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of Okunohosomiche on the table. “Twenty-seven!” one scholar
says. “This is quite impressive. Your translators are trying so hard!”
There is a heated, in the main good-natured debate, incrementally
fueled by sake, about this one Bashō haiku. “No-no—we have differing
opinions—the horse peeing sound didn’t wake him, he was already
awake, scratching at fleas, and that’s when he heard the sound.” “No,
the order isn’t important. Bashō suffered insomnia anyway. It was
the reduced circumstances, the primitive circumstances of sleeping
in the stable that’s most important here.” “I think eventually Bashō
is laughing here—fleas, lice, horse-peeing, all equally gave him the
haiku.” One fellow slowly recites the haiku in Japanese: “nomi
shirami/uma no shitosuru/makura moto,” then writing it down for
me, says, “The name of the barrier nearby, Shitomae, in your English
means, ‘before the urine.’ Bashō must have thought about that, eh”
On and on; two bottles of sake; a third bottle; up all night; first thing
in the morning we all go back to the stable and one by one lie down in
front of the wooden-horse replica and have a photograph taken.
Then the most esteemed of the scholars said, “I’ve been working for
more than twenty years on a translation of the letters of Joseph Conrad.
I have never been to sea. I have never been to England. I really must
visit Conrad’s grave in Canterbury and speak to him. Still, I have read
the letters in English. I have every collection of them. My university
helps me, but they are getting a little impatient. But I say, ‘Translation
can take a lifetime.’”
Howard Norman is the author of seven novels, three memoirs, and several
translations, including Algonquin, Cree, and Inuit poetry and folklore. He
has received many awards for his writing and translation, and received two
NEA Translation Fellowships in 1981 and 1985.
16
National Endowment for the Arts