in this column on Aug. 20, 2006) contained nine of such, and this new De Wolf collection contains three: “An Enlightened Husband,” “An Evening Conversation” and “Winter.”

 

In addition, the two collections do not much duplicate each other. The translators share only two late works: “The Life of a Fool” and “Cogwheels.” The interested reader will need both volumes because of this lack of duplication and because of the excellence of the translations themselves.

 

To be sure, these two late (posthumously published) stories are among the Akutagawa works already adequately rendered into English. “Cogwheels” was translated by Beongcheon Yu in 1965 and by Cid Corman in 1987. “The Life of a Fool” was translated by Will Petersen in 1970 and, again, by Cid Corman in 1987.

 

Translations, however, are a product of their times. Arthur Waley’s “Tale of Genji” with its Edwardian prose still has its admirers, but the original is best displayed in the Edward Seidensticker translation. The fusty exoticism still perceived attached to Akutagawa’s work can in part be attributed to his early translators.

 

In building what has been called an identical structure side by side with the original, the translator must choose words and expressions that both mirror and explicate the original. The excellence of the translation (or the lack of it) depends largely upon how good the translator is in his own language. In any event, his interpretation is based upon the stylistic choice he shows us.

 

Below are two translations of the same passage from the 1927 “Aru Aho no Issho.” Rubin translates this as “The Life of a Stupid Man,” and continues with “#18. Butterfly. A butterfly fluttered its wings in a wind thick with the smell of seaweed. His dry lips felt the touch of the butterfly for the briefest instant, yet the wisp of wing dust still shone on his lips years later.”

 

De Wolf translates it as “The Life of a Fool,” and continues with “#18. A Butterfly. A butterfly fluttered in the seaweed-scented breeze. For an instant, he felt its wings touch his parched lips. Even many years later, the powder on those wings that brushed his lips still glistened.”

 

One translation has no advantage over the other, both impart the purport. The Rubin translation (40 words) is slightly longer than De Wolf’s (33 words), a ratio that is maintained throughout both books. At the same time there are indications of intent.

 

In his notes, De Wolf makes a distinction between “aho” and “baka,” feeling that the latter is the more restricted and that the former is not always a term of abuse — as in August Strindberg’s “Confessions of a Fool,” a work Akutagawa knew well and mentions in the text. Perhaps that’s why the translator chose a word like “parched” rather than “dry,” the term chosen by Rubin.

 

“Dry” is a statement, like “wet,” but “parched” (like “moistened”) implies a cause. I have no idea what the original Japanese is so I can only guess that De Wolf, with reason, wanted to connect this fool with other fools (Strindberg, Dostoevsky) who had anxious reasons for having parched lips.

 

Rubin in his notes (both collections are richly annotated) would seem to have supported the “stupid” thesis since these notes mention the women in Akutagawa’s life and the very similar problems he had with them. Could that be the reason behind the choice “shone?” Doesn’t “glisten” imply something less steady, more intermittent — when what the translator perhaps needed (and found in “shone”) was a word that implied permanency?

 

Whatever. Both translations are useful and defendable and their differences are illustrative of varied interpretations. And both offer us the opportunity of meeting old acquaintances in new clothes and introducing us to enchanting strangers.

 

Mandarins: Stories
Rynosuke Akutagawa

These glittering stories are the smallest divisible literary parts: moods, scenes, bits of conversation, set in trains, behind windows, in quiet rooms. Often, the action is limited to reverberations around harmony, like Meiji-era paintings: brief disappointment, shifts in feeling. “The scene had been vividly and poignantly burned into my mind,” thinks a man, watching a woman throwing oranges from a train window, “and from this, welling up within me, came a strangely bright and buoyant feeling.” The characters share a haughtiness, with their snippets of French and high literary tastes (they read Strindberg, Dostoevsky and Wilde). The refined attitude and exquisite detail (clouds, autumn grasses, lanterns, bowls) make the stories piercing, emotional, sometimes oddly painful.

 

You’ll be forgiven for thinking Haruki Murakami to be the first Japanese author to capture the hearts of American readers.

 

Is it our fault our memories are short, and Japan is so far away?

 

On the other hand, it wasn’t that long ago that Yukio Mishima riveted our attention with his 1963 story “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.”

 

And Tanizaki Junichiro’s novel “The Makioka Sisters” remains high on many Western reading lists [for example, Jane Smiley’s list in “13 Ways to Look at the Novel”]

 

Still, it was only after World War II that Americans began, en masse, to seriously adopt Japanese culture and read Japanese literature.

 

Ditto, the rest of the world who eventually found short story master Kawabata Yasunari [author of “Snow Country” and “Thousand Cranes”] worthy of a Nobel Prize, Japan’s first.

 

But what of Ryunosuke Akutagawa?

 

How could we have forgotten that he wrote the short story “Rashomon,” the basis for Akira Kurosawa’s classic film?

 

Again we claim as our defense the existence of a pre-World War II cultural blindness to all things Japanese.

 

Archipelago Books’ just-published Mandarins: Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, translated by Charles De Wolf, shines the light anew on the “father of the Japanese short story,” a lyrical writer who wrote about Japan in the ’20s, a decade on the cusp of old and new Japan.

 

Teahouses, fishermen in loin cloths, geishas dot the stories as well as western cultural references and modern technology. And if the reader’s cultural knowledge lags, footnotes on language, geography, etc. will help clear things up.

 

As with so much Japanese culture, there is much melancholy in these stories—beauty, yes, but beauty doomed to pass.

 

Akutagawa also holds up a melancholy mirror between the natural world and the man-made one. And he waxes on about traditional values versus intrusive new ones.

 

This is a collection deserving of our attention, not only because it helps complete the hierarchy of literature, but for the transitory beauty of the period in which Akutagawa wrote.

 

On another melancholy note, Akutagawa—like Mishima and Kawabata—committed suicide.

 

A, perhaps, more questionable tradition.

 

Reviewer’s Bookwatch: November 2007

Burroughs’ Bookshelf
Mandarins
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, author
Charles De Wolf, translator
Archipelago Books

 

Skillfully translated from the original Japanese by Charles De Wolf, Mandarins: Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is an anthology of short stories written during the all-too-brief life of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Fluidly evoking 1920s Japan, in an era when traditions were in flux and the yearning for personal liberty burned brightly, Mandarins features characters who struggle against the society around them. The three stories in Mandarins translated into English for the first time are “An Enlightened Husband,” “An Evening Conversation,” and “Winter.” At times cruel, at times fantastically descriptive, Akutagawa’s prose resonates with a piercing clarity on every page. A welcome addition to Japanese literature shelves.

 

Short Classics Get a Facelift

Brad Quinn / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Mandarins
By Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Translated by Charles De Wolf
Archipelago Books, 255 pp, 16 dollars

 

As the unofficial “father of the Japanese short story” and with the nation’s most prestigious prize for new writers named in his honor, there is no doubt that Ryunosuke Akutagawa is one of Japan’s great literary figures. But two of the latest collections of translated Akutagawa stories–Charles De Wolf’s Mandarins and Jay Rubin’s Rashomon and 17 Other Stories (Penguin, 2006)–also display how the writer’s much-admired style still resonates with modern readers.

 

For readers new to Akutagawa, or who may know of him only through the classic Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, based on two of his stories, Rubin’s collection provides an excellent introduction. The greatest hits are there–“Rashomon,” “In a Bamboo Grove,” “Hell Screen,” “A Spider Thread” and “The Nose”–and rendered in an appealingly contemporary voice. Those who have read Rubin’s translations of Haruki Murakami’s work will likely feel themselves on familiar turf, as several of the stories share the mildly absurdist tone typical of much of Murakami’s short fiction.

 

Those already familiar with Akutagawa’s more celebrated works will find De Wolf’s Mandarins nearly as essential. The 15 stories include such important pieces as “Cogwheels,” an autobiographical work revealing the narrator’s troubled thoughts–Akutagawa would commit suicide not long after he wrote it at the age of 35; “The Death of a Disciple,” a tale of Christian martyrdom set in Nagasaki; and three stories never before published in English: “An Evening Conversation,” “An Enlightened Husband” and “Winter.”

 

The earliest of these three stories, “An Enlightened Husband,” first published in 1919, begins as the narrator runs into an acquaintance, Viscount Honda, at a museum in Ueno featuring an exhibition of Meiji era culture. His mind flooding with memories while viewing the exhibition’s ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Honda relates the story of an old friend named Miura, who marries for love but then finds his faith in the “supremacy of amour” shaken when his wife’s extramarital affair, which he has tolerated, is proven to be “impure.”

 

The story’s themes of idealism and disillusionment, as revealed in Miura’s comment, “I could wish for nothing more than to die for a childish dream in which I truly believed,” are echoed in “An Evening Conversation.” Published in 1922, the story drops in on a drunken conversation among six former university dormitory mates, now middle-aged, that escalates from gentle teasing into an alcohol-fueled rant on life and love. With his characteristic ironic sense of humor, Akutagawa comically deflates the value of philosophy at the story’s end.

 

“Winter,” one of Akutagawa’s last stories, completed only a month before his death, will likely remind readers of one of Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares. Set against a cold, gray winter landscape, the story concerns the narrator’s attempts to visit his cousin in prison, only to be made to wait for hours, with no assurances or explanations from the prison guards. Uncompromisingly grim, “Winter” is a story devoid of hope.

 

In contrast, “Mandarins,” the collection’s far more hopeful title story, published eight years earlier, ends with the disillusioned narrator’s life-affirming epiphany inspired by the sight of a young woman throwing mandarin oranges from a train.

 

During his short life, Akutagawa is believed to have completed about 100 short stories. Although many have been translated, a number of critics have complained about the quality of the English versions. Hopefully, the likes of De Wolf and Rubin will continue to improve the existing translations as well as introduce new Akutagawa stories to English readers.

 

(Sep. 7, 2007)

 

As Basho hovers between life and death, his disciples perform the ritual act of brushing his lips with water, while their reactions to the poet’s passing range from revulsion to relief. A man prepares himself for his first murder, and the woman who is his conspirator finds herself playing an unanticipated role in the killing the two have planned together. Recent university graduates on a seaside holiday before searching for jobs in Tokyo, watch young women swimming among the jellyfish that have kept the students from the water. A saintly young man who is the protégé of Christian priests falls from grace and into penury, until an act of courage leads to his death, his redemption, and the revelation of the shadow world that he had made his own.

These and other characters in Mandarins, a collection of brief and haunting stories, are poised between actions, where author Ryunosuke Akutagawa examines them as though they were butterflies impaled on the pointed ends of pins. Each story, a carefully constructed world of sadness and a kind of hopeless beauty, is precisely described in spare and graceful sentences. As a group, they linger and tease and disturb, inhabiting their readers in ways that are not always comfortable.

The temptation to look at many of these stories as offering an autobiographical glimpse of Akutagawa is great, especially since two of the most revealing tales—“Cogwheels” and “The Life of a Foll,” which explore the inner workings of a tortured mind—both appeared just before he died of an overdose of Veronal in 1927. What they do reveal is Akutagawa’s thoughts about his country after its rush from isolation to modernity, and in the beginning of its expansion before World War Two. “The Garden,” with its examination of tradition altered and destroyed, its “undeniable intimation of impending ruin,” clearly shows the author’s distaste for the changes that Japan went through during his lifetime. Translator Charles De Wolf’s notes at the conclusion of the book illuminate both the writer and his work, though he also cautions against mere historicity, saying, “to relentlessly render factual—historical or biographical—what should be left as literary would surely spoil the story.”

It is certain, however, that these stories plunge fearlessly into the place that lies between sanity and madness, between tradition and modernity, between the past and the future. Creations of the beginning of the last century, they could easily have been written yesterday, and will last far beyond tomorrow.

 

Everyone knows the name of the man who made Rashomon. But no one knows the name of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Japanese literary legend responsible for the stories on which Akira Kurosawa based his film. Reading Mandarins, a new collection of fifteen Akutagawa stories translated by Charles De Wolf, will make you wonder why he’s not as well known as Mishima and Kawabata. He writes with melancholy, passion, tenderness, and irony of a country and its people making the transition to modernity; his elegant prose never buckles, even under the more melodramatic moments. “I must say that I have grown weary of all that is called modern enlightenment,” a character says, and Akutagawa himself, who committed suicide in 1927 at the age of 35, wasn’t convinced that the new Japan was better than the old one. His men hold out for love only to be cuckolded, his women sacrifice their talent to familial love, and even the landscape suffers—a family’s once-grand garden withers from neglect while they chase after money. The stories, some of which are based on the classical Japanese folk tales Akutagawa loved, bring to mind the Russians he also revered, but with that fatalism relieved by a capacity to be consoled by the world’s occasional, accidental beauty: a moon whitewashing a river at night, a young woman tossing an armful of oranges to her brothers from a train.

 

That last image comes from the title story, which turns on it, and which I regret mentioning in the way I might regret giving away what happened this season on The Wire. We’re very, very enlightened now, but hardly any writer working today could make you feel that in describing a visual detail you’ve spoiled a plot twist. Or would cede narrative power to the pleasure taken in beauty—pleasure unapologized for, and unadorned by sentiment.

 

Carlene Bauer has written for Salon, The New York Times, and n+1.

 

No one goes through life without questioning themselves. Of Song and Water is the story of jazz guitarist Coleman Moore, who finds himself questioning his path in life and turning to the sea. But in his questions, he opens up new problems revolving around his daughter, his music, and the people he calls friends. Of Song and Water is a riveting novel of facing mid life crisis, very highly recommended.

 

 

 

Music can evoke powerful sense memories of people, places, and times. In Joseph Coulson’s novel Of Song and Water, music and issues of memory, identity, and family are intimately tied together in the story of onetime jazz guitarist Coleman Moore.

 

There is a sizeable canon of jazz fiction, but Water is distinct for its use of Midwestern settings, like Chicago (including The Green Mill), and upstate Michigan. Certain archetypes and tropes from the jazz canon reappear in Water, like the experienced African-American musician-teacher taking a young white student under his wing. Like the Art Hazard character in Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn, Otis Young becomes a complicated father figure for protagonist Moore. Coulson though, brings greater sensitivity to his characterization of the mentor-student relationship. Coulson describes Young as a man dispensing hard-won wisdom:

Jazz is dead. He remembers first hearing the idea from Otis, who liked to go off on philosophers and critics who were in the business of declaring this or that thing deceased, particularly music, books, theater, small towns, newspapers, public education, motherhood, empathy, justice, hope, even God. ‘Tell me this,’ said Otis. ‘When I pick up my guitar and play, even if I’m alone in my house, is jazz dead?’ (p. 122)

For Coulson, jazz is not dead. He is clearly steeped in the history of jazz guitar, with legends like Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass making cameos as Moore tours the scenes of his triumphs and failures as a once promising musician. Unlike some jazz books written by “slumming” writers, Coulson must have a genuine love for his characters’ music.

 

To a large extent, Moore is haunted by the history of his nautical family and the secret of his bootlegging grandfather. However, his own issues, even including his name (born Jason, dubbed Coleman by a club owner) make Moore an increasingly difficult character to spend time with. Memory is indeed fundamental to Water, to the point that the constant flashbacks sometimes confuse the narrative.

 

However, Coulson is a skilled writer who undeniably knows how to use language. Deliberately paced,Water is a serious character study that treats the music of its narrative with genuine sincerity.